Ohlen could totally tank it, as long as Bromberg remembers to Bloodlust on cooldown... False. F2P (conventional f2p) is still synonymous with lack of quality. Go look at Runes of Magic. Go look at Allods. Decent enough games in their own right, but SEVERE compromises always have to be made to make the games profitable (RoM: graphics, Allods has a cripplingly restrictive cash shop). You'd be hard pressed to find a F2P game that can be considered "AAA". Freemium on the other hand? They all have one thing in common: they were originally sub-based and had an initial box price. There's no way that EA could've even started breaking even on this game without that $60 up-front. Since you already believe that the game will make more money as a freemium, doesn't the quick conversion lead to some rather uncomfortable questions?

In-game challenge, the amount of time it takes to earn a reward, and the level of your stats are just numbers completely controllable by the devs. Why ask for changes to those systems when you can offer to pay for them, and keep paying for them? Silly humans.

Why not open the game up to addons, so your fans do the work for you for free... and thank you for the opportunity to do so on top of that? There's a reason that a half-dozen other notable MMOs have opened up their game to addons -- it lets us customize our experience while freeing up dev resources.

You assume everyone is in it for the long haul. With all these games going freemium, the need to be dedicated to any one game is greatly reduced. These boosts are there specifically for the content tourists. They're the perfect impulse buy for the guys that will try out the game with little intention of spending much, if any money. While the INTENT is to get everyone hooked to the game, it's not realistically going to happen. Having "useful, but not really" items like xp boosts is a way to get a bit of money out of those guys before they leave.

*Shrug* Scope matters. It IS a spectrum. XP boosts are pretty meaningless in a game such as this one, where leveling is beyond easy to begin with. Take a game like Allods though, where things are all honky dory until 20, then suddenly the normal mobs become next to impossible without store bought buffs, and death means an xp debt so large that you have no way to work through it other than to buy it off via another store item... THAT'S a game where leveling aids are pay-to-win. A bigger fear for me would be to see them drag out the content with filler grinds to accommodate these items being in the store, but that worry is a ways off. Also a worry would be for them to decide not to shorten the leveling process for the older zones as the level cap gets higher (and pretty much all MMOs make leveling quicker as the level cap gets higher) since you can just buy xp boosters in the store. That's another subtle change that could ultimately cause us to spend more money (hope I'm not giving them any ideas ). Personally, I'd be more interested in xp boosters in this game more than I would in any others simply because I like the class stories that much and I find the rest of the leveling experience to be extremely tedious, and would gladly accept any item that lets me skip the parts that others might genuinely like, but I happen to be bored of.

I understand your point better then. Already on the GW2 forums, people complain about the downed state in pvp, the skill queue system vs the global cooldown system, ect., "because it's different". Still, context matters a lot, and the absence or presence of certain features still has to be justified in the context of weather or not it enhances game play and weather or not it makes the game more fun. I mean, this game got a lot of criticism of what it DIDN'T have, because it just made the game less convenient rather then providing a unique experience. Who wants to go back to squinting at debuffs/buffs again after using vudo or something similar? Raid frames, mouseover targeting, damage meters, these didn't come from Blizzard. They came from player mods, and were integrated into the game because they were successful. A fear of change is human, but that's not enough to discourage good, thoughtful innovation. A lot of the failed MMOs didn't fail due to "good thoughtful innovation that didn't work out" though, they failed due to poorly thought out change, or change due to lack of resources. The masses are going to rip that to shreds.

Really? Quite a few of the original "deviant" games (Ultima, Dark Age of Conan, ect.) are still running to this day. That, and Minecraft and Eve would like to have a quiet word with you... Making a sweeping statement such as the one you quoted w/o accounting for quality of the games and how well the company reacts to customer concerns (like bugs and broken experiences) is pretty meaningless, and just a shallow excuse to complain about "the community". Swtor is a decent game overall... it's just the most derivative experience in a long line of derivative experiences in this genre. F2P isn't going to change that.

While there's a lot of interesting discussion going on, it looks like most people who are trying to explain the differences are confused themselves. Free-to-play: The "original" free subscription model. No box price or sub needed, the game relies completely on a cash shop for income. Runes of Magic, Fly-for-fun, Silkroad, ect. are examples of this price model. Note that a lot of "asian grinder" games follow this model, and it's also where the term "pay to win" comes from, because the cash shops sometimes sell power. Buy-to-play: Coined by guild wars 1 fans, way back in the day. It's very similar to how you buy console games: you pay for the box, but the rest of the game (sans expansions) is otherwise free. Cash shop may be present or not (original GW didn't have it until later), and if present tend to sell cosmetics and the like almost exclusively. Think of it like a single player game purchase. "freemium": This term was coined by Turbine when they introduced a special payment model for DDO, and later Lotro. This is a hybrid model where you pay for a sub OR content. Like F2P you don't pay an up-front cost, unlike F2P specific content is denied to you unless you buy it a-la-carte. The big distinction between freemium and F2P is that F2P has become synonymous with a lack of quality and with buying in-game advantages in the store, which is perceived as bad. Freemium makes you pay for content to fund future content, and to avoid selling power items in the store. They're TRYING to make the term synonymous with quality on the cheep. Evidence of this is the latest wave of freemium games have all been former sub games: Age of Conan, STO, Everquest 1 and 2, Vanguard, City of Heroes, ect, all formerly considered "AAA" titles. Also, "hybrid": stuff like Eve goes here. It's doesn't REALLY fit the above categories, but since you can buy sub time with plex, it's not a full subscription game either. SWTOR is going with the "freemium" model, no question. No box price, free to play up to 50 with restrictions on content on the way up (warzones, heroics and flashpoints), no ops unless purchased, option to continue subbing. Hope that clears things up.

