Honestly? Having the opposite effect, I've already let my guild know this is my last week as I won't be resubbing and the F2P option is much to restricting to continue with.

Nope. As a sub you are still capped at 8k. As a lifetime sub you get a bonus mission that nets you another 1k refinement for a total of 9k. I believe that that extra 1000 is tied to subscription rewards incidently. Don't know, didn't sub for long enough to earn it. Thats nice, but thats not an issue. People buy/sell it constantly. GW2 potentially could have the exact same problem one day, but its not today or anytime soon. More opinion, and conspiracy level ********... so they gave you zen and they are bad guys for doing it? Whatever.

That's nice, but at the end of the day an opinion. The company may, shocker, want to make a profit but with STO they do not FORCE you to buy things as F2P. Every single item is OPTIONAL, and the game allows you to make cash shop currency ingame. Yes, you can earn the cash shop currency ingame... and as a F2P player going from a SUB it cost me $5.00(dilitium equiv) to be endgame ready.. You can't do that in SWTOR. Instead, if you want to wear high end armor, cash shop. If you want a title, cash shop. If you want to color match, cash shop. Whatever, those are optional but the content itself being hidden behind a paywall is not. Raid, PVP, Flashpoints, Guild repairs, the credits you earned as a sub. its all hidden behind CM fees. At the end of the day, I spent nearly $30.00 worth of SWTOR's currency, and am still blocked off from progressing in endgame. If I wish to continue, I must pay more, as the big ones are recurring costs. Factually incorrect opinion, STO runs events constantly that earn you huge lump sums of dilitium. Finishing off the reputations, again, huge sums of dilitium... all that can be converred into cashshop currency. Ships(T6) (aka the best) are also given out as event rewards incidently.

From a subscriber's point of view: Effectively speaking, we aren't getting much in the way of free content. It's hard to argue that it hasn't slowed down significantly. Has our subscription fee lowered any to balance out this loss in content output? Nope. Additionally they are now selling what amounts to content patches as a 'expansion'. Has the cost of that dropped match the smaller size of the update? Nope. $10 for the first expansion, $20 for the second expansion. Increased in fact then. Has our money then been spent on making the game better? Nope. The operations are still buggy FOUR months in, and the UI still lags the game to nearly unplayable levels. So what is our subscription being used for? Funding the cartel market... so that we can buy more things ontop of our existing $15.... yeah, that seems like fair value. From a F2P point of view: Effectively speaking, in order complete endgame content you need to shell out around $20, closer to $30 if you have any interest in your characters appearence. Add to that a recurring fee of ops passes (weekly) and coin escrows's (bi-weekly). This does not include PVP. You are better off going back to being a sub, F2P is a barely viable option (and completely impossible for a new player) if you are interested in raiding as your 'fees' will total up to about a monthly sub anyway.

As far as I can tell, having played more then a few of them. Its near the top of the nickle-and-dime list. Pretty *********** pathetic. Agreed. I subbed to STO for a bit. $5(Credit Unlock) was what it cost me to play comfortably as a F2P account afer the sub ran out. SWTOR.... I've used about $30 of cartel coins, and in the end I'm still running into ******** restrictions. STO also lets you grind things out and earn their cartel coin equivelent ingame, So no, SWTOR is by far, nowhere near the 'best F2P model'.

Yeah, honesty is cancer in a work place for sure. Can't have any of that around. They fired the guys who were working on the engine a very long time ago, and then they fired the next set of guys too. And who knows how many more have gone thru that office since. By now, any shred of documentation is probably long gone, and digging thru code you yourself didn't write is a nightmare in of itself, let along something as big and complex as an MMO. So yeah, they really CAN'T do anything with the engine, because anything they would touch could break the game entirely.

Except.. you know, other games allow you to uncap for a fee. The escrow system is complete balls, so while the ******** bugs and general terrible way the game runs atm drove me from being a sub to a preferred player, the escrow will probably drive me from even playing the game into ignoring it complete. That, actually, is how you shoot yourself in the foot. By pushing people out of your game entirely.

