I have been playing Star Wars: The Old Republic as a free-to-play player. This means I never even bought cartel coins for it. Here's some gripes I have that make me hesitant to pay for the game.
1. Inconsistency of movement. Sometimes, my jump is two feet, sometimes it's five feet, and that's from standing still, jumping, then pressing the arrow. It's not exactly a game where you need to jump, unless you're going after the datacrons, which is actually something you're supposed to do to get as powerful as possible in the game.
2. Broken side-quest. The Bonus Series will not complete if you accidentally complete one of the quests within the series out of order. So after you finish your storyline on the planet, you need to run around and get all the quests that pop up at that point, but you can't complete any of them until you do the bonus series, so that you don't accidentally get stuck at the part where you turn in the quest before the one you've already completed. Oh, but you can complete the objectives, you just can't turn it in until that point in the bonus series. The thing is, why can you even get the quest before you're supposed to? When looking for why the quest was broken, I found out that even for subscribers, they won't fix the quest since it's not the main storyline. Really?
3. As a never-paid-before player, I can't trade. This means that when I get an item I can't use, I can't just give it to my partner who's playing a different class and can probably use it.
4. Some of the quest rewards for content that has been there since before the expansions were changed so that you need the expansions to use them.
5. There's a limit to how many times you can collect the loot for flashpoints. I don't mind so much that the flashpoints always provide loot a free to play player can't use, they're not part of the main story, they're not even part of the side-quests. They're extra. But going through all that work, and you can only collect loot from the first five, and one of them is part of the actual story, and there's no warning in the game. I had to find this out while searching something else.
6. Party loot only affects how loot works inside the flashpoints. Outside the flashpoints, it's always round-robin. And the loot is specified for each player, but we can't trade, so very often I end up with stuff my partner member could use but I can't, and vice-versa.
7. Despite free-for-all where first player to click gets it all is an option, the default option is to area-loot, and there's also an option to auto-collect the loot on click. We went through a quarter of a flashpoint before I managed to get my partner to understand that I wasn't getting any loot at all. Except from elite enemies, who would drop assigned loot.
8. Enemies tend to fall inside walls when they die. Sometimes, they are completely inside the wall, and you can't get your loot.
9. It's inconsistent about whether you want to right-click on something or left-click on something to use it.
10. You have to actually learn gathering skills, and you only get one skill slot.
11. Respawn rates are inconsistent. I'll do a quest and have the enemies respawning within a minute or two, then my partner will do the same quest but the enemies take forever to respawn for him.
12. If you have the same class, joining the other player's storyline means you have to play it twice, even if you're both on the same segment of story and you both wanted the same exact options throughout.
13. There are points within the personal storyline quests where the other player can affect the outcome. We're both playing republic characters, his is a jedi counselor, mine is a jedi knight, and a few times the part where you choose your response allowed me to participate despite it being his personal quest.
14. There are many places where the game ignores your choice and acts like you chose something else.
15. There are a few times where the choices you can pick from, none of them are what you actually want, but you choose one anyway, and then your character says something along the lines of what you would've picked if it had been an option.
16. The targeting system sucks. I pick my first target for each fight, as usual, but the autopick for the second target never picks the one right in front of me, and a few times has picked a target that was behind me and at a distance. Jedi Knight doesn't have ranged attacks. Which I don't mind except for the fact that it keeps picking a target far away. Quite often, one that isn't even in the fight.
17. The game keeps using free-to-play and preferred interchangeably, despite the fact that there are differences (higher credit cap for preferred, more skills, more character slots). So tooltips which talk about what free-to-play can and can't do, sometimes it applies to preferred, sometimes it only applies to the truly free-to-play. Sorting out which is which can be a mess. And because the game does that, people in the forums do that. Occasionally, you'll see a person complaining about the posts from "free-to-play" players, but only subscribers and preferred players can post in the forum. Which also means there's no way but posting on a blog for a truly free-to-play player to explain to the company who owns the game what I'm posting here- why I'm having a hard time deciding if I want to actually support the game with a bit of discretionary funds.
18. More about looting. The beams that show me I have loot available are often not where I need to click to get my loot, and occasionally disappear completely if the other player in the party takes their loot first.
19. I am getting conflicting information on how many people can be in a party. One thing said four people, including companions, meaning only two players. Another thing said four players. Another thing said you need three other people in your party to create a guild. Another thing said you need four other people in your party to create a guild (and it even specified that was five people when including yourself). Still another thing said that some flashpoints are designed for groups of six people, but you can't join the flashpoint unless you're in the party, so...
20. Lots of guides say that free-to-play players have a credit cap of 350k. No. That's the preferred player credit cap. This goes back to the gripe from 17. The free-to-play cap is 200k.
(if you're completely lost, credit is what they call the in-game currency, similar to "gold-silver-copper" in fantasy games. Fairly sure the equivalent of one credit is one copper. Which makes the currency cap roughly the equivalent of 10 gold. But the free-to-play content only gets you to the level 50 cap, so 10 gold isn't too shabby.)
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All of the inconsistencies point to the game having been patched and patched and patched. I get that people want updates to happen quickly, but part of an update that changes code has to be deleting the old code so that it doesn't cause conflicts. People will gripe about the update speed, sure, but it won't make them not pay for the game. But inconsistent gameplay and badly programmed quest choices that get ignored will make people leave without paying. We're not even done with Chapter 1, and the only reason we've played it this long is because it was helping with his depression.
Still, they did a good job with not making things which were necessary for gameplay out of reach of free-to-play players. 200,000 is a bit low for the credit cap, but preferred players get 350,000. The minimum credit cap still lets you unlock all but two of the rooms in a stronghold, and if you're careful about your skills, you can do the crafting. And as I said, it did help us through his depression, so I do plan on purchasing something. Not sure yet if I'm going to do a month of subscription to get the rest of the content, or just some cartel coins so we can trade and access the cargo hold. Oh, and those two rooms I mentioned for the stronghold- the one that calls itself a garage is not out of range for a preferred player (someone who spent money at least once, often many times), but the balcony costs so much you either need to go subscribed, or buy enough cartel coins for it.
Good news for anyone who only wants to subscribe one month, but doesn't know how to save up the credits with the cap. First off, there's the escrow account, which holds all your credits above and beyond 200,000 until you subscribe. Secondly, since you can never see how much is in the account, we've gone over the 200,000 inside our legacy banks, so you can use that to keep track of how many credits you have, and can plan to subscribe when you have over what you need to buy everything you want. I'm aiming for 60 million, assuming the legacy bank will let me hold that much. And if you play the heroic missions, a few hours can easily get you 75K credits in the Chapter 1 areas. I can't wait to find out how much we can get in the rest of it.
Anyway, time to stop griping about a game that I've just spent five days playing every chance I get. It's as addictive as one of those phone games. Another big reason to go ahead and support it, despite it's many, many flaws.
