Two. Same for preferred players. To get more you have to sub. They said for people that subbed or had a previous trial that made more than that, they will lower the limit over time. You will be able to access all them at first, but if you delete a character and are still over the limit you won't be able to make a new one.

as long as the xp rate for freebies is throttled, and the boost normalizes them with subscribers, I have no problem. The point is, subscription should get you the biggest piece of pie available, freebies get a small piece, and can pay to match yours.

To echo F1ach, there is a difference between these types of restrictions and the types in games like Lineaage 2 (Aion should have completely converted by now but I haven't checked), DDO, LoTRO, and several others.

There's several things you can charge for which don't really "suck":
1) Access to cosmetic stuff
2) Access to "better" means of inventory management, bank space, transferring items to alts, etc., while workable versions already exist (e.g. the only way to get that 6th page of bank slots is to sub or buy it with points, but it's the 6th page, hardly a necessity).
3) Access to some adventures when plenty of other adventures exist (e.g. at least 30%, more if there isn't much content, of in game quests are free, and often more can be earned by grinding). The key is that there should always be something for F2P to do.
4) Buying mild performance boosts (e.g. extra health potions, or experience boosts for 25% extra XP).

F2P stuff that sucks:
1) Buying powerful equipment or boosts (e.g. 200% XP, elite equipment is required to compete but only available to people who pay).
2) Gates after just a little bit of content: Zynga does this a lot, where you get some arbitrary bullshit "energy" doled out daily which gets consumed quickly and you're stuck pestering your friends for more or you must buy it. Incidentally, yes, Bioware chose to emulate this method, Zynga-style. Also, roadblocks such as, "you're now level 10, here's your level 10 quests, 100% of them exist in premium content areas which you cannot grind for, you are stuck paying us or quitting, get out your wallet!"
3) Inventory or other systems that punish the shit out of players who are F2P, e.g. can't equip anything but inferior grade equipment, most skills are unavailable to use/train, 20% of normal inventory slots, etc. Occasionally auction house, private messaging, and mail restrictions are put in place to prevent spamming, these are not part of this.

Sorry, how is Bioware emulating Zynga?

I have been playing since I was in the beta and I am a current subscriber as well. I think the F2P version is terrible. Any F2P game that restricts inventory slots ought to strapped down onto a spiked bed and beaten repeatedly.

Trouble is many F2P games do this which I and I am sure many other people hate. Cost wise if you are going to play this game it is far better to subscribe for a month than paying say 50 dollars to get more inventory slots and remove all the restrictions.

EA/Bioware have definitely screwed themselves over by using this particular F2P business model.

Go play World of Tanks than. Everything is availible on free account. Getting top tier tanks is quite hard without premium, but far from being impossible. Hell, as of recently even premium gold ammo can be bought for ingame currency, you don't have to pay real cash for it.

Again, the point is that subscribers should get X, and freebies, NO MATTER how much they pay should be limited to X-1.

The death of City of Heroes is the death of altoholism. I don't know any other game that's so altoholic friendly.
I think they do this because it works. My main reason to buy Silver for $10 a few hours after I started playing the F2P version of EQ2 was the bag slots. Sure I also got more character slots, shared bank slots, etc., but the inventory slots were the main reason.

Well, in Lineage 2 you can have as many accounts as you like, each can have 8 characters. Also, you can dual box, eg, have a fighter on one account and a healer/buffer on another account, you can fire both accounts up at the same time or even more accounts if you prefer, I have only tried having 5 characters on together at the most, but if your PC can handle it, you can have more I'm sure.

Ryzom is another off the top of my head, where you can have multiple accounts with characters online at the same time, but it changed it's F2P status recently, it used to be F2P up to Lv 125, it could still be the same, but I'm not sure.

I have 3 accounts in EQ2, and a zillion (6? 8?) in CoH, but never saw the need to have several online at the same time.

Still, I don't know anything like CoH, where you can have hundreds of characters on the same account. By default subscribers get 12 characters on each server (16 servers), but you can have up to 48 characters per server (the limit was raised from 36 when it went F2P). The extra slots you could buy although some were given for free on various occasions.

I'd actually rather pay for an offline single-player version of the game rather than play their F2P.

Buying this game was one of the weakest, stupidest fanboy things I have ever done in my life. When I saw the email detailing my "free currency" it made me sick to my stomach.

Ugh.

Ahem

http://www.gog.com/en/forum/general/swtor_free_to_play_restrictions_detailed/post1

HAHA.