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  1. I call shenanigans. They have my credit card on file. They bill me every 30 days for game time. They do not need me to make a separate, full-price purchase of coins to then activate a discount on a second purchase of coins.
  2. Yeah, this is rubbish. I was thinking of throwing down 40$ to get some collection unlocks because, apart from a sub that I just recently renewed, I haven't paid anything else into this game since I pre-ordered it. Seeing that they arm twist you into paying them, before you can pay them again (at a discount) just kind of sours the whole deal, to the point where I probably won't buy any coins at all. This is just like that "complimentary cartel coin" fiasco back when they first went F2P -- if you paid for their game, you had "free" coins going into the F2P conversion, but you couldn't get those coins unless you subscribed, after the game went F2P. Load of bull****
  3. So you have to buy coins, before they let you buy coins at the discount for the "promotion"? Stuff like this is why I honestly regret that I currently play and mostly enjoy this game.
  4. Care to link where best-in-slot items are going up on the BMAH? As far as I know, the Black Market is not a player-run auction house but rather just has randomly generated listings of rare, hard-to-aquire fluff items (like rare drop mounts) that players can bid against each other for. Care to link where real-money auction house is going into WoW? As far as I know, that's just in D3, and there's been no mention of including it in WoW. Granted, I could be wrong, but I could also just make a bunch of **** up because I'm feeling overly defensive when comparing my game of choice that is hemorrhaging subscribers to the current market leader that is stable for the last quarter at 10.2 million active, paying subscribers. Now, does a ton of players equal a superior game? No, not necessarily. Does a fresh game on the market with a huge development budget need a ton of players to keep operating and improving and adding content? Most definitely. We still don't even know what the sub numbers are until we get a report that isn't conveniently released right as a free month is offered to the players. If I was EA, I'd definitely be trying to think of ways to gouge the people that stick with this undercooked product out of some blind, misplaced loyalty to SW or BW instead of leaving for the many alternatives. F2P is a great place to start digging some claws in. I'm not saying TOR isn't fun to play -- I have a blast when I play it, but I play it for very specific reasons. When I run out of dialogue wheels and cut scenes, I see TOR for the shoddy WoW clone that it is, and I ask myself, "How can they seriously charge standard MMO subscription fees for this?" Maybe EA will see it the same way sooner or later. WoW, Rift, TERA, TSW, GW2 -- nearly all of them can give you either more features and content for the same price, or they are unique enough in setting or mechanics to differentiate themselves from the WoW-clone-itis that plagues way too many MMOs on the market.
  5. I'm not going to dig through 6 month old posts (actually, maybe a little older now, because I think I last tried LOTRO before TOR released) on a forum for a different game that I hope burns in hell. You can believe me, or you can not believe me. I don't particularly care if you don't, to be honest. I know, at the time, someone tallied up all of the available content and said that if you planned to play for more than X months (and X was pretty small -- I think it was around half a year) it was better to frontload a bunch of cash for Turbine Points and permanently buy the content on your account, rather than sub, because it was cheaper that way. But, if you did that, you wouldn't get the monthly bonus tokens to spend on all the optional things like mounts and conveniences. I did just look at LOTRO's website where they boast that you can play for free all the way up to level 75. But then I looked at the details of the account levels and the free player only has questing content for Bree-Land, the Shire, Ered Luin, and the Lonelands. That's the 3 starting zones and the level 10~16 (and 18~24ish later if you come back to LL) zones. I guess if you want to F2P to 75 you start grinding wolves after that. Lots and lots of wolves. Yeah, that's really free to play and totally not baiting customers at all.
  6. I covered this several pages back. At the rate this thread moves, I don't blame anyone for missing some posts. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=4653153#post4653153 If LOTRO is the way of the future, I'll be done with MMOs.
  7. I have played LOTRO and I was not a lifetime member. They did the whole "free to play" relaunch and touted that owning retail versions of the core game and addon content would allow special privilege and access to all of that content without paying again. Except, even though they said that, they threw a chart up on their website and said "this is what you get" and then actively locked portions of their recently released expansion and kindly asked me to pay for them a second time. It's a scam to bilk money out of players. That's all. No more, no less. If you can play and enjoy what's available without having to sink money into the game, congrats, your personal playstyle let you dodge that bullet. That doesn't mean they aren't actively trying to screw over their players.
