Unruhe
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Posts posted by Unruhe
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So this method is directed at the big Cartel Coin spenders only? I was thinking of making one purchase to take advantage of the deal, but there is no way that I'm spending additional money on the website beforehand just so I can use this feature.
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****
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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.
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well wow players need something to cheer them up i suppose, that with BiS being sold on the black market auction house and real money auction house going into it so whats the point of raiding there anymore, then the news that china/korea numbers are falling so low that they are having todo HUGE server merges. And all the f2p is going to be is the upto lvl 15 trial, wow already has upto lvl 20 trial and i see little difference in it myself.
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.
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Except you did not. Please post your "math" on the matter, instead of quoting it.
I'll be waiting ;-)
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.
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Except, with most western f2p games, you still can sub.
There appears to be a wealth of people who haven't played a F2P in the last 3 years or so, and seen how current F2P models (aka Freemium) work, then getting up in arms about things which more or less, stay the exact same for them regardless of the payment model.
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.
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Exactly. Or just get a sub and get basically all content. For all the flack LoTRO has taken with the f2p it has really worked well and has allowed great flexibility in their payment structure. I think those who complain about it have either never played the game or are lifetime founders that are somehow miffed that the great deal they got with the lifetime sub lost a bit of value when it went F2P.
I pay $10 a month for my LoTRO sub and have never spent a dime in the store. I get 500 free TP a month and have been able to buy all sorts of convenience items in the store.
Really, it works very well and it is less than my $15/month here.
I have played LOTRO and I was not a lifetime member. They did the whole "free to play" relaunch and touted that owning retail versions of the core game and addon content would allow special privilege and access to all of that content without paying again.
Except, even though they said that, they threw a chart up on their website and said "this is what you get" and then actively locked portions of their recently released expansion and kindly asked me to pay for them a second time.
It's a scam to bilk money out of players. That's all. No more, no less. If you can play and enjoy what's available without having to sink money into the game, congrats, your personal playstyle let you dodge that bullet. That doesn't mean they aren't actively trying to screw over their players.
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Free-to-play almost always sucks for the consumer, because the mentality of it is, "We can't attract and retain enough customers, so how do we gouge the hell out of the ones that stick around?"
With very rare exception, the F2P model is designed to:
A) Entice people to a game by pretending to offer a full game experience, only to "force" them to pay for content or abandon the game entirely when they realize how much of the product is completely unavailable despite being "free to play."
B) Encourage avid supporters to spend more money on stuff than the average 15$/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)
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LOL is it severly flawed? You played it like you hadn't clue one about the game. It's not wow, warhammer, eq, gw ro rift. It has a story and if you can't listen and participate then it's not for you.
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.
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So from what I've been reading is that most of the complainers are the spacebar warriors who have burned themselves out from the game because they decided to skip the biggest asset of the game, the RPG. While others, like myself are enjoying the game for what it is and taking our time. Makes sense.
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.
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But... that's every MMO ever, even the old MUDs.
Except there are more polished, more content-filled, more feature-rich places to do it than here.
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Interesting.
This seems to be the camp from which the unimpressed tend to spawn.
From the other camp spawns those that build friends and guildmates, to where the "grind" is peripheral to the participation in a game, with friends.
From this I'm gathering that those of us that seek an MMO shooter where gear progression is their first priority are burning out. Those of us that seek an MMORPG and a community of friends where gear progression is secondary to the enjoyment shared with friends and guildmates, are still very much enjoying the game.
I'm guessing for some, the game is expected to provide the fun for them, where for others the game is simply a platform that provides the environment in which they can make their own fun.
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.
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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.
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You're assuming all 1.3 million remaining subs are actually as satisfied with the game as you are. Not true. And none of those 1.3 million have even paid for the current month of subs.
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)
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Basically to sum up this thread is that some people expected a WoW clone with lightsabers, it didn't happen, so according to them, the game now sucks.
/end thread
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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This is the first 1-4 player RPG I've ever seen that required a monthly fee.
