Having to take a title designed as a subscription game from the start and morph it into a free-to-play game cannot be easy. Nothing can be shoehorned or half-assed. You don’t want to alienate customers – new, old or current – yet you can’t have the game be too open or two velvet roped. BioWare is juggling this exact problem with Star Wars: The Old Republic right now. Lead Designer Damion Schubert has just announced some changes ahead of the November (re)launch.

• Free players receive two quickbars, up from one.
• Free players can participate in five PvP Warzones a week, up from three.
• All players will see reduced Cartel Coin item locks (cash shop cooldown timers). Free players have been reduced to three days while subscribers are down to two days.

The changes have been made after analysis of the action on the test server.

Schubert spends a substantial amount of the post explaining the delicate balancing act of the subscriber vs. free-to-play experience. In fact, he believes that the PvP Warzone queue should increase despite the restriction, since many titles have seen subscriber numbers increase after converting business models. The past doesn’t guarantee future results, so Schubert was quick to state that if Warzone queues do go the other way, the restriction will be modified to correct it.

Still have questions? Check out the extensive “