Details on SWTOR’s Free to Play

With little to announce at E3 the bomb announced was for SWTOR.  Ignored was largely the content updates and the new raids that were coming out.

The big news was SWTOR is going free to play.

Well kind of.

I rather they refer to this as an eternal trial, because that’s what it is.  Without buying the game you will be able to get to Level 15.  You will however be able to play that Level 15 character forever.

Included in this will be limitations on chat and social communications.

A lot of people saw this as a sign that SWTOR was doing poorly.  It is simply not the case.  The game sits at around 1,000,000 subs.  SWTOR attracted a very large casual gamer base and it did all of this without having to expand into China.

SWTOR is just doing all of the same business practices that all the other subscription based MMOs are doing.

That is not to say that they wouldn’t eventually go completely free to play.  Going free to play only makes sense at a corporate level once your game becomes unprofitable with subscriptions.

For now it appears that E3 was a lot of fluff for SWTOR.

Bioware Entitlement Again: SWTOR

In light of a pretty disastrous patch day in which servers were down for 48 hours, Bioware issued an apology to gamers expressing nothing but regret.  The patch was absolutely disastrous.  Upon bringing the patch online they were forced to take down servers to fix all of the problem they caused.

As a present to gamers they gave two different rewards.  The first was 30 days free for anyone with a character Level 6 Legacy or higher.  The second was a free week for anyone else, including people who are not currently subbed.

Gamers raged.  People could not understand why there were different rewards for different people.  To them anyone who was subscribed should get the exact same rewards.  Instead people who are subbed and do not have a Level 6 legacy get the same rewards as someone who isn’t even playing the game.

For the record a Level 6 legacy is a lot of work.  I got a Rank 60 PvP character with full raiding gear and another two Level 50s and I’m only Level 7.  This took me four months of what would be considered unusually high play.

A level six is mostly people who played near the start and stayed subscribed.  Bioware basically sent this out as a thank you for the constant support.

This controversy is similar to The Scroll of Resurrection controversy in World of Warcraft.

If a player resurrected a former player the former player would get a free Level 80, a free race change, a free server change, a free month of play, and a free spectral mount.  The total value of these services and digital products was somewhere around $160 given away for free.

This enraged the WoW community because they really could not understand why Blizzard would reward people who don’t like their game (who quit) over those who have supported their game.

This is called entitlement.  It is the idea that you deserve something because you are entitled to it.  Entitlement is when you believe you have a right to something.  For example as a worker of Canada I am entitled to worker’s compensation if I get injured.  If I am out of work I am entitled to employment insurance.

Entitlement in gaming is sort of a false entitlement.  It is a gamer believing they have a right to be treated in such a way.  It happened with Mass Effect 3 when gamers believed they had a right to an ending they agreed with.  The irony of course is that people have been inventing fan fictions for years to get that ending and plot line of their favorite characters for years now.

Unfortunately Mass Effect fans didn’t take this energy to create endings they wanted because in truth, they can’t.  The fans of the game are generally incapable of making great stories and rage at how utterly average the ending was.

The same thing is really happening here.  On the one side you have a bonus reward of three extra weeks given to anyone who has been playing the game a lot.  League of Legends uses a similar system in which people who play a lot get more stuff for free than those who play less.

You don’t hear people playing League of Legends complaining about how they are spending more money than those that just play a lot.  Kind of odd for it to emerge here.

Gamers are the spoiled and privileged class of this world.  They were born of middle class parents and given every single thing they ever wanted and when push came to shove their parents spoiled them.

A gamer will have no concern about asking a corporation to spend millions of dollars to do something just for them.  Not for a community.  Not for an artistic design.  Just for them.

SWTOR Sits at 1.7M Subscribers

A lot of people have been wondering exactly how well SWTOR has been doing.  The game world feels pretty dead with less and less people showing up at Fleet and less and less raiding guilds sticking around.

It has been widely known that the largest portion of the game have multiple characters and are somewhere between Level 10-49… meaning not in Fleet at all.

And t he number is… nearly 1.7M.  This is a three month drop of 300,000 subscribers… which isn’t bad.

Let me explain.

Rift has had something between 600,000-750,000 subscribers and is now sub 200,000 subscribers total.  Many people consider Rift a huge commercial success despite this.

Age of Conan sold 1,000,000 units and after the first free month it dropped to under 90,000 subs.

Warhammer Online sold 750,000 units and after the first free month dropped to under 100,000 subs.

DC Universe Online sold 450,000 sales and after two months it dropped to under 10,000 subs.

So when a publisher comes out and states that they have only lost 300,000 subs… that’s a good thing.  It means the game has stability, especially in light of the first content patch coming out ‘very soon.’

It Wouldn’t be Star Wars Without Treachery

Throughout the SWTOR beta people were using speed hacks to win games very easily.  Basically in a game of Huttball a person could grab the ball within the first two seconds and score very very quickly.  The target can then almost instantly score, only for the exact same person to pick up the ball seconds later.  Bioware was happy this was exploited in their beta as it allowed them to patch it.

Well, it’s back… and getting more popular.  Roughly two weeks ago people were reporting that they witnessed speed hacking.  At first people thought it might be sprint or teleport but it was just too odd.  People were teleporting behind doors in Voidstar that were not blasted open to get easy wins.  People were traveling the Huttball way too fast.  There are even people with statistically impossibly high health.  There are even Smugglers/Spies who never run out of energy.

I saw this all as huffbluff until I myself saw this happen in a Huttball.  I reported it immediately at said player had their account banned.

Okay, so when looking for a speed hacker what are you looking for?

Well first off you should see some sort of graphical error.  The target should look like they are lagging out or randomly glitching.  After the glitching ends you will notice that they have teleported randomly to another location.

Using this the ball handler was able to travel from the ball to the goal line without taking a single hit of damage.

If you see this report it immediately, less of these people in the game the better.

In the mean time watch my new PvP video:

SWTOR Sells 2,000,000 Copies

A lot of times people wonder how games are doing.  Usually they cannot get that information because they’re dealing with privately owned studios.

But Electronic Arts is a public company and guess what, they have to give out stock information.

EA  announced that they have sold 2M copies of their Star Wars: The Old Republic and have 1.7M active subscribers (meaning they paid for another month).  This means the game currently has an 85% retention rate.

First off this is the highest first month sales of any MMO to date.  This makes SWTOR already the most successful MMO ever released.  As well they have retained the most people (% wise and actual).

With this only being the first month it is suspect that SWTOR will in fact hit their March 3M subscribers total.

Also EA stock went up by $5…. yep no one cared.

Source: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/electronic-arts-reports-q3-fy12-financial-results-2012-02-01