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I'm to the point that I hope they don't change anything for at least six months, that way all of the whiners will have moved on to cursing the GW2 forums and the Tera forums and the next FOTM MMO forum and we can stay here and make this a better game.
Because Warhammer is getting tons of new development to make it a better game, what with all the money it's generating from all the non-"whiners" that are left playing it while people with a brain moved on to better-handled products.
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LFG tool is server-only. It will do nothing to help people on woefully underpopulated servers.
Please stop using the LFG tool as any kind of logical counter to the "My server is dead, please fix this" argument.
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Your 15$ can get you a lot more elsewhere...
Of course, the amount you get for your 15$ here is relative. I play with a RL friend on a dead server. No 2-player RPG is worth a monthly fee. If we were lucky enough to be on a server that has players and doing more than 2-player content was easily accessible, I'd be way less bitter.
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They need to fix the things they broke this week, so they can break new things (and then later fix them) next week.
Otherwise the amount of broken stuff will be so backed up it will be a feat to even log into the game.
Or something.
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Not at all. Only that it's typical, and that, mathematically speaking, TOR is above that typical curve. Is it a good thing? Imho, despite the fact that it's normal, no, I don't think it's a good thing. But that's on the players, not the developer.
The 1.3 million is including people on free game time. Free game time given out by EAware. I'm sure if Rift said "come back for 30 free days" at its 6 month mark, Trion could report more than 250k subscribers at the time.
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I wouldn't mind the cost if the bonus was worth it. As it is now, the price for the unlocks is waaaaaaay too high for the paltry benefit/convenience that most of them provide.
GTN on the ship? That would be AMAZING and worth the cost! Neutral GTN on the ship? Why did you bother?
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So yeah, you can go on thinking you're somehow more mature as a gamer than me, and I'll keep on playing a game while you stand in fleet.
This is a big deal to me. Gone are the days where it was normal to wait 20 minutes for a ship to ride and then ride that ship for another 10 and then walk (we didn't have mounts) across a continent to get where you want. Or pay a Wizard an insane amount of cash to port you, and even then portal destinations were few and far between and often kind of out of the way themselves.
It isn't WoW's content that gives it so many subs, in my opinion, but rather the feature set. It's a game you can log in and start playing in one way or another almost immediately, and it's "spoiled" the average MMO player, myself included. I'd rather play a game than sit around waiting to play it.
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I'm on one of the worst servers on the planet of any game ever created in the history of America. So I'm just curious what others who are languishing on low population servers do to keep yourself interested in this game? Since there is no functioning GTN, PVP, Finding a group for a flashpoint? HA! Imagine that! What is this Lost Island you speak of?
InB4 LULZ JUST REROLL!!! There are a couple of factors preventing me from re rolling. I play with 4 IRL friends who are very casual and refuse to level up again. Also, I spent 5 months working on my main, why would want to just abandon him? Thats just stupid, and I personally hate that argument.
I'm leveling up an alt to experience the Trooper storyline (the Consular story was unbearably lame most of the time) with my Smuggler friend. When he hits 50, I can have a second person on Ilum to do dailies with my main. After my 30 free days run out, I'll likely be moving on to another game. I may check out TERA when the box price comes down and they get a few patches in (I'm not suggesting TERA is bad now, I have no idea, but AoC and TOR have taught me never to buy a MMO at release ever again) or hit up MoP (I actually like the pandas)
If meaningful and free server relocation and consolidation occur before my free time runs out, I may stick around longer. I genuinely like the game, but I'm not going to pay 15$/month for a 2-player RPG.
41 days and counting.
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500K subs is massive, bro. Then again, I'm a former AoC player, so I think 50,000 is a massive number.
Not when they're spread out over a hundred servers. That's this game's largest problem right now, and exactly what the OP is pointing out: This game feels like a single-player game. You don't need people for anything until level cap (a sad trend in a lot of MMOs actually) and then when you get to cap, everyone's so spread out that organizing anything is way, way more painful than it ever should be unless you happen to be on one of the handful of healthy servers.
Purchase Cartel Coins In-Game – Now Live!
in General Discussion
Posted
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.