SWTOR's Free-to-play Restrictions Revealed

[raychuu]

As some of you might know already, Bioware's MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic will stop using its pay-to-play scheme in detriment of one of the increasingly popular free-to-play ones. Recently, the official website has been updated with a table which compares the differences between those who opt for a subscription and those who play free of charge.

The full list can be found here.

Does this change make you want to try out this MMORPG? What do you think of the free-to-play scheme?

Personally, I must say I'm not a fan. More often than not, free-to-play games - with some notable exceptions which rely mostly on aesthetically oriented micro-transitions, payments that serve to speed up progress, without handicapping free players too much, or a subscription to get rid of ads - feel like a glorified trial version, with too many imposed limitations that demand a lot of grinding to allow evolution and detract from the fun of the game. You can easily remove these with a subscription, but the thing is the game will also likely be flooded by trolls, haters and all that sort of annoyances, thus being forever affected by the situation.

 

[BugMite]

So basically, access to everything but the story content is limited (as of so far, anyway). Well, that may be the most important thing for me, anyway. I may want to check this out sooner than later now.

 

[Tophat Dragoneye]

I'm not a fan of Star Wars, but decided to take a peek at the list of limitations and with only the story not being limited, I don't think people are willing to pay for subscription. I've only heard good things about the storylines, but that the rest of the content is more or less average. And IF you wanted to try those content anyway, those limitations seems rather cheap to me in my opinion. Now, to your questions:

Does this change make you want to try out this MMORPG?
- As impressive the storylines are and the fact SWTOR goes free to play, I already play one MMO at the moment, which takes up some of my time. Maybe I'll try for one day or two but not more.

What do you think of the free-to-play scheme?
- The most obvious and plausible reason this MMO goes free-to-play is due to the loss of players for multiple reasons. Yet, I think they're doing it the wrong way. As I mentioned, since people only care about the story and not the rest of the content, why bother paying for that? Whether or not the MMO will survive because of that, only time will tell.