Wrong, RoI brought a level cap increase which is something that is never part of a free update. RoI was of a comparable size to SoM. Content delivery is faster and of comparable quantity and I have been playing since the pre-launch beta phase. Your claim of a decline in quality is your opinion and not one that I would agree with. I agree with The Butler and Aidencast. I consider LOTRO's high-water mark to be the Mines of Moria era. At that point, the game was coming off a solid first year with steady, frequent additions of content. And the trend continued well after MoM released: new dungeons, new content filling in the gaps in Eriador (the big region to the west of the Misty Mountains), new systems (such as skirmishes and cosmetic-gear tabs), new in-game tools. Moria is admittedly a near-impossible act to follow, but I thought the game ground to a halt after Siege of Mirkwood went live. In retrospect, this was when Turbine entered into negotiations with Warner Bros. for their buyout -- but in my opinion, this year-and-a-half period of inactivity essentially killed the game. To date, LOTRO has come nowhere close to the level of output we enjoyed in the first two years of its history. So much so, that it's clear they haven't even tried. The Rise of Isengard "expansion" is indeed barely worthy of the name. The land area added by this retail expansion is almost exactly the same as what was added with the Enedwaith content update, right down to the number of quest hubs. The only significant difference is the Tower of Isengard and its associated raids and dungeons. In my opinion, it ws nothing but a quick grab for money by a company desperately in need of an infusion of cash. If you wanted a sensible product to market, RoI and the new Rohan expansion should have been part of one expansion pack. But Turbine split the two, and sold them separately a year apart. And worse, there has apparently been no content additions between. (I unsubbed last December, when SWTOR went live.)

Heh... "KNOWING EA"... This is EXACTLY why I cancelled my subscription within an hour of learning SWTOR was going free-to-play. Consider it the accumulation of EA's many disreputable actions over many years: buying out and gutting popular development studio after development studio, and title after title; DRM, holding back key content from popular games at release in order to sell it later as an add-on sale for "Downloadable Content" (DLC), and on and on. For EA, the adage is starkly true: what goes around, comes around.

What's the point?

In the meantime, they ruined the game by announcing they were taking SWTOR down the free-to-play rat hole. /golfclap.

YES, IT IS. Don't EVEN get me started (again) on LOTRO's F2P model. It would not be pretty. If you really want to see my thoughts on the matter, check some of my previous posts. I've gone into some detail elsewhere. For now, suffice it to say WB/Turbine SCREWED their subscribers -- badly. In many ways. Because they apparently felt they *needed* ways to mulct even paying subscribers into spending Turbine Points on must-have stuff that was once readily available in the in-game environment, but is now a Turbine Store exclusive.

Pizza by the slice vs. buying a whole pizza would also have worked.

Yeah... saved. The game SUCKS. Not exactly what I would consider "saved."

After watching Warner Bros/Turbine convert Lord of the Rings Online to a free-to-play model, this news makes me very, very sad. F2P, in my opinion, just sets up far too many temptations for a company to screw over its player base, be they subscribers or free-to-play. I saw it first hand in LOTRO, when WB/Turbine did things like remove critical items from the general in-game environment and make them exclusively available in the Turbine Store, EVEN FOR SUBSCRIBERS. I saw it in the way WB/Turbine turned EVERY LITTLE ITEM IN THE GAME into an insane grind -- a grind that can be BYPASSED ENTIRELY, ALL FOR A LOW 295 TURBINE POINTS (or whatever)!!!1!!11! I also saw its effects in the form of seemingly-endless tweaking of the low-level/entry-level areas of the game, leaving the "endgame" (the veterans and subscribers) to rot. It was CLEARLY all about churning the subscriber base, bringing in new suckers... erm, CUSTOMERS... faster than people were quitting in disgust. Or at least, trying to compensate for the mass exodus. Or partially compensating. Or heck, just surviving in the face of the mass exodus. I don't know. Bottom line for me is, I watched SWG go up in flames because SOE succumbed to a case of WoW envy. I watched LOTRO do the things the devs SWORE they would NEVER do -- screw their existing players. And now, EA/BioWare are taking their first toke on the crack pipe that is F2P. I'm outta here. Congratulations, EA. You've devoured yet another once-beloved game company, and turned it into... well, you-know-what. Your reputation as America's most-hated company is reinforced.

Face it. P2W is inevitable. As are Pay-to-play microtransactions. They'll just save it until you get hooked.

CORRECTION: It WAS a great game. With F2P, it goes from great, to horrible.

Because F2P is a HORRIBLE idea, that's why.

BioWare once had the guts to do games that no one thought could be made, like Baldur's Gate and Knights of the Old Republic. Today's F2P announcement is a sad, sad day, because it clearly marks the fall of a once-great studio.

See my sig.

