Ah, I agree with most of the things you say but you're not exactly right about crew skills. 2 crew skills is Preferred and 2 crew skills is fine, you can get your gathering and your crafting and level both all the way to 400; you only have to buy things off GTN when you want to make blues and purples. Well, mostly just blues, lolz artifact authorization 1 Crew Skill is what free players get and that's a pretty lousy introduction to the crafting system. They'll basically grab a gathering skill for more cash and forget about it entirely beyond that. That won't sell unlocks!

I'm pretty sure they can. At least a few people I've talked to on the forums have claimed to be free players, so...

It seems fine to me (it's what they're doing already). Customer loyalty and increased commitment (in the form of a longer sub) is rewarded with a discount already. A CC bonus doesn't actually cost BW anything, and is one of the few things a subscriber can legitimately say they got as a bennie out of this patch. (Well besides the game continuing to survive. Kind of a plus, that.)

There's a reason they called it a great single-player game... There's room for both. Hit a heal with an enemy targeted, heal the ally that enemy is targeting. Hit an attack with an ally targeted, attack the enemy that ally is targeting. Even City of Heroes does that and it's from early 2004.

Wow. I know subs are tired of hearing about the restrictions but jesus, so much snobbishness in this thread. It's not a big deal, but a developer actually had to come up with the idea "let's make emoting subcription-only" and then had to get programmers to code it. And for what? It's silly that they'd restrict emotes because really, who the heck is going to subscribe for the opportunity to /cry or /agent? Well, maybe to /agent.

Ah, knew there was something I was missing. Thanks. Yeah I dunno, as silly as the request sounds it would be as easy as changing one number and there is a certain appeal to checking out planets before you're strong enough level to actually level on them. I think you should be able to run around on Quesh as soon as you've got your ship if you so desire.

Mm. I've actually started going lightside on my Consular just because that seems to be the only side that's had things written for it. It's not quite the same "redemption" as people going LS after the kid in the spaceport on Hutta... But! This is less to gripe about the Consular story and more to find a better one.

I seriously shouldn't have gone from an Agent to a Consular. In the Agent story, things you do can and will come back to bite you later. There are multiple endings! Some of them can only be gotten by pursuing certain choices well before the final mission. You can see the fact that the game is paying attention as far back as Dromund Kaas, where Keeper will chew you out if you took Lightsided options on Hutta. Agent story is great. In contrast, in the Consular story, nobody cares. Kill a guy's daughter? Oh well. Save her? Well she's very glad and then is never seen again. Kill your master? Nobody cares, they'll give you the same swanky title and send you off to save the galaxy anyway despite you having proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that you're a psychotic maniac who shouldn't be trusted with a spanner. You kill how many people as a DS Consular? Even just at the conclusion of Act 1? I know they did some pruning of consequences from some stories (don't know which) in beta when people complained that, for instance, killing companion characters would leave you permanently down a companion character. That's nonsense! Bioware's best selling point is story, and in a modern-day RPG, story should include choices that matter. But yeah. I haven't played through them all, and I guess I don't want that many spoilers, but I'm looking to reroll again. Which class has stories where it feels like your choices actually affect the story?

Wait, can't you land on any old planet (that your faction can access, anyway) any time you want? I'm 80% certain you can.

If you want to be a kind soul, sell Artifact Equipment Authorizations for 350K to help retain returning players. If you want to make money, probably race unlocks or something.

I have little doubt that they'll refine the F2P model and that in three months it will look a lot better than it does today. Of course, having some really glaring flaws that are really difficult to market right at the time when the system has the most publicity isn't going to help them. You can't un-screw the pooch. You aren't clever.

Not a penny. But the stuff I've bought on GTN represents like $30 that somebody else has put into Bioware's pocket, so I think they made out pretty well. Making a bunch of the cartel market wares tradeable was probably the best decision they made in this F2P conversion.

Or accidentally jump off the cliff and die. I still remember the "holy balls, what?" that resulted when I found out there was a jungle with dinosaurs down there!