  8. Free-to-play almost always sucks for the consumer, because the mentality of it is, "We can't attract and retain enough customers, so how do we gouge the hell out of the ones that stick around?" With very rare exception, the F2P model is designed to: A) Entice people to a game by pretending to offer a full game experience, only to "force" them to pay for content or abandon the game entirely when they realize how much of the product is completely unavailable despite being "free to play." B) Encourage avid supporters to spend more money on stuff than the average 15$/month you'd pay for an all-encompassing subscription. Many F2P models offer a sub option on top of all the cash-shop milking that will temporarily unlock most of the content, but even those tend to suck. Someone worked out the math on LOTRO, for example, and if you thought you'd play the game for more than X months it was actually wiser to spend $$$ on "Turbine Points" and just manually unlock everything, rather than pay the sub fee. But, then, that's not including all the overpriced "bonus content" that you could buy like mounts and such, and the bonus stuff (or extra points) are included with your subscription, which makes you want to sub, even when it would be cheaper to do it the other way. In then end, you screw yourself no matter which option you pick, unless you sub and plunk down cash in the cash-shop, which is exactly what the greedy bastards want you to do. F2P is typically no "free-er" than a demo of a console game that you can download on the Xbox. You're playing a slice of the game with the marketers' hope that you'll get hooked and give into the non-stop petty nickel-and-diming required to experience any meaningful amount of content. Since EA has their filthy, sticky hand in this, I can't imagine a TOR F2P scenario that doesn't bend its players over a barrel and go right through the pants (for the wallet, get your minds out of the gutter)
  9. Except I did listen and participate. I did everything I could possibly do by myself all the way to 50, and did most of the heroics. The ones I couldn't find a group for I just waited until I outleveled them and went back. I skipped no dialogue. And I got a character to 42 the same way, playing with a RL friend who was seeing everything for the first time. If you can't read a post and comprehend what it says before insulting someone, then maybe you should fanboy, fanboy, fanboy fanboy. "If you don't like the game, you didn't play it right and skipped the best reason (the story) to play it!!1!!ONE11!!" No, I did play it correctly, and once I finished the best reason to play it (the story), I saw that there was literally nothing left of merit. Comprehension people, comprehension.
  10. I spacebarred through no dialogue, and did every quest I could find (and every heroic I could find a group for) on my Shadow. I got him to 47.9 in the free release month. This was after I rerolled off a 26 Guardian on a full server to avoid queues. I got my Shadow to 50 on the 7-day return. I also have a 42 (43?) Trooper that has skipped no dialogue (even the stuff I'd already seen) because he was in a static with a RL friend that had not yet seen the content. If I can get a 50 and a 42 in 37 days without spacebarring, I'd hope that the average player could hit 50 in the 6 months that the game's been available. Granted, I have no social life, so most of my free time is spent gaming (ideally on vent with RL friends that now live too far away for me to frequently see them in person) and so I consume content faster than the average player, but the whole "People that have seen all of the story must have spacebarred through everything and don't belong here" became invalid about 3 weeks after launch. Just because a particular person plays one night every other week for an hour doesn't make him any more wrong or right of a player than someone that rips through the story. I'm not even complaining that I'm out of story, what I'm complaining about is that once the story is over everything left behind is just a worse version of what I could get in WoW or Rift for the same monthly fee. TOR's story content is good. The skinner box at the end isn't remotely as comfy as the features in other, similarly priced skinner boxes, and a class story buried in the recycled planetary content isn't good enough for me to constantly level alts. TOR is a severely flawed game that manages to be a very fun, unique experience for a while because of the BioWare voicework and RP. Nothing more, nothing less, and I can easily find more to do (with a higher ease of access and quality of life) elsewhere.