Not only that, but there's no logic behind the performance stutters. I can be standing still, staring at a wall and my FPS swings from 105 to 40 and back up to 105. I run Temple and depending on the part of it I'm in I could be seeing 100 fps, 60 fps or 20 fps... all without exiting the area.

My sub runs out next week, I am currently leaning heavily towards not renewing it. To put it bluntly, of the three games I play.. SWTOR just doesn't work, STILL, months after they broke it with 3.0. Seriously, how the **** do you expect people to spend money on things you can't, as devs, be bothered to fix.

I don't hate SWTOR, but to be blunt the game has steadily gone downhill since launch. The game engine was badly optimized to begin with and in all likelyhood should have been scrapped and replaced with something that works, but 2+ years later its pretty obvious that EA/BW have no interest in spending resources on fixing that issue. Content release has been slowing for years, ideas are tossed in the game and used to get players to spend more money ontop of the existing monthly fees before being abandoned entirely. The base game was amasing, Makeb was alright, but SoR was a joke. No interest in spending resources there either. PVP has been left to wither on the vine for years, and the results are what you'd expect. Match after match of facing the same tiny handful of players, before eventually the queue just dies off. No point spending resources there. So what are we actually getting then, a cartel market that sells us the same items again and again, 'this time with more holes' and $20 single use dyes. So no, we don't hate SWTOR, most us us 'complainers' are simple dissappointed at how badly this game has been managed. Go play something else, there's plenty of mmo's (some even don't charge you per month) that put out better content consistantly at a much quicker pace, only difference being they don't have the Star Wars name to hide behind. EDIT: Before you ask, the reason I don't leave is my raid group seems dead set on sticking it out for now, so I'm beholden to the desires of others.

Yeah, don't bother. I built a new PC a while back, not aimed particularly at swtor but a general gaming rig. Even reading off of SSD's the game still loads like a slow POS, the UI still bogs everything down, and the game generally runs no better. Yet all my other games doubled and neared tripped in performance. So.. probably not your computer, save yourself some money.

Things are not fixed in this game, the cartel market is littered with items that clip, distort, or generally just look like crap. So no, I imagine it won't be changed.

About the only thing I enjoy from this game is raiding, but even there is losing any sense of appeal as each week is just another **** show of broken fights and random buggy encounters. But hey, lets focus on the cartel market Bioware Austin, that'll right the ship.

Trend - the general course or prevailing tendency. I am aware WoW is back up to 10mil players, time will tell if its a blip or a shift in direction for them. Over the years, the population had been dropping, which was why I used that particular phrasing.

Bioware's F2P is not really a viable option if you actually want to do anything, too much stick not enough carrot. So split hairs all you want, Makeb cost me $10 ( with subscription) and SoR cost me $20 (with subscrption) so my original argument stands, twice the cost a fraction of the content. Blizzard's momentum has actually been in a downward direction, each expansion has had fewer and fewer players, with numbers dropping down to 5mil+ as of Pandaria. Yet they continue to put out full sized expansion (maybe not the biggest they have ever dropped). Overall, yes. WoD has been a better expansion if you want to compare value for dollar spent. SOR cost me a third of what WoD did, and offered a tenth of the content.

That's nice. I don't. By any measurable statistic we got less content for a high price tag. Where we got two distinct storylines with the last expansion, here we got a single one, that has no real differences between the republic or imperial sides. Ontop of that what we did get is laughably short. As for the storyline, its fanboy bait. Hell, it got me excited too.

Except SoR was the expansion, it also was twice the cost of Makeb, so it being a setup for me to buy something else down the road isn't actually a good thing.

Oh please, you could replace Revan with generic Jedi #1 and it wouldn't have changed the story significantly. Emperor captures Bob, Bob dies, Bob's body comes back and mistakenly raises the emperor. Woops! The end. Did Revan even have five minutes of dialog this expansion?