Sorry, but anyone who thinks LOTRO's move to F2P worked "great" didn't have a high-level character. LOTRO vets got SCREWED. Badly. Repeatedly. Both F2P and subscribers. I've posted repeatedly on what Turbine did to its most loyal long-term subscribers, so since this is now chiseled in granite that SWTOR is officially adding F2P, I have nothing further to say. Expect my unsubscription in short order. Freeloaders, enjoy your gimped game.

When I look at the Rakata sets for Consulars, I immediately think, "demented Christmas Tree angel" or "This was stolen from the wardrobe of the Queen of Naboo." The War Hero set, with its off-the-shoulder toga look, draws comparison to Queen Cleopatra. Definitely NOT Jedi-like, and definitely NOT very practical-looking for an athletic Shadow.

"Fluff" has a nasty tendency to morph into "pay to win." Worse, it has an even nastier tendency to morph into "pay a LOT for something we've decided to make a necessity now that you're hooked," and "We're going to fabricate huge, contrived grinds -- but you can get it now for only $X.XX!" I saw all three in LOTRO, and quit the game because of it. Me, the biggest walking LOTRO Lore geek in my circle of friends and a continuous subscriber from Day #1 of LOTRO's Open Beta -- I walked away because LOTRO went F2P and did with it what they swore they would never do. THAT is what is inevitable if EA ever sticks the crack pipe that is "F2P" into SWTOR's mouth. As for your challenge to "Show (you) one MMO where you have to pay for every little thing," it depends on how closely you want to parse the qualifier, "every little thing." To answer this, I again need look no farther than LOTRO. Sure, you can play LOTRO for free -- at first. You even get a goodly sample of the in-game experience... until you out-level the Lone-Lands. THEN you indeed pay for "every little thing" -- quest packs, stable routes, task packs, relic-removal scrolls to enable you to salvage those costly relics from your Legendary Items as you out-level them, and on and on. And it's all paid for in "Turbine Points." Theoretically, you can earn TP's in-game by completing deeds or gaining character levels -- but those are gained in increments of 5 to 15 TP for each achievement, and each is a long, painful grind especially if you haven't bought quest packs and task packs for the zone you are in. And a single perk generally costs hundreds of TP, so if you want to actually build your character up via the TP system, you are FORCED to buy Points, which are generally worth a penny per point. So, to put that into perspective, a single Relic-Removal Scroll at the time I finally quit LOTRO cost my character 499 TP. That's $5 worth of TPs -- for a single-use scroll on ONE of my FIVE high-level characters! (Plus three more level-40+ characters that were into LIs.) Oh, sure: I could just kiss that item's three tier-6 relics goodbye -- but they EACH represent MONTHS of grinding. I really, REALLY hope BioWare has the sense to not even step onto that slippery slope. In my book, F2P is a recipe for seething, white-hot liquid hate.

For 20 levels. After that, you pay a sub fee. Finish the sentence, please.

^^^ This. Big difference between "considering" something and "doing" something. With Guild Wars 2 on the horizon, it's only common sense to "consider" the impact that game will have on the competitive picture. Thing is, GW/GW2 are very different MMOs compared to SWTOR. The big selling point for GW was the short ramp-up into competitive PvP. The game didn't have a long levelling-up process, or the sort of emphasis on Story that we find here in SWTOR. Their model was to let the players equip and gear up their players rapidly, so they could commence quickly with the killin'. Hence the name, GUILD WARS. I predict GW2 will have a big initial splash on the MMO scene. Then, as players get their fill of the PvP, they will move back to other MMOs. But for GW2, the F2P model makes sense. Not a lot of expensive content to create, players can jump in and out, and retail box sales can drive revenue. I doubt that model would suffice for SWTOR, a game marketed around Story. Theoretically, BioWare could make this F2P and sell lots of retail expansion packs to add storylines. But the expansion packs would cost more, since the game wouldn't have a revenue stream derived from monthly sub fees. This appears to have happened to an extent with LOTRO: Previous expansion packs (Moria, Mirkwood) cost $30 when they released; this summer's Rohan pack cost $40. And LOTRO's content isn't fully voiced. Bottom lin is, Robert Heinlein's "TANSTAAFL" acronym still holds true: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Anyone who thinks "Free To Play" really does mean free to play is deluding himself.

Martial-arts pandas do not concern me, admiral.

True, but my goodness, have you seen the Consular gear sets?? I think that's a rare occasion where EVERYONE agrees: they are horribly ugly. Especially the Rakata set. I feel like a demented Christmas Tree angel every time my character tries it on. First armor set in ANY MMO that actually manages to look more ridiculous than the Hunter's Giantstalker set from WoW. And I can't believe NO art designer had the sense to give SHADOWS (an acrobatic melee class) ONE gear set that looks like it would be used by an acrobatic melee type.

