f13.net

Really cool mounts, cool pets, some gearsets (not impactful to endgame) that help players as they level up. The gear you will find will be interesting to everyone because it is not going to be restricted by class or by faction and all moddable. The gear you purchase in the CC shop is hopefully something you will be able to use for a class you got.

We also have a really cool thing called Cartel packs. Cartel packs you buy give you a random assortment of really cool items and a chance to get some of the cooler items that maybe in the game (not powerful, but very cool – they going to make you look AMAZING!)

I hate those gambling boxes. They're annoying in TF2, drove me to quit STO, and I imagine they'll be just as annoying here.

The new raid tier set, however, has been in the game files since April, art and all. It just continues the theme they have of each "tier" of gear sharing the same looks.

Tionese/Columi/Rakata look the same, so Black Hole/Campaign/Dread Guard will as well.

The server merges happened though, complete with round 2 of the terribly inconsistent naming conflict policy.

Yeah, my girlfriend lost her favorite name that she had since launch on her 50 to someone's much lower-leveled alt. I can't say I blame her for immediately canceling her sub.

On the plus side, I got my Legacy name back, only to find out that the person who had it on Shadowlands when I transferred was none other than one of my guildmates.

We didn't get moved again did we?

Legacy names are non-unique now, so maybe that person still has it!

The server merges happened though, complete with round 2 of the terribly inconsistent naming conflict policy.

Yeah, my girlfriend lost her favorite name that she had since launch on her 50 to someone's much lower-leveled alt. I can't say I blame her for immediately canceling her sub.

On the plus side, I got my Legacy name back, only to find out that the person who had it on Shadowlands when I transferred was none other than one of my guildmates.

Christ, the name thing is a mess.

You think F2P will bring that many players in? 

You think F2P will bring that many players in?  To me it looks more like a way for them to fleece whatever playerbase they still have (they're expecting subscribers to pay for the stuff on sale in addition to the subscription).  And, let's see, the F2P will probably be released at Christmas, and by then most pandas will be just about levelled up enough for raiding, no?

Yeah it isn't a box sale, it is true F2P.

I believe they've said we're getting some free store points or whatever, much like LOTRO did.

I cancelled a few days back before knowing about Naming Fiasco #2.

They should have let us pick a family name at character creation and insisted that IT be unique.

That would be fine too. I feel a little silly for being so pissed off over the loss of all my names but it's seriously put me off the game.  I probably won't play even for free until they either fix the problem or at least fire all the blockheads that made the original stupid decisions that led to it.

Can't equip purples without a license (so any 50s coming back in their raid gear are... uh... kinda hosed)

Meh.  If I don't have bank access after purchasing and subbing for six months, they can stuff a lightsaber where the sun don't shine.

More like you pay a dollar and it turns on for a week.  :oh_i_see:

More like you pay a dollar and it turns on for a week.  :oh_i_see:

Preferred Status - Making a purchase will unlock access to the following features:

You thought SWTOR was dead before?

Repeat it until it becomes lodged in your brain forever: 500k for SWTOR is not 500k for LOTRO is not 500k for Rift. That 500k number is them bleeding money and they have to goose numbers.

They already bled the money.  That's totally immaterial to what they do moving forward.  The game can be a total failure and not be "dead".  You need to get over your wish for this game to die and look at reality.

Well Tanno Vik at least would be quiet anyway, since his voice actor died.  :sad:

Aw no, really? I liked his voice.  :heartbreak:

I didn't roll with Vik simply because he's a tank, and I'm a BETTER tank, dammit. Even if I was a healer I'd go with Mr. Roboto, because... well, yeah.  :awesome_for_real:

An exclusive sample of the finest goods from the Cartel. Each Pack contains very rare bonus items found nowhere else! Two rare bonus items with a chance of a Super Rare!

Subscribers may now access speeders at level 15.

Crew skill that returns lockboxes do not return lockboxes. Instead, players are asked to subscribe to get full rewards.

They'll only be able to play 3 WZs a week though, so it's okay.

