Yikes. TOR is going to make one fascinating post-morten in Game Developer Mag in a year or two....

^ Very true.

I hope this does happen. I am not an MMO player and really tried to play this game on the first free WE. The story and characters are great but the MMO and more specifically the monthly sub part of it really put me off.

If it goes F2P I know I'll be back to actually play it through.

Lots of people said Bioware should have made KOTOR 3. Yes, I am beating the dead horse. But this proves my point painfully. I wonder if someone did an analysis of how much profits they have made from the MMO, then did a theoretical projection how how many copies KOTOR 3 could have sold to how much profits it could have made them. What would be the comparison?

As for the Free-To-Play, I play TOR and I pay monthly. If they go Free-To-Play, does that mean I have to pay for new content? How does this work? What is the deal?

Add a random loot system similar to D3's with a real money auction house that crossed all servers in SWTOR? Could make things interesting.

Maybe this should be a warning sign to the guys attempting Skyrim mmo.

I honestly don't think they should do it. EA has a very VERY poor track record with free2play games. The two Battlefield games and the Need for Speed MMO just show they have no idea what they're doing. Pay to win and fragmenting the user base behind pay walls is the name of the game when EA does F2P and it just doesn't work.

EDIT: bad idea...

I think anyone trying to create an MMO is chasing a pipe dream. The last MMO I played was Jumpgate: The Reconstruction Initiative and that closed after over 10 years on the market.

No MMO has come close to that and so far the model most follow don't even look like it. I've been a primary console gamer for years now, MMOs are too much of a cash-sink for me. at least I get a different game experience every once and a while and can choose not to pay $60 bucks.

I'm only buying two games this year, ME3 and GR:FS. That's it, I'm good for the rest of the year.

Though Minecraft looks tempting...

I've only played early beta versions of SW:TOR, but I wonder HOW they would implement F2P. They already have a level-capped free trial, which is the obvious interpretation for "free to play" for subscription games (that's how WoW and Rift label it). How else would they do it? Content gating like LOTRO, selling you one zone of quests at a time?

I hope they make a Mac version first. F2P on an MMO sounds like the next step to death, which would mean no Mac Version. :(

It worked for D&D online, so i'd expect the SW franchies to bring in more than enough revinue to keep the game alive. But i agree with Simon Ludgate with the fact of i'm not sure how they would implement it.

Free to play won't change the fact that I won't play it. The fact it is online only killed any interest for me out of the gate.

MMO in a nutshell is a summary of what they did wrong. But also streamlining and lack of intelligent gameplay, poor social immersion, story .. well done story without much intellectual stimulation ... the list goes on. But where was the choreography, where was the imagination? And did it all matter when at the end of the day all you had to look forward to was racing to the top in an incredibly easy game?

they did everything wrong except to appeal to soccer moms and pre adolescents. This is a zinger but it's the truth, they could have called themselves Zyngaware. And it would have fit. All that time spent on story, and so little of it was actually interesting. I can't even count the amount of times they addressed slavery on both hands and it meant nothing to the immersion except another kill quest.

What a complete waste of time and money, Bioware why??
They threw away everything that meant anything in Kotor ~ personal authorship, intelligent reflection, diverse character creation through the entire game, decent art with enough abstraction, complexity of gameplay, alternative non combat situational gameplay,intelligently hand crafted encounters, puzzles, artistic closeness ... and the list goes on and none of this that made Kotor meaningful in Swtor.

all to appeal to a subsection of people that would be just as well suited to playing Indiana's adventures on Facebook. It's as if George Lucas waved his magic artistic travesty wand over the whole project.
the truth is probably a lot closer to reality however.
Frustrated new head developers, decieved doctor's influenced by WoW's creators and new talent that hasn't a clue drafted directly from another failed MMO experiment ~ Warhammer .

Why don't they try subscript by hour not month. Monthly subscription is a big commitment for player.

Aah, this is almost hilarious. Anyway, it's going to be interesting to see, if they succeed with this model.

The F2P would be simple - steal some from DDO, some from LOTR, and some from WoT.

- steal the mission packs for sale from DDO (some free to give you a taste of a story followed by the next 2-3 chapters for charge mixed with whole stories for sale).
- steal the costumes/mounts from LOTR (everyone loves pretty cloths, and a dune lizard mount)
- steal the ~$30-50 premium vehicle concept from WoT (who'd not pay to get an upsized corellian?)

I craked out on the premiums from WoT as it seems like the only way to credit up to a 2+ million credit vehicle with any kind of speed? I can say I am the 10-20% on the F2P side of things...

I really hope they don't go free to play. I can't see any way of this working out for the better of the game. In the end it would come down to "I have spent $50 on my character and you only spent $10 so my character is stronger" which completely ruins any point to playing.

They have to realize that many of the people that have left the game did so because they had too many servers from day one so if 100 people in your server were only planning to play for the free month, you're left with only another 500 or so people on your server all divided into empire/republic, leaving you with about 250 people left on your team, then divided again by another 10 planets or so, which leaves you with around 25 people in the same area and level range to assist with quests or group with (and quite often the people there didn't want to do the quest you were doing). The main reason I didn't play for a while is because there was nobody to play with and in the end I had to re-roll an alt on another server with more people.

I think everything will work out much better once they complete the character transfers and people can enjoy the game with other people again.