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[Vlodril]

This has to be the worst planned f2p conversion i have ever heard. I was planning to go back to finish my smuggler and jedi knight class stories but fuck that. I do not know what are they thinking in Bioware.

I agree with the guy that said that is punishing players. The goal of F2P should be to tempt the players to the store or subscription (pirates of the burning sea did it well) not to punish them until they get it, because guess what? they are not going to get a sub they are going to leave your game and never come back.

Really unbelievable stuff.

 

[Stormtrooper30]

So if I were to pick this up solely for the single player, how much of a hassle would it be being F2P? Not into MMO's at all, but I love KOTOR.

 

[Forkball]

So basically this:

The most successful F2P games are those that make you WANT to pay rather than make you feel obligated to pay.

 

[KKRT00]

This has to be the worst planned f2p conversion i have ever heard. I was planning to go back to finish my smuggler and jedi knight class stories but fuck that. I do not know what are they thinking in Bioware.

I agree with the guy that said that is punishing players. The goal of F2P should be to tempt the players to the store or subscription (pirates of the burning sea did it well) not to punish them until they get it, because guess what? they are not going to get a sub they are going to leave your game and never come back.

Really unbelievable stuff.

How would You temp people to subscribe and dont lose already subscribed player base [300k+!]?
Honest question, because i dont know how would they do it other way than what they've done, without making tons of new content just for actual subscribers and unlocking whole current game for F2P.


I think that their F2P model is very good, especially for someone who havent been subscriber earlier, because You can buy TOR today for 10$ and get 30 day subscription, cartel coins and prefer status all in once.

 

[StudioTan]

I think the quickbar thing is blown a bit out of proportion. While I do use more than 2 on my Gunslinger and Guardian I don't NEED more than 2. The extra bars hold buffs, stances and other stuff that you use out of combat. I have a couple of seldom used skills on there as well but really I wouldn't miss them if they were gone.

One thing people forget is that there is more than 1 page to each quickbar. So just put all that stuff on page 2 and use the keyboard binds to switch pages quickly.

So, this sounds like he's answering this question, but he doesn't come right out and say races specifically. This still remains my stumbling block for playing this again, and while I have been reassured time and time by other players, I have yet to have seen an official response stating simply and frankly "yes, Preferred status players can play their existing characters regardless of race."

Their F2P model is a recipe for continued disaster, but I've ragged on it so much at this point that I'll refrain and not shit up this thread.

You CAN play your existing characters regardless of race. I can confirm this because they dropped everyone to free to play, then preferred, status on the PTS and that's how it worked. I don't believe you can make new characters with those races however. Legacy unlocked races I'm also not 100% certain of but I did buy an unlock on the store with the play coins they gave us and since those are listed in the store as "Legacy Unlocks" I would imagine if you unlocked them through legacy while subbed you'd be able to make a character with them.

 

[Fine Ham Abounds]

You CAN play your existing characters regardless of race. I can confirm this because they dropped everyone to free to play, then preferred, status on the PTS and that's how it worked. I don't believe you can make new characters with those races however. Legacy unlocked races I'm also not 100% certain of but I did buy an unlock on the store with the play coins they gave us and since those are listed in the store as "Legacy Unlocks" I would imagine if you unlocked them through legacy while subbed you'd be able to make a character with them.

Thanks, that's good enough for me then.

 

[Lone_Prodigy]

Redeemed my CE code last night. Now to patch and start creating characters.

 

[Slappers Only]

So the game's pretty much a cat in heat at this point, sticking its ass up in the air and wagging it around.

Fuck everything about free.

 

[StoppedInTracks]

So for someone who will likely NEVER subscribe is this game worth buying after 15 November? Is it kinda, sorta like KOTOR3 then? Don't really care about raids etc.

 

[Milly79]

So for someone who will likely NEVER subscribe is this game worth buying after 15 November? Is it kinda, sorta like KOTOR3 then? Don't really care about raids etc.

From what I hear, the Jedi Knight class is supposed to be the "KOTOR3" story.

I personally have not experienced that all the way through, so I cannot tell you if that's true or not. I would recommend trying out the Imperial Agent, Smuggler or Bounty Hunter classes if you want a good story. Remember, this is all IMO.

 

[fluffydelusions]

So for someone who will likely NEVER subscribe is this game worth buying after 15 November? Is it kinda, sorta like KOTOR3 then? Don't really care about raids etc.

I had fun with it for the first month at release. I hit max level with a sith inq. I hear bounty hunter is fun to play. I mean I guess looking at it optimistically you do get more playtime out of it than the majority of $60 games out there. I'm not sure what the state of it is now. I know at launch there was always a queue to get in. I'm guessing that is no longer the case. That said, if the servers are low pop it will likely suck terribly cause you will never be able to do the heroics and such.