We've been observing PTS closely over the last few days. In that time, we have generally been very pleased with how well the build has been performing, as well as overall reaction to the build both on the boards and in-game. That being said, based on community and internal feedback here and further deliberation, we will in short order make the following changes to the Free to Play restrictions:
   

• Free-to-Play players will now get a second quickslot bar.
• Free-to-Play players will now be able to do 5 Warzones per week instead of 3.
• The Cartel Coin item lock (i.e. temporary bind) will be reduced to 3 days for Free-to-Play players, and 2 days for subscribers.

We've found some crucial bugs that needed stomping, which is good. These changes will make their way to you probably early next week.

There are a couple of key concepts that should be kept in mind as you review free to play changes. The first is that, to be honest, all of you are looking at a gameplay mode that you will likely never see. Subscribers who choose to cancel their account will typically revert to something that we refer to as preferred status. My fellow designer Nathan Emmott will in short order have a post up describing the ins and outs of preferred status. Originally, the second quickslot bar was part of preferred status, but this morning based on feedback here and what they were seeing in the community we decided to give it to everyone.

The second is Warzones. Perhaps the most interesting point regarding the Warzones limitation is that some players have concerns that putting limitations on Warzone runs might make Warzone queues less likely to fire. While it is possible that this may happen, we don't think it will -- our subscriber base likely will not shrink much, and for some of our competitors, converting to Free-to-Play has resulted in a subscriber increase! Which means that Warzone queues should likely see improvement from what you experience in game, and at minimum be relatively unchanged in experience.

That being said, one of our golden rules is that the Free-to-Play experience should not cheapen the experience for paying subscribers. If it turns out that the Free-to-Play conversion results in a degraded Warzone experience once we go live for subscribers, you can rest assured that we will quickly make adjustments to the system to ensure that subscribers have an optimal experience.

Also, and take this with a grain of salt, but apparently some datamining of 1.5 on the PTR's been done, and some stuff about Chapter 4 of the storyline's been uncovered. Heavy focus on the Hutt Cartel (oh boy...) with only two overarching storylines, one for each faction (maybe with minor variations based on your class), instead of eight individual class storylines.

Where can I see the data mining stuff?

The game is actually playable with 2 bars instead of 1, at least. You'll have to use stuff like buffs and fast travel off of the abilities menu instead of a quickbar, but I can fit just about anything I really need to hit on my 50s on 2 bars.

All this concern over bars makes me appreciate GW2's single bar even more.

No, not yet.

Patch 1.4 is probably going live within 2 weeks.

F2P is scheduled for 1-2 months from now.

It says it right at the top of the link you posted:


Most F2P do this now.  They come up with a bunch of draconian restrictions to force a single purchase.  It's a good way to get rid of people who won't actually pay anything.

More like you pay a dollar and it turns on for a week.  :oh_i_see:

And quite frankly they could use a place to put inventory-usable items other than in the inventory.

So do you use micro transactions to buy more bars and inventory or is it a black/white type of decision where you get nothing unless you do a monthly subscription?

They're basically setting up everyone even remotely interested in this game as "preferred."  All the accounts that ever were created, even if they played only the "free" (first) month.  Also, as a true new player, as soon as you provide a CC (to buy cartel coins once), you're preferred.

To me it looks like they're just afraid of RMT'ers and bots using F2P to flood the game.  It's the only thing that explains the decision to cripple the UI.

Subscribers will still have 12 character slots available on a single server.  F2P players will have 2 (as will Preferred).  At Launch, we are not enforcing the penalty on subscribers who convert to Free-to-Play, but we will in a subsequent patch.

Ouch. I'm pretty much spoiled by GW2. The f2p+sub model just seems like a sub model.

Tatile: It's been mentioned that Darth Nihilus' mask dropped from one of the gambling boxes. Is everything in the boxes available outside of them or are some things exclusive? If so, which?

