By replicating the concept of "energy", if you don't know what that is watch this:
http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/energy-systems

They've cleverly dressed it up, but it's the same system underneath: you get to do X a certain number of times and then you must pay (or in Zynga's case, alternately you can suck some friends in to get a few extra bits of energy, but eventually you pay or remain extremely limited). That's the shitty way to do F2P, it's ironically precisely what EA CEO Riticello was talking about when he gave this talk about social gaming: http://allthingsd.com/20121019/electronic-arts-ceo-consumers-wont-pay-for-crap/
Why? If the F2P guy is paying more than your sub ever could net, why should the sub get better stuff? If the point is to support the MMO publisher, your support is inferior in that, albeit rare, case.
Now on this point I agree, subscriber should pretty much get it all. This is precisely why Turbine gives DDO points to active subs (VIPs), so they can get the goodies. In fact VIPs are normally the ones that have the goodies since they get "free" points and everyone else is saving points for the next adventure that's coming out.
The point is "that girl" is one in a sea of even more interesting girls, all without the slight "issues" this one seems to exhibit, i.e. I'd date her if there was nothing else but there is plenty else. That's MMO land for you right now and Bioware seems to be pretending it's not.
Wow, I hadn't even read your response when I posted mine, lol, guess we picked up on the strength of the metaphor in the same manner.
WAR is still going on a single server, afaik, but the game died not really because EA did anything wrong, but rather Mythic was run into the ground by a bunch of douches and the players' problems were completely ignored until they quit. There are tons of MMOs, you do not alienate your playerbase by ignoring consistent issues.

Energy? Not really? They're limiting the amount of "formal" group content you can do, which is really quite trivial until you hit level 50. I doubt most typical players will run 3 Flashpoints per week whilst leveling. I don't think I do, and I tend to play the game in spurts.

Of course, if you're a PvP nut I suppose it's different. However, consider the implications: there are several open-world PvP zones which will now be much more attractive. I actually think this might be good for a particular subset of players.

Also, I'm pretty sure these Cartel Coins won't be tradeable.

One thing that *does* seem overkill is limiting the user interface for free users. You only get two extra bars as a paying user, which isn't really enough after a certain point, and, assuming it must be paid for, a customizable UI isn't really that big a deal, at least not to me. I do worry that the cash shop button is a bit large... Hopefully I'll be able to shrink it or remove it entirely come Thursday.

Oh, so no limits for the 10-20 days it takes to level (so long as you don't mind not really doing any group quests)? What is there to do at level 50 besides these things?
Going F2P, almost by definition, is an exercise is appealing to as many people as possible, not a narrow niche of players that adore open world PVP.

I hate making these kinds of assertions - they generally feel unfounded and like nothing more than conspiracy theories - but here's what I'm pretty sure happened:

The truth is that the game was a massive flop, being released in a very unpolished state that drove a lot of players off. To my knowledge they just never managed to get off the ground and only released three or four content patches. The last content patch appears to have been particularly messy - from what I could gather they had to rollback the entire thing and then spent months fixing it, and this patch was apparently years in the making since most of the Mythic team was moved to other projects when it became clear a few months after launch that the game had failed utterly.

While I did have a lot of fun playing it myself (I've got the CE, which I bought mostly because it looked really nice) I sort of lost interest because my friends did. Never got far - I've actually still got an unused game card for the game. It's a damn shame because the game had lots of character and great PvP - and I normally avoid PvP.

At this point I'm contemplating if it's not a mercy to pull the plug, but on the other hand, there's still a handful of people liking the game, and as I know from Tabula Rasa, losing an MMO is a heartbreaking experience. It doesn't matter how bad an MMO is - there will always be a small core of fans who adore it, and wishing death on a game is just plain rude. (Sorry about that small rant). Even MxO had its fans - I used to know a guy who loved the game.

You can still do normal group quests, unless I completely misread the entire thing. There are plenty of those, and some of them are really cool. I'll be honest, most content at 50 is instance-based, although there are a bunch of Daily quests you can do, as well as some quest chains aimed at that level.

Also, I was talking about the average guy who spends a couple of hours per night playing. They likely won't run into any problems. It's us more dedicated people who will.

Once you reach level 50, you've gotten a lot of content out of the game without paying a dime. Like, seriously, a lot. Don't you think it's worth investing in one of those Flashpoint/Warzone passes at that point? I was under the impression you could buy permanent access, or was that just Operations?

It's a fortunate side effect, nothing else. I'd say making the game more appealing to a certain subset of players increases the game's appeal as a whole, no? (Let's not get into the semantics of that statement).