 

[StudioTan]

I had fun with it for the first month at release. I hit max level with a sith inq. I hear bounty hunter is fun to play. I mean I guess looking at it optimistically you do get more playtime out of it than the majority of $60 games out there. I'm not sure what the state of it is now. I know at launch there was always a queue to get in. I'm guessing that is no longer the case. That said, if the servers are low pop it will likely suck terribly cause you will never be able to do the heroics and such.

There may be queues when it goes free, we'll see. They introduced their new mega-server tech a couple of months ago which means that can have a lot more people per server and did a second round of consolidations so the servers are pretty full and there are always lots of people to play with, even late nights/early morning.

For the cost of a boxed game you can probably get enough coins to unlock most of the perks, but you'd still be paying a little bit to do end game stuff if you wanted to. I worked out that if you just wanted to just PVP (for example) the weekly cost would mean that you'd be paying a little under $7 a month.

 

[Alur]

I know at launch there was always a queue to get in. I'm guessing that is no longer the case. That said, if the servers are low pop it will likely suck terribly cause you will never be able to do the heroics and such.

The servers have all been consolidated from 100+ to a mere 8, due to them allowing/developing servers that can hold more people at once as well as the dwindling population after 1.2. They are plenty full now (two and sometimes three instances of fleet, ~220-240 people makes one instance), and the planets I've leveled on typically have a good 50+ up to Hoth which is level 32+ on republic side.

Yeah and no queues. That may change for a bit when F2P goes live, I suppose.

 

[Osiris]

Decided to download the free trial to get me started before the F2P starts, starting to regret it though...

25Gb+ at 50KB/s to 150KB/s, are you fucking kidding me? I have a 60 meg connection, that kind of speed is positively insulting!

Someone tell me there's a mirror I can download from rather than waiting for this shitty launcher to download/install the game, please?

 

[HBroward]

So for someone who will likely NEVER subscribe is this game worth buying after 15 November? Is it kinda, sorta like KOTOR3 then? Don't really care about raids etc.

You won't have to buy it after the 15th, but if you get it now for $10, you gain all the abilities of a preferred player, along with some complimentary cartel coins. Anyone seriously considering playing this may want to pick up it before the 15th to gain those benefits. You can also buy the CE for $30 now, which is a really good deal considering all the awesome things it contains. One other thing to note is that you would get a free month of being a subscriber, and that you wouldn't convert to free to play until the next major patch, which would be 6-7 weeks after the 15th.

 

[Anoregon]

No extra character slots for preferred is dumb. There are other MMO's than went F2P that give a bonus 1-2 character slots when an account goes premium/preferred, and I think that's a pretty nice bonus and incentive.

I guess "incentive" is the main issue, though. EA doesn't seem concerned with actual incentives for getting non-sub players to become repeat micro-transaction customers nearly as much as they just want you to subscribe due to how restrictive the F2P model is. Which is utterly stupid, because you'd have to be blind or just ridiculously stubborn to not realize the direction the genre/industry is moving.

 

[StoppedInTracks]

You won't have to buy it after the 15th, but if you get it now for $10, you gain all the abilities of a preferred player, along with some complimentary cartel coins. Anyone seriously considering playing this may want to pick up it before the 15th to gain those benefits. You can also buy the CE for $30 now, which is a really good deal considering all the awesome things it contains.

Thanks for the tip. Bought

 

[TheContact]

I preordered the CE edition and played it for a couple weeks. I don't think F2P will make me come back.

 

[Osiris]

No-one has tips for this abysmal download speed?

I've tried the following so far, from various forums:

Changing hosts files to add the patch servers IP address, I have no firewall, all necessary ports forwarded, direct wired Ethernet connection and still getting a lousy sub-100KB/s download speed.

At the rate it's currently downloading, it'll go F2P before it's finished :/

 

[Schweinehund]

I'll probably reinstall and finish my bh story, and perhaps do an agent, sith inquisitor or guardian play through. When are they coming out with the mini expansion?

I don't really have an interest in raiding in mmo's unless the people I'm playing with are both competent at the game and fun to hang around with.

 

[Milly79]

No-one has tips for this abysmal download speed?

I've tried the following so far, from various forums:

Changing hosts files to add the patch servers IP address, I have no firewall, all necessary ports forwarded, direct wired Ethernet connection and still getting a lousy sub-100KB/s download speed.

At the rate it's currently downloading, it'll go F2P before it's finished :/

Their download speeds have always been notoriously slow.