  11. Except there are more polished, more content-filled, more feature-rich places to do it than here.
  12. What you are saying about two different play motivators (watch number increase OR have fun with others) has merit, but here's my counter to your argument: As far as many players are concerned, there are better games for either "playstyle." As far as I'm personally concerned, this game wasn't even "release quality" until 1.2, everything before that was pay-to-beta. I'm definitely of the "MMO shooter burnout" mentality -- I like to see my numbers go up. I like to hit harder, I like to have more HP, I like to mitigate more damage. I like killing things and progressively making future things easier to kill through my character's personal development. I enjoy the social aspect of a game insofar as I get to kill stuff with people I like. I'll never be caught sitting around chatting up a cantina. But with TOR, I'll be honest, I haven't experienced any of the endgame content. Not because I don't want to, but because my server is deadsies. EA may let me transfer off of it starting tomorrow, but they may not. The single server that they may ship me to may just be another fledgling where I can't find a massively multiplayer playerbase -- there are threads from PTR players saying that even in a fleet of 70 people it still takes an hour for the groupfinder to pop as a tank. The *only* thing that TOR brings to the MMO genre is that they put the "RP" in "RPG" through the voice acting and BioWare dialogue wheel. Now, I'm not trying to underscore the value of this -- it's amazing. The first time you do a batch of content (especially with a RL friend or two) it's absolutely fantastic. I can laugh at my Smuggler buddy's total lack of standards for the many, many women he has "pillow fights" (that's what he calls it) with, and we can crack up every time my Trooper shoots someone he's supposed to negotiate with and then shamelessly hits on Elara. Once you've seen anything a single time, though, the fun ends. Strip away the (very good) "RP" part of the game and you're left with a very inferior WoW clone with Star Wars paint on it. If you want content and ways to access that content, WoW and Rift stomp all over this game. You get more stuff to do with more features and less clutter (4 loading screens to change planets? Pass) with your friends or a batch of strangers. If you want to enjoy a more sand-box style open world, TSW has a bit of that going on (though I hear that may be all it has going for it). TL;DR: If you're playing TOR simply because that's where your friends (RL or otherwise) are, you could all probably switch games (after seeing mostly everything in TOR once) and get more enjoyment per time invested than you ever could by staying here. This game is more Neverwinter Nights: Star Wars (and undeserving of a sub fee) than it is MMORPG and I don't see EA fixing that any time soon, the shoddy groundwork is already in too deep.
  13. Nope, my fat lady's gone and sung for this game. I had some great fun, and checking out the fixes in 1.2 (that the game should have been shipped with instead of charging gullible players for 5 months of a sub-beta-quality product) was neat and all, but my server is dead. Transfers on Tues may fix that, and they may not. EA won't tell us what the hell they're doing until after they do it, and I'll be out of time too soon to see if the results were successful or not, and the upcoming level cap increase makes it a little pointless for me to keep grinding my 50 anyway. If they give another free month before their next investor report I might poke my head in and look around, but EA isn't getting getting any more of my money for this one. Between MoP, GW2, TERA, and TSW (ugh, EA on the box, maybe not TSW) all this year, I have plenty of other options to explore.
  14. I just wonder what the EAware apologist reply will be when that 1.3 mil gets devastated as the following occur: A) D3 comes out B) People realize Tera is pretty fun, and while it has some issues, it doesn't have any of the glaring atrocities that TOR commited on paying customers when it launched in December C) GW2 comes out D) TSW comes out E) MoP comes out F) All the people here only for the free month let their sub run out again It really pisses me off. If the game launched with the current quality and feature set that it has now, it would probably be doing way better with retention. The game still as a long way to go in terms of quality, but it's miles better now than it was in December. Release an uncooked turd and people leave because of the smell and many probably never look back (unless you give them a free month to pad your financial reports)
  15. Some of us expected a WoW clone with lightsabers. What we got was a really lousy WoW clone with lightsabers. MMOs expand and evolve over time, but there's no way anyone can say that December 2011 TOR was of a 'release' quality and not be lying or blind. Combat delay. "High Rez" textures. Shadows. Shaders. UI. Load screen to a ship to load screen to a OS (that you couldn't mount in) to a load screen to a planet. That's just off the top of my head. TOR was massively undercooked and pushed out the door for the Christmas Kiddie Sales. Between the Star Wars brand and the EAware dialog/voiceover treatment, this game would have launched into the stratosphere if only it released in a state that could be described as "working" but since it had to launch in 2011 right before Christmas, we got a severely unfinished product that turned off a lot of people. The game is getting better now, slowly, it's a hell of a lot better than it was 6 months ago, but the damage has already been done, they just aren't going to pull back the bulk of the people they pissed off in January unless they make a regular habit of giving out free gametime right before financial reports.
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