Blaine: A large portion of the items in the Cartel Packs are exclusive to the packs. The great news for anyone who does not want to purchase Cartel Packs is all items in the store can be traded (and thus gifted to friends!) and sold on the Galactic Trade Network. This means that you can get what you want via the GTN if you are patient and have the in-game credits to spend. Also important to note is this is just the start of the offerings you will see for sale in the Cartel Market. As we gather information and feedback on what players want to see, we will certainly make adjustments.

Don't really care about the gambling boxes. Gives me something to dump the free sub coins into, I guess.

e: also, it looks like it's not "you can run 3 flashpoints a week", it's "you can roll on 3 drops per week" (inc "let's grief the f2p player" stories, in which people deliberately roll on items that are an upgrade for the f2p player so he uses up one of his rolls without winning anything!). I'm not sure if normal (or even hard-) mode FP gear is worth rolling on once you have a full set of commendation gear or even the baseline "scrub pvp" blue gear they gave to all 50s... have they boosted them?

Why would gold sellers farm FPs? I bet 4 goldsellers can make more credits farming / gathering stuff (or even doing daily quests, yech) than 'farming' FPs, and more importantly those activities are at least partially bottable. For individual goldsellers there's the non-trivial risk of getting votekicked in FPs, as well...

It's sub+cash shop now.  With shitty gambling boxes even.  The worst of both worlds.

(even when it's fairly important like the ability to display titles)

Is it all cosmetic stuff, or do the boxes give you p2w gear as well (like the uber-crystals with a level 10 req)?

They're not gambling in any legal sense, they're not even particularly close. Unless you want to call a pack of baseball cards gambling.

That's got to be a bug that will be fixed.

Well, preferreds keep their characters, just have to mark 2 as "active" and the rest will be greyed out.

There's a devblog (http://www.swtor.com/blog/developer-update-technical-changes-game-update-1.5) out that says next patch (1.5) will make changes to the graphics again.  Not shadows, this time it's grass and tree leaves transparency.  To quote, this change also "does not reduce framerate at all" just like the shadows didn't, I'm sure.

So the other bit of discussion to have is about the color crystals. I thought in this case that I would start the discussion with all of you, so that you could understand our logic and guide our thinking.

Currently, these crystals appear in cartel packs with a level 10 requirement, and on the store with a level 35 requirement, in order to access stats roughly equal to a standard level 50 color crystal. It's worth noting that color crystals are something that the itemization team stopped improving the itemization of shortly after launch, because people really hated losing their signature lightsaber color because it was no longer Best in Slot. We have, incidentally, seriously entertained removing all itemization from color crystals entirely (it makes many problems go away for us), but we didn't have the time to make such a large change on itemization before this patch went live.

The reason why we put these in with low level requirement is pretty simple: getting an item you can't use in the Cartel Packs really sucks. It's the same reason we pursued the tech that allowed us to make mounts adaptive - we expect a very large influx of new players when we launch free to play, and those guys opening cartel packs to get items they can't use for months (literally, for casual players!) is a negative experience, not a positive one.

So after discussing with the balance team, we decided to put these in with lower level requirements, with the following reasoning:
The balance math shows the bump to be pretty good at level 10 (not something the balance team was uncomfortable with, though), but pretty unremarkable by the time you hit, say, level 30 or so. Since pretty much open world PvP doesn't happen at those low levels, the impact on open world PvP is pretty much negligable.
The way the math works out, the benefit pretty much washed away by the bolster system in warzones, which means there is no significant advantage there.
The crystals are exactly as good as end-game color crystals, which means they have ZERO impact on endgame activities (level 50 ranked warzones, operations, heroic flashpoints, etc). We're still philosophically avoiding putting any stat advantage at this level that subscribers cannot earn through reasonable normal play.
The fact that these items are fully tradeable means that players who do think there's a balance advantage here can acquire them on the GTN for pure credits without spending a single cartel coin.

The net result of all of this is that slapping one of these color crystals in your saber at level 10 effectively makes levelling from levels 10 up somewhat easier, with the benefits tapering off quickly as the player levels up, and eventually zeroing out altogether. We felt, in general, that that was okay. The focus groups that we ran also seemed to think it was okay, as long as we avoided endgame power.