The type of story that Bioware did in this game is just not that complex though, at least compared to their single player games. That's mostly due to the limits of the MMO genre. There's some pretty good story moments, but the complete lack of consequence and all of the contrivances involved with every character having to go to every planet at specific points in the story make the overall experience into something that's pretty shallow, when all is said and done. Stories such as the ones that this game has would have little problems being adapted to a more open ended world. The Elder Scrolls series has been doing broad gameplay with a shallow story for years.

Fatal flaw in that argument is that it assumes that they caved to forum tears for an OP nerf, so there's nothing preventing them from doing the same thing again a few months down the line. Healers SHOULD be hard to kill. They are target #1

Sounds perfectly reasonable. I'd be more apt to believe that the reason for the way that the transfer roll-outs are happening are more due to with technical limitations/devs still coming to grips with an engine that they didn't build themselves and loaded with art assets than any sort of PR spin. Perhaps they need to get a better handle on how many people their "super servers" can actually hold and if they let one get too big, they don't make the same mistake across all their servers. I still don't like how slow this is happening, and how it's impossible to merger my characters to the same server unless I happen to get lucky on where my destination server happens to be :/

To be fair, I think they started viewing Roll for Cover as zero cooldown movement off the GCD, as in: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=444103 ...but it only sort of works this way. It's inconsistent. It's clunky. It doesn't work as well for snipers as it does for Ops. Roll for Cover should really be ground targeted and directed. It should be possible to roll from cover to cover. Only THEN could it be seen as a real advantage. This would also make the cover system a bit less dependent on terrain, which would only be an improvement. One thing that's always been true across every MMO ever designed is that terrain breaks constantly with new patches and updates (just like it's true that any class with a Vanish mechanic has complaints that it doesn't work properly). I don't think that it's a coincidence that the cover system broke so early in this game's life cycle, and I expect to see more of the same. At the very least, they could reduce the points of collision we have vs terrain when we drop into cover (too many points of collision is why a players can stand on places where a sniper can't go into cover). That would make cover bugs occur less often, at least.

The interview reply has repeatedly been taken out of context. No one mentions how Ohlsen dodged the question completely and answered what he felt like answering. The question: Massively: Sorcerers and Sages were hit pretty hard in the update. Some players have said, "Good, they needed to be nerfed," because there have been instances of Operatives and Mercenaries being passed up for flashpoints and operations because Sorcerers could "do a better job." However -- and I'm sure you've heard it -- Sorcs and Sages are complaining that their viability in PvP has been greatly reduced because when they face, for instance, a Sentinel, he can literally prevent them from ever being able to drop their major heal. Did this change accomplish what you'd hoped, and why do you think players are having these reactions? The bolded part was the actual question. The complaints were never about resource management at all, but rather other changes that pushed the class further downward in terms of PvP viability. I don't even play the class, and I can see that.

Well... there's time-sinks, and then there's time-sinks. Having uninspired content to repeat is one issue, another one is that the game is set up in such a way that there is large interruptions in the flow in order to move from daily to daily. They need to do stuff like: -Make the lfg tool cross-planet as a default. -Add server wide LFG channels separated by level bracket. -Add an intermediate point between planets where you can access the daily areas quicker, somewhat like GW1. Multiple loading screens going from Fleet to planet, then planet to planet is more tedium than it is worth. I have never found a group for "The Fall of Torvix" on my server. My healer has soloed it, my sniper has simply had to do without because there's never more than 1-2 people in the daily area when I play, and they rarely respond to tells. I'm sorry, but I simply can't motivate myself to go back through several loading screens to spam general chat for a group, just to go back through several loading screens again if I DO happen to get a group. I'm not sure that more interesting content or rotating quests would motivate me to do more than 1-2 planets worth of dailies as long as the above issues persist.

The LFG isn't even server wide. The default setting is for the planet/zone that you are on. This blows my mind. In the extreme short term, the could've long since added a server wide LFG chat channel divided by level bracket. I've seen low-rent pay to win asian grinding games that can do that, at least. There seem to be at least 1-2 bad design decisions in every aspect of this game, some of which have easy solutions -- but they're moving slowly on these things.

But that would make them... pooperatives!