 

[Osiris]

How on earth can they think that it taking nearly a week to download is in any way good business?

*baffled*

 

[Anoregon]

How on earth can they think that it taking nearly a week to download is in any way good business?

*baffled*

Probably because it's not a prevalent issue?

 

[Osiris]

Milly79 vs Anoregon vs My own experience so far, what to believe?

A google search seems to suggest my experience isn't uncommon either.

 

[fluffydelusions]

Should this get a new OT?

 

[Milly79]

Milly79 vs Anoregon vs My own experience so far, what to believe?

A google search seems to suggest my experience isn't uncommon either.

I've been playing since launch. I think I know what I'm talking about.

 

[Cystm]

I've never had slow download speeds after launch.

Verizon fios, west cost, 15/5

 

[Osiris]

Well, I started the D/L over 6 hours ago and only just finished the first 1.6Gb file (English Video 1) and starting now on 'Main Assets 1' but at this speed I may as well cancel/give up.

I can download stuff from anywhere else at nearly 7MB/s right now, and this download is the only one with such issues. It's not a connection/user issue, it's a Bioware issue.

So to answer my question, no mirrors anywhere then? - No faster sources other than the launcher? Origin etc.?

 

[Milly79]

So to answer my question, no mirrors anywhere then? - No faster sources other than the launcher? Origin etc.?

Do not believe so, sorry.

 

[Cystm]

Never had to look into it before, google is bringing up nothing that looks at all legit.

 

[Osiris]

There's plenty of legit reports of issues.

189,000 results for "swtor download speed"

These are all on the official SWTOR foums, and just for the last 4 weeks alone.

 

[Cystm]

No work around in there?

Thats too bad about the slow download speeds.

 

[Osiris]

The workarounds are fairly obvious, and of no help whatsoever. (i.e. Use Wired, instead of Wireless, turn off Firewall / AV etc.).

And it's not just me.

If it's this bad before F2P launches, how bad is it going to be next week?

 

[HBroward]

I've downloaded the client several times, and it was always around 5MB/s. Maybe all the hype of the F2P is causing the discrepancy with so many people trying to download it.

 

[Milly79]

The workarounds are fairly obvious, and of no help whatsoever. (i.e. Use Wired, instead of Wireless, turn off Firewall / AV etc.).

And it's not just me.

If it's this bad before F2P launches, how bad is it going to be next week?

Trust me, I know it's not you. The game has been pretty bad lately with lag spikes, dc and I'd assume the D/L ties into that as well. I know BW is trying to gather as much data as possible through traceroutes and pathpings, but who knows what will come of it.

 

[Krogan]

Which of the light saber classes has the best story (or at least decent)? I had played a Jedi Consular and it incredibly boring.

 

[StudioTan]

Trust me, I know it's not you. The game has been pretty bad lately with lag spikes, dc and I'd assume the D/L ties into that as well. I know BW is trying to gather as much data as possible through traceroutes and pathpings, but who knows what will come of it.

To be fair it also doesn't mean it's everyone. I've never really noticed slow speeds for patches.

Which of the light saber classes has the best story (or at least decent)? I had played a Jedi Consular and it incredibly boring.

Consular is one of the worst. Jedi Knight is much better.

 

[Goldenroad]

Crazy. Free to play and I still have no desire at all to try this game out. KOTOR was probably my favorite "last gen" game...no, it was definitely my favorite, but there is just no part of me that wants to play an MMO, even one based on one of my favorite games.

 

[Draxal]

Which of the light saber classes has the best story (or at least decent)? I had played a Jedi Consular and it incredibly boring.

I think the consensus is.

Warrior > Knight >>>>>> Inquisitor > Consular.

Warrior's much more personal, while Knight's more galactic super hero, so that's also a personal preference.

 

[Milly79]

To be fair it also doesn't mean it's everyone. I've never really noticed slow speeds for patches.



Consular is one of the worst. Jedi Knight is much better.

Never said it did, but thanks. Judging by the forums it's quite a bit.

 

[Schweinehund]

Which of the light saber classes has the best story (or at least decent)? I had played a Jedi Consular and it incredibly boring.

I beat consular, it wasn't really that great for darkside (the only cool part of the story is the last segment when you get a very interesting companion).

I also beat sith warrior, which was pretty good, even for lightside. The story is definitely tailored toward darkside player.

My friend tells me the inquisitor story was terrible and didn't make much sense. Guardian story is basically the main swtor story in terms of major events that happen.