We are more than open to having a discussion about this and other options here (with the proviso that we have very limited time to make changes before this goes live!) if this continues to be perceived as an issue.

Welp, regular maintenance on Tuesday. Guess 1.5's not going to be this week.

Welp, regular maintenance on Tuesday. Guess 1.5's not going to be this week.

Maintenance has now been postponed, so who knows what is happening now.

nope. No 1.5 this week. This was going to be a normal maintenance for our systems.

Get ready to visit the Cartel Market loaded with coins to spend this November - and turn these golden coins into valuable items such as pets, vehicles, XP boosts, and more! Remember, you must return as a Subscriber to take advantage of this golden opportunity!

Not much of a 'reward' if I have to pay for it, eh?

A more fun one is how this f2p does anything useful for the games profitability, popularity moving forward or solves the core problem of setting content expectations it will never be able to fund.

At least it wasn't a post about FFH!  :grin:

Allow me to change my look and my race for cash and they will get more money out of me.  I'm sick of looking at my stupid blue twi'lek head.

Am I dumb or is this absurdly complicated?

You deserve to be punished for making a blue Twi'lek.   :why_so_serious:

I think it's pretty simple really! Subscribe -> get everything.  :-P

I think it's more simple:  I'm done with subscription games.

I think it's pretty simple really! Subscribe -> get everything.  :-P

All former subscribers who reactivate their subscription by the new date of December 20, 2012 at 11:59am CDT will be granted Complimentary Cartel Coins for their prior paid months up to November 15, 2012.

Trying to chop a game designed for subscription into f2p, without cannibalising subscriptions is why we see these sort of pointless semi-conversions that are just stealing focus and resources.

Yeah, things are just generally too high in price it seems like.

Nah, quickbars were always 250... though in practice I'd rather go with the account-level quickbar (at least 1, probably 2). 2 quickbars + artifact unlock are 3780 coins total, that's $27.49 - $42. Where are they getting the dollar prices from (and what's with the huge variance), btw?

This tool also helps you determine how many coins it will cost to buy all the items you are interested in and an estimate cost in USD. Low price point is calculated at 137 coins for 1$ exchange rate (what you get when you buy the biggest coin package) and high price point is 90 coins for 1$. Just click on the "Add to wishlist" link and browse away.

And if they just said that it would make sense to me. Obfuscating the cost of playing in a reasonable way just seems like terrible marketing.

So when they first did the merges, I lost Fordel and renamed myself Fordell (two L's). Now that they did the super mega mergers, I have somehow reclaimed Fordel, as I had that as a level 1 alt name on our original server...



 :?

Unfortunately, at this time server transfers, account to account transfers, name changes, race changes, and legacy changes are not services that we offer. While this may change in the future, currently we are unable to offer assistance with these requests.

Tell them to roll on Ebon Hawk, silly!

Actually cross server legacy WOULD be delightful, I have friends on Jedi Covenant. :(

I have one more for their F2P model.  Subs get to keep names, F2P can choose names but if a sub takes it then F2P loses it.  Brilliant I know

Locking med droids? Seriously?

EDIT: Is there a link to that info somewhere?

Today’s server maintenance has been extended with no ETA. We will update as soon as we have more info. Thank you for your patience.

I got 3 emails giving me 100 each, but from the actual page I'm supposed to be getting 1750. I'm not sure the emails were a good idea.

Okay I'm sorry, but this fucking slayed me.

I even YOLO'd for you, what more do you want!

The number of coins being given to subscribers seems too generous. Not sure who is going to be desperate to spend more than 600 thingys a month on hats.

The number of coins being given to subscribers seems too generous. Not sure who is going to be desperate to spend more than 600 thingys a month on hats.

The "free" element is ridiculous and likely counterproductive.

The cash shop seems well implemented.

The number of coins being given to subscribers seems too generous. Not sure who is going to be desperate to spend more than 600 thingys a month on hats.