It's entirely possible I misread, but I only recall reading about weekly passes. The problem with all of this being, one of the benefits of F2P folks for the people still subbing is actually having others with which to play, this what happened on a lot of WAR servers: no one with which to play, hell not even to PVP and level up. That's death for most servers. You can also only server merge two times or so before people get damned tired of that as well.

Anyway, I have no problem paying for F2P if I like it and am playing, but many do, and those people will also be necessary to keep the game vibrant. Without them it's not even worth giving it a shot and putting such onerous restrictions, even if they've played for "free" a ton, is going to hurt more than it helps.

I understand that F2P is a hard idea to swallow for a lot of gamers, I'm just saying that "normal" expectations do not apply and you need the "freeloaders" (who aren't really freeloading, honestly, but that's how many see it). Ideally you can't even tell who the F2P folks are, if your playerbase is split like this after going F2P, you failed: http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/05/11

As I said, it's a matter of outlook. If your priority is a long term relationship, then you might ignore the good about the woman you're worried about and exaggerate her faults, and will go on to date women which you feel are better prospects for marriage. As you said, what you're worried about is that you'll have fun and then the game will end. If what you were looking for was fun, and not the long term relationship, that would not have sounded too bad.

Hardcore MMO players (which I imagine you and orcishgamer are) want a long term relationship. Me, I just want to have fun with the game. If SWTOR offers a good story based experience which I'll enjoy, then I don't want to miss on it because it might die further on.

That's easy when it has only released an handful of games so far.

What if those other girls are just as attractive, the only difference being you can later change your mind and deepen that relationship if you wanted? Why go for the riskier one if you have other options that are just as good?

I'm not a hardcore MMO player, I don't even currently play any MMOs at all. But if I did want to play an MMO, I'd either return to WOW or LotRO, or maybe try out some GW. I have no reason whatsoever to play SWTOR. If I wanted to play a multiplayer RPG, SWTOR sounds lackluster compared to the more popular MMOs. Considering where the game is headed, it's probably getting more and more empty and less like an MMO. If I wanted a fun single-player experience, I have better choices than an MMO with grindy padding, internet monkeys and gameplay annoyances to prod me into paying something.

Ah, it appears I was mistaken, then. Yes, weekly passes seems a bit harsh.

Tried the new Daily area, started the HK-51 quest, took a gander at the new cash shop. Kinda tired. Here's some stuff I saw:

-As far as I can tell free players get the standard 4 action bars that was the norm until this patch. Subscribers get 2 extra action bars which were just added. This is good news.
-Subscribers can't remove the cash shop icon. It's not all that intrusive, but it is a bother.
-There are a number of (presumably) Custom armour sets in the cash shop. They come with mods and stuff, but the highest-level one is level 43, so calling it pay-to-win would be disingenuous.
-Free players need to buy most of the customization options - the toggle to hide helmets, the ability to colour coordinate your armour to your chest piece, display of titles, etc.
-You do indeed buy a weekly pass for the important things. I was wrong on this one, as I suspected.
-Cash shop items can be sold on the GTN (the Galactic Trading Network) after 36 hours, unless used before then.
-Subscribers pay less to strip mods off items, repair (I think) and get free respecs. Some other stuff as well.

Bed now. HK-51 tomorrow.

Had a wretched time trying to download this, involving some ridiculous computer slowdown and three major crashes. Download speed doesn't tick above a tenth of what it should be, so it took hours. Then I open it up, log into my Origin account and...

"There is currently no active subscription on this account. Activate your account here." which just leads to my account page.

No word at all on how to fix this. It's a good thing EA made sure to let everyone know that the link to buy premium currency was broken and provided a workaround, wouldn't want people to be unable to to throw money at them. Meanwhile, some guy from support just sends back a form letter telling me to reinstall even though there's half a dozen other forum users saying that didn't help, and I'm not maxing my bandwidth cap for something I'm only morbidly curious about in the first place.

So yeah, not enjoying my TOR experience so far.
You have to buy helmet toggling? I'm speechless.

Yeah, I'm uninstalling this. What a waste of time.

Think limiting customization for free players is standard in F2P? Eh, it's not a huge deal. Helmets look good for the most part.

Still, calling it "morbid curiosity" is doing the game a disservice. I think it's a great game, but it's your loss. :)

Limiting customization is fine. Helmet toggling is almost universally just a simple toggle in the options menu. For me, that's on par with charging extra to play the game in widescreen resolutions.

It's not that I think it looks bad, because it looks quite good. I'm just not engaged enough to put up with the severe problems I've had so far, as this has been the worst MMO install process I've ever experienced.