 

[vilmer_]

I really enjoyed the Jedi Knight story. There is one downfall, although it may have been changed since I beat the story ages ago, in that

Spoiler

the final boss was extremely difficult to solo, I had to get help from a friend on her Consular to beat him after numerous attempts on my own.

 

[Moaradin]

If you plan on playing this, do yourself a favor and play the Imperial Agent story. One of the most unique and interesting Star Wars stories I've played in a long time. Me and a buddy played co-op the whole game and had a blast. I'm probably gonna come back and try out the Jedi Knight story.

 

[Osiris]

Ok, so I've solved the slow download issue after a bit of messing about, and it was quite illuminating.

From a bit of googling I discovered that earlier in the year there were some slow patching issues for some people, and the advice given was to make an entry in the HOSTS file to associate a particular IP address with the hostname cdn-patch.swtor.com. The reason for this is that there was a problem with one of the IP addresses given out by the load-balancer that was used for swtor's content delivery system, hardcoding this IP address in the HOSTS file allowed users to bypass the load-balancer but was advised as a temporary fix with the entry to be removed after use so that the IP that had been given out wouldn't become overwhelmed.

I tried that as a fix but the slow downloads continued at the same snails pace as before.

So I researched different IP addresses that had historically been associated with the cdn-patch.swtor.com hostname and started going through them one by one as an entry in my HOSTS file to bypass the load-balancer and speedtest the results.

The IP address that was given out as the old slow patch fix was one of the slowest (50KB/s to 100KB/s), and was coincidently also the IP address that was always given to me by the load-balancer when I had no entries in the HOSTS file to bypass it.

A few other IP addresses were a little faster (300KB/s to 500KB/s), but then I came across an IP that was on a whole different subnet to all the others and I tried it out in my HOSTS file.

Using that one I hit 3MB/s immediately, and although it's speed has reduced a little it's bouncing between 1.6MB/s to 2.74MB/s quite consistently.

To check that it wasn't just a co-incidence I removed the entry and tried again, once again I was given the slow IP by the load-balancer and my sub 100KB/s speeds returned.

I re-enabled the fast IP in my HOSTS file, flushed my DNS cache (Had to do this ALOT) and restarted the launcher, immediately my fast speeds returned.

So, my conclusions:

Either EA have a broken load-balancer, or they may be purposefully prioritizing traffic from subscribers IP's to the faster content delivery systems and leaving a lower priority machine for non-subscribers.

When they post advice on their forums telling you to run ipconfig /flushdns and try again what they are actually telling you is "clear your DNS cache and hope that the load-balancer gives you a nicer connection to a better, less populated patch system" and makes absolute sense, but is unfortunately ultimately flawed, because whilst you can flush your local cache via this method, it ignores the fact that some ISP's themselves cache DNS requests, so you will get the same IP address over and over despite the fact that the load balanced system should give you a different IP.

 

[HBroward]

Very nice detective work. Hope it helps some people, that is a pretty big difference.

 

[Cystm]

Impressive. I hope you share these findings on the OF.

 

[Trigger]

So, my conclusions:

Either EA have a broken load-balancer, or they may be purposefully prioritizing traffic from subscribers IP's to the faster content delivery systems and leaving a lower priority machine for non-subscribers.

When they post advice on their forums telling you to run ipconfig /flushdns and try again what they are actually telling you is "clear your DNS cache and hope that the load-balancer gives you a nicer connection to a better, less populated patch system" and makes absolute sense, but is unfortunately ultimately flawed, because whilst you can flush your local cache via this method, it ignores the fact that some ISP's themselves cache DNS requests, so you will get the same IP address over and over despite the fact that the load balanced system should give you a different IP.

Wow.

 

[Osiris]

The funny thing is, that the HOSTS file fix they suggested back then will likely be causing issues itself now, and may explain why that IP is so slow, once people edit HOSTS and things work, they are rarely going to go back and remove the changes they made, making the load on that IP overwhelming, which is the type of issue using a load-balancer is supposed to solve in the first place, that poor single IP address is probably serving patches to half the damn playerbase now.

Suggesting people bypass it via a method that EA/Bioware have no control over rather than removing the problem IP from the lists of IP's given out by by the load-balancer (A fairly quick job, one that would have been entirely under the control of EA/Bioware) was a bit of a rookie net admin / customer support error and amuses me greatly.

They do seem to have spotted it though, I noticed that beginning sometime in Sept / October customer support started suggesting people remove the entry if it was there to speed up downloads, rather than add it

 

[Lone_Prodigy]

Trying to patch, and the launcher hangs when installing the assets. Looks like it's a persistent problem.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

Where's the cheapest place to buy this now if you want to pay money just you can Sprint?