Star Wars: The Old Republic Adding Free-To-Play Option In November 135
EA and BioWare announced today that Star Wars: The Old Republic will be getting a free-to-play option later this year. Players using the F2P option will be able to reach the level cap and play through the full class stories, but their access will be limited for other parts of the game; they will only be able to play a certain number of Warzones (their PvP battlegrounds), Flashpoints (their instanced dungeons), and space missions each week. Access to travel functionality and the game's auction house will be limited as well. F2P players won't be able to participate in Operations, the end-game raids. Subscribers will retain access to all of these features. There will also be cosmetic items sold through the 'Cartel Market' using a virtual currency.
Re:Are people still playing this? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Are people still playing this? (Score:5, Informative)
The end game is an was terrible. Bad balance between professions and loot drops. Bizarre itemization and gearing requirements as you move past the first tier of raiding. Buggy content (floors not spawning, interactive objects not working properly). Dailies take an excruciatingly long time to do not because the dailies themselves are bad, but because there are so many load screens etc.
Then the population started dropping and the game became a shell. They've moved just about everyone onto about 10 or 12 mega servers, which is actually a good idea, generally, but they implemented it poorly.
The game has a series of hard DPS checks, which is fine, but then it didn't provide tools to asses dps. Problems like that basically plague the game. You can't ask players to reach a benchmark they can't see, or understand (gearing is especially guilty of this). And the game performs badly on loading, which by itself is forgivable, except they didn't design the game to be bad at loading, (which would mean doing things like giving players free teleports to group or the like) they just... expected you to put up with it.
It's interesting how much the 'convenience' stuff in WoW matters. Having a calendar, so you knew who was going to show up to a raid in game was a whole lot better than trying to use and outside tool. Being able to summon everyone in the group to a summoning stone, again huge improvement. WoW didn't start with those things, but they make a huge difference to how much time you can spend actually playing the game versus how much time you spend getting to the content. I think the difference is that as WoW has evolved the people who make the game want time to be able to both play the game, and have jobs and lives at the same time - so they've molded the game into something they can actually approach as adults. SWTOR didn't get that initially, and to some degree still doesn't. So it's not approachable.
Making a game accessible doesn't necessarily mean making it easy. Hard mode Ragnaros was a fucking hard boss (in Firelands not molten core), and I never did manage to kill him with my group. But I didn't have to spend 15 minutes running between 3 or 4 loading screens to get to him. And Rag is a long run back by modern WoW standards.
Re:Are people still playing this? (Score:4, Informative)
The one thing WoW did best was make themselves mod-friendly.
Most of the little 'convenience' stuff wasn't originally a part of wow. The Calender, a much-improved Auction House interface, the ability to switch between specific gear-sets, the more intuitive quest interface, even the clock under the map,.** Originally provided by 3rd party tools because Blizzard didn't have them. The key is that Blizzard embraced that functionality. When you install the game, there is a folder called "AddOns" by default. And not only do they allow such additions, butthey take the good ones and run with it, including them as full-fledged features. Now, instead of having to download all those, and hoping that my clock addon is compatible with my yours, or manually adding each calendar item, we all get the standard clock, and can easily pass appointments between each other.
** There are a TON more, but I've been clean and WoW-free for just over a year now (after being a serious raider for many years prior) so you'll forgive if I don't recall every add-on that graduated into Feature status, or what was added when.