Makeb cost me half the price of SoR, $10 vs $20, and dropped with significantly more in the way of actual content. The story took more then a small handful of hours to complete and had two distinct arcs, Republic and Imperial, allowing some replayablity. So yes, compared to WoW's expansions it was very content lite, but more importantly compared to its OWN first expansion it was content lite as well. P.S. I've played all of WoW's expansions. EDIT: Again, as a customer I don't need excuses. You charge me X amount, I expect Y amount of content. If you are not able to do so, then why exactly am I giving you my money? I am better off giving that money to someone who will deliver Y amount of content. Also, there are F2P games out there that deliver more content as well, with no monthly fee... so am I just paying for the license? Star Wars being the name on the tin is less and less of a reason to play this game, especially with the lack of any real FIXES let alone content.

Yes, but the major difference is that when the expansion hits it brings with it major changes, alot of improvements (which is subjective, I admit) and they tend to reshape the world. SWTOR's are nothing like that, and I'll bluntly admit felt a bit like a rip off at $20. Nothing was added or done with SoR that couldn't have been a patch. Even compared to Makeb, it felt VERY content lite. Three days after it launched I had already run everything SoR had, and being work days it totalled up to fewer then 7 or 8 hours. And to add to the already excellent point, Blizzard never actually pushes the cash shop on you. It never feels like a major part of the game with dev resources being spent almost exclusively on it. EDIT: As a customer both games cost me the same amount of money per month, so I do not see why I shouldn't expect the same quantity and quality for my investment. Arguing that EA/Bioware have less resources and therefore I should expect less is laughable. EA has deep pockets and should they choose to do so they could invest quite a lot back into the game. They simply don't, and I also as simply do not accept that as a valid excuse.

And SWTOR is magically better? Both dev studios, scratch that, all dev studios have issues with meeting deadlines, its the nature of the beast that is MMO's.. My point is, and remains, that their patch notes have a lot more meat on the bones, even if its delayed content that 'should have been in at launch', which by the way is a sin that Bioware itself has commited. Or have we already managed to forget the length of time we spent in DP/DF? What do we get from Bioware in regards to technical changes and/or fixes? We're told they can't touch it for fear of breaking stuff more things, the UI lag and piss poor frame rates remain untouched, the game does not look good enough to run as poorly as it does to be absolutely blunt. So what do we get? Mostly more things to buy from the cartel market, which is then used to fund even more things for the cartel market.. but the quality is starting to drop off there too.

What? -Reworked Blood Elf models -Twitter Integration -Reworked Heirloom system -New pets + New mounts + toys -Profession Updates with new recipies -New garrision quests + continuation of the legendary quest chain -Additional things to do during the DMF event On the technical side of things you've got.. -Improved colour blind support -New SSAO options with the addition of HBAO+ support -Improved MSAA + new SSAO options -New per pixel based lighting -A metric ton of bug fixes and class balance Also, the first wing of the new raid dropped about a week ago. But hey, aside from all that.. yeah.. 6.1 has nothing in it at all.

Problem is, SWTOR was from the start a mediocre MMO built with a terrible engine that managed to have an interesting story and great voice acting. Now take away the voice overs and story... what does that leave us? Oh right, patch 3.0.

Yeah, pretty much. I somehow managed to get my hopes up for the 'expansion', made a fresh toon on the republic side and was rearing to go. Fresh start, few level cap, new skill system, it'll be awesome. Two daily areas an expansion does not make, fast forward to today and I'm half out of the game. After five years of not touching the game, I went back to WoW because.. well.. they put out content compete expansions and big sized patches with **** to do. SWTOR... eh.. swtor finds new ways to double/triple dip (Reselling existing mounts, now with flourishes).

Because money. There is no other reason, it makes them money because people are dumb enough to buy it.