I tried to get access to my account, but because I used a mobile authenticator I need some security key to log into my account.  I gave up after about five minutes trying to access it again; they told me I have to call them  to get it restored.  Fuck a phone call; we're in 2012 now.  Only people that should be using the phone are government employees, who will start using email about the same time we develop telepathy. 

EA did do a poor job with the mobile authenticators, though - the Blizzard ones are handled better.

Physical authenticators for life for me though.

Well, at least EA hasn't had their authenticators hacked.   :awesome_for_real:

11. For subscribers with more than 12 characters due to the server consolidation, will they have to purchase character slots to unlock them once the character slot restrictions are put in place?

That is the current plan, yes. We don’t think it’s fair to everyone else who wasn’t lucky enough to get this accidental side benefit from server merges. However, those additional characters aren’t lost, and players will easily be able to unlock those characters. The timeline for this is TBD.

I hope none of you have more than 12 characters on a server due to server merges:


So Bioware fucked up and launched with far more servers than they needed, so people who had presences on multiple servers get to pay for it.

I hope none of you have more than 12 characters on a server due to server merges:

And I still can't imagine how terrible the game would look to someone coming in new as f2p.

Most of the new player comments for the game have been good.  The worst parts of F2P seem to annoy them far less.  The two bar limit is seen as just another aspect of character building for instance.  I expect tunes will change at 50 of course.

Really depends on the class/spec, too. My healy-sage could easily, EASILY be played with two quickbars.

Hasn't been my experience at all (talking about level 50). I'll log into my healing sage to check, but I seem to remember I was using 3 full hotbars when I quit in Jan. I do agree that some classes have it far worse, I have no idea how my tanking vanguard's skills could be fit into 3 hotbars, never mind 2...

e: just checked, it looks like this:
first hotbar (mostly healing) - healing trance, force armor, deliverance, rejuvenate, mind snap, throw huttball, force potency, restoration, force stun, medpack, force slow, mount
second hotbar (mostly damage and cooldowns) - tk throw, disturbance (of all skills, this MAY be the only not strictly necessary one), mind crush, weaken mind, forcequake, noble sacrifice, force mend, salvation, revival, cloud mind, meditation, force of will
third hotbar (pvp / cc stuff) - force lift, force speed, force wave, project, [force valor, heroic moment, heroic legacy skill 1, heroic legacy skill 2, heroic legacy skill 3 - I guess you could use these from the spellbook], double strike (again, insanely situational, but it has helped me defend a node once when all my instant nukes were on cooldown), warzone healing item, warzone adrenal.

I can fit my dps smuggler and healing trooper on 2 bars no problem (cover bar helps though)...

Oh yeah, mission items, I forgot all about those. Have they added a WOW/RIFT-like way to use mission items directly from the mission tracker yet?

Can you still page through other hotbars on F2P?  I can't fathom being forced to open the power window constantly.

You can page to the second bar if you don't have it activated, but that's it.

If you already bought quickbars, they are going to do something to make it up to you. Why they decided to launch with such a terrible limitation in the game, only to reverse it a few weeks after it had already pissed everyone off, is a mystery. Now they also get to deal with the head-ache of refunding players that did buy it, if they even are willing to refund it. Bravo.

I struggle with how anyone is 'getting the shaft' given you can always not play and be in the same situation you were before the micro trans thing.

But I agree its a bad scheme for bringing in subs.

Re 1.6: when is the ETA, and are they giving out a new pvp recruit set too? I know that the blue set I got a long time ago was basically fodder status, but seem to have read somewhere that there was a "recruit gear mk2"

So, in 1.6 they're adding a quest at level 50 that basically gives you a free set of Tionese gear. In addition to the one that gives you the recruit PVP gear. Ugly suits all around!

After two weeks, they have decided to give preferred status players the 4 quickbars they were accustomed to (and that you realistically need to play the game).