I live near Marshall Space Flight Center, and interact on a weekly basis with NASA engineers. What this person is not telling you is that the person he's referring to has been eaten by a species of intergalactic beetles from Sagittarius-Beta-5, and that the International Space Station is overrun by these beetles. The beetles are sentient, and have established a colony inside Nancy Pelosi's head (which came perilously close to being exposed during the debate over ObamaCare, when Ms. Pelosi insisted, "We have to pass the bill to know what's in the bill," causing observers to wonder whether she'd lost her mind) and are planning to use her private 747 to seed Australia in January 2013. From there, they plan to island-hop across New Guinea and Indonesia, and make landfall in Vietnam, then track north to reunite with a sleeper colony inside the corpse of Kim-Il Sung. (The Dear Leader was killed by the establishent of this colony.) From there, they plan to tunnel their way into the Marianas Trench and trigger a massive tectonic shift that will unleash a 950-mile-long plume of magma that will vaporize the Pacific Ocean and convert the Earth's atmosphere to a permanent 98% humidity level, allowing them to relocate their entire planetary population from Sagittarius-Beta-5 to Earth and live in comfort, with an abundant supply of Democrats for dietary protein. All of this information has been given to me by sources within NASA that wish to remain anonymous, but are utterly reliable. I could identify them to assuage the inevitable skeptics, but then I'd have to protect the secrecy of the mission by feeding you to the beetles. As it stands, the secrecy of the mission remains intact, because no one will believe you.

Grinding is not "harder." "Tedious" is not "harder." The "middle ground" I am looking for is challenging combat. The thing is, the character classes themselves introduce some huge variables in how 'hard' a quest may be to finish. I myself found that a murderously-difficult quest for my Consular Shadow (such as the climactic fight at the end of the Alderaan Consular story) was faceroll-easy for my Consular Sage.

Well, first of all this "anonymous BioWare employee" post has so many factual errors in it that its credibility goes from zero (the infamous "anonymous insider" thing redux) to sharply negative territory the moment it talks about BioWare opening up the forums to the public only a few months before the game went live. Seriously? I've been trol... erm, POSTING... on some version of an official SWTOR forum since October 2008, when BioWare first officially announced that SWTOR was in development. And people (myself included) were jonesng for a BioWare Old Republic MMO on the BioWare forums for years before that. Yeah, there were always the KOTOR-3-as-single-player grognards, but ultimately the choice for how this game was designed rests with BioWare. THEY kept this game under TIGHT wraps for years, with iron-box secrecy over their vaunted iteration process. The ONLY thing they shared with the community was odes on how great the Hero Engine was to work with, and how easy it was to rapidly cook up prototypes for internal testing. Even when the game was in Beta, we testers were warning BioWare that the game was very linear, and that "endgame" content might be a bit thin. What we DIDN'T find out was how badly the game would bog down under heavy populations in concentrated areas. We had to take it on faith that the Hero Engine coupled with the Complex Event Processor software add-on would actually work as well as they were saying it would. It didn't. It worked well enough in Beta, but in the post-Launch environment, with the much-heavier player load, it does not. That's not the players' fault. So now BioWare's playing catch-up. We've got mission terminals instead of NPC quest-givers in the Black Hole District, and few seem to miss the NPC quest-givers for the dailies. Denova is coming; it will be interesting to see if BioWare broadens its approach to world design to make them seem less like an on-a-rail experience and more of an open-ended exploratory experience. I figure it will have all the usual "signpost" quests leading players from Quest Hub "A" to Quest Hub "B," but I'm also hoping for a world big enough to allow players to feel like there's more "white space" around the questing zones than has been the case in previous worlds. But the sky-is-falling prognostications predicting SWTOR's imminent demise? Please. Such things strike me as the spewings of rabid, ravenous fans who are too close to their product for objectivity.

Well, whatever. I'm not going to engage in camping among same-faction elite NPCs and call it "PvP." It's just boring to me. Ambushing enemy players in the open field of the Jedi Temple ruins (among the turrets and such) is one thing -- the quests are set up to bring Imps and Pubs into the same field, so it's intended that clashes will take place. But like I've said many times, triggering elite mobs in a heroic area pushes enemy players into a wierd, lopsided version of PvE. If YOU want to call it "PvP," you go right ahead. Knock yerself out. I find it pointless, both as a source of "fun" as well as being devoid of any in-game improvement for my character. But it does give a great excuse to execute KoS attacks on the perps. Not that we'll ever see them anywhere but cowering among elite NPCs or taking the long dirt nap while waiting for their rez timers to cycle down. They better like levelling alts.

In general you want to strike a balance between Defense, Shield, and Absorb. Personally, I tend to weight a bit towards Shield/Absorb while keeping Defense somewhere in the ballpark. The Shield/Absorb stats increase the effectiveness of the armor you gain from Kinetic Ward, your bread-and-butter defensive skill.