"Lifeless" is about right. The NPCs talk to each other... with the same dialogue every time you pass. The NPCs shoot at each other... and then you kill the hostile ones and the friendly ones keep shooting off into space and ducking blaster bolts that aren't being fired. When I rolled a trooper and did the quest with the Republic Intelligence spooks interrogating a girl, I actually facepalmed because I knew the second I walked in the door how the encounter was going to go. I was going to talk to the person, and then walk away. Why? Because it wasn't instanced, and thus there were going to be no ambushes or betrayals or opportunity to kill anyone because the only person present was a non-instanced quest endpoint. Inside an instance, I probably would have gotten to shoot the jerkwad. It's not that they're puppets on strings. All NPCs are. It's that the strings are way too obvious, and it kills the immersion that they were going for. And strings are always moved in exactly the same direction. Instances are a big neon sign saying "STUFF IS DYNAMIC NOW" and I actually look forward to them. They have people providing color, but jaysus. Look at Coruscant. That's the city-world capital of the Republic. Look inside the Senate Tower. That's the beating heart of a galactic superpower. Where are all the people? I can find maybe twenty or thirty in the Senate Tower if I look around for a while and pay very close attention. The prequels weren't good but at least they paid attention to how unspeakably vast and populated the whole thing is. SWToR has as many people in the center of the center of a galactic superpower as they do in an undermanned bunker out in the boonies on an ice world that nobody wants (count the number of people in the Senate Tower, then compare the number in the Hoth base). And they all. Stand. Still. Nobody who is targetable moves. At all. They don't walk around, go for a stroll, go over to talk to other NPCs, interact with objects (when they exist). And you can't talk to anybody who isn't a questgiver or a vendor. Even KotOR let you chat up random people for the lulz. Even if they were aliens that don't need voice actors, being able to talk to people that aren't involved in quests would be huge for immersion. As far as I know, the place where they got it right was in the Imperial Intelligence wing of the Citadel on Dromund Kaas. It's busy. People are doing things. You can talk to people about your mission and about their background and all that! It never comes to anything that the one guy used to be a Cipher, but you can ask him about it anyway (even though that too is an optional part of a quest). There's a good reason the Imperial Agent story is the best, and immersiveness is a big part of that. The rest of it, though? It's just really, really bad design, outdated before Guild Wars the First was young.

Protip: Not an attitude that will actually produce subscriptions.

1. Quickbars 2. Customer Support 3. Head Slot Hide The first two are elementary and it's nonsense to not have them. With facial customization and voice acting being two big plusses in getting a F2P player invested in his character (and helmets and voice filters both looking/sounding much worse than not having them), charging for hat hiding is going to hurt BW in the long run.

I get the impression this is also the reason for F2Pers not getting to claim credit boxes from mission rewards. (If BW came out and said that, a lot of F2Pers would stop complaining about that issue because nobody likes gold farmers.) Honestly, the F2P restrictions are pretty straightforwardly delineated into "reasonable" and "*********** stupid." XP/valor penalties and limits on FP/WZ/Ops are totally reasonable, it means a subscribed experience is faster and more convenient. For the others... "nickel and dimed" is a phrase I hear a lot, and that means the little, petty restrictions are discouraging play more than they're encouraging payment.

Paid race or cosmetic changes are basically printing money, if they've got the technology to do it. Be a bit more difficult to make it a cartel market thing, though, as all the cash shop purchases are applied in-game.

Probably won't be. I don't think they even have the people for that any more. That said, if I'm wrong, I definitely wouldn't say no to a Tech Specialist class or the like.

Ess-dubya-torr. Or Star Wars ToR if I'm in a hurry. What, it's less syllables!

Agreed. The voice filters they already have in the game (for helmets and the like) are already not that great. Trying to apply a filter to make characters sound more Sith-like would at BEST sound like a ripoff of the WoW deathknight thing.

These are all just numbers upgrades. Tanks generate more threat and take less damage? Healers heal more? Do you feel healers and tanks are currently weak enough to justify across-the-board upgrades? Oh, except this one:

...are selling for exactly 350K credits on my server, and there's a good quantity available. :3 You know I complain a lot, but sometimes I love you guys. You could probably be making more credits per cartel coin selling other things, but instead you're letting returning players equip their stuff. Major props to everyone who's doing this. The feels. I haz them.

Okay! You don't understand numbers. There exist people who will complain about all restrictions. This is a tiny, tiny minority of the people who are complaining now. But this is a forum and not an especially well-trafficked one, you only need like five of them to fill the airwaves. There are lots of people who will complain about really absurd restrictions like customer support being subscriber-only. There are even more who don't complain but vote with their money and their feet (the ones who leave and don't say anything are the ones that make marketers want to punch walls). You will never stop all the complaining. But a deluge of criticism is bad for PR. You can stop the majority of the complaining, make the remaining complainers look like total idiots and improve your player retention and conversion to paying customers by easing up on really absurd restrictions like customer support.

Hmm, I hadn't thought of those, you're right. SOE's is straight-up worse. EQ2's is too, by the looks of it rather than a one-time fee they straight-up require a subscription to equip their equivalent of purples. I'll ease off on the hyperbole. ^^; I don't like that restriction at all but I guess there is some precedent for it.