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=562422

If you already bought quickbars, they are going to do something to make it up to you. Why they decided to launch with such a terrible limitation in the game, only to reverse it a few weeks after it had already pissed everyone off, is a mystery. Now they also get to deal with the head-ache of refunding players that did buy it, if they even are willing to refund it. Bravo.

This was really the last change I needed them to make before I was willing to play the game again. Selling features that were required (imo) to play the game normally was insanity and didn't make me comfortable about the future of their F2P model. Looking forward to picking up the story on my BH and Smuggler.

Yeah, and the last time this happened it took Bioware over a month to fix, and that was before  their big rounds of layoffs.

I was hoping to hit 50 today.  Trying to find a group at this level is just too annoying though.

I tried last weekend to get into this. Got to lvl 10 on my agent, and promptly got so frustrated with the restrictions I just gave up.

Hoping to hit 50 tonite too on my BH.  First 50 for me.  I enjoy soloing even though I have some downtime. 

Which of the restrictions are even meaningful at level 10?

20%.

Honestly, the 25% extra added to all vendor costs would drive me absolutely bugshit crazy after a while, and you cannot ever remove that unless you sub.

The Old Republic's biggest failing as a free-to-play game, though, is its attitude. It doesn't simply push you to subscribe. It levies so many petty restrictions that it ends up feeling like the goal wasn't to attract newcomers so much as spite any who dared show up. One of many examples: if you don't at least unlock Preferred status by spending a few quid (or returning to an old account), you're not allowed to Sprint until Level 15. Yes, that was the case at launch. It was changed shortly afterwards because the maps are huge, and getting around them at walking pace was and remains a deeply miserable experience.

Of course, BioWare needs to sell things to make this model work. That's not the problem, and most of what subscribers get is fine - early access to mounts, all-access passes to content and so on. The catch, as any game with the sweeties budget to enlist a six-year-old child could tell you, is that the free side of the game is just as important. The more people stick around, the more they're likely to buy - if not quick cosmetic stuff, then maybe extra maps or lockboxes or similar. All players matter, if not as VIPs to spoil right now, then as potential customers next month, or in three months, or next year.

The Old Republic has no time for this, preferring to treat non-subscribers as third-class citizens - even the ones willing to spend money on individual purchases. These unworthies earn no rested XP, with even regular XP being acquired at a lower rate. Quick Travel is now on a two-hour cooldown instead of half an hour. Even opening a shop window (not including the real money one) means getting a snippy "Vendor prices are increased for Free-to-Play Players".

This is not how subscribers are won. This is how 20GB of disk space is recovered.

The flip over to 50 and the suddenly effective group finder makes an enormous difference. From 30-49 its guild mate or gtfo.

if you get logged out from the server due to being idle, the game thinks you've gone F2P and takes your bars and stuff away (full restart of the game fixes it, but you still have to repopulate your bars I think).

The part about F2P I agree with fully, though the stuff before it grousing about the story (which suddenly sucks now that bashing on TOR's the thing to do) and comparisons to other recent MMOs' story offerings kind of had me rolling my eyes a bit.

My big issue with superweapons in SWTOR is that people keep talking about them but you never actually see them because lol MMO.

I really need to stop spamming the space bar when I quest. 

I always thought that it was stupid that they didn't give social points for doing Heroic FP's.  Did they ever change that?  My sniper has run like a bajillion Heroics and is still social 1.

[... doing Hard Mode FPs at 50 will rocket you up the Social tiers.

Pretty sure they changed that a long time ago.

A quick check indicates it was changed in 1.3 (same patch where they made social gear adaptive and added social point rewards for killing champion mobs.)

I'm also pretty sure I mentioned that changing in 1.3.

I'm not willing to give them money unless it's fun, and it's hard to check for fun with that restriction.

You have at least 4 bars as a former sub.  If you can't even be assed to figure out how to open them you're just being a whiny bitch.

Ah, cool. I thought it was part of 1.6. So rattran might just need to open up the interface editor and load the 'extended quickbars' template.

Yeah, didn't give me more than 2 hotbars last night. Maybe it was put in, but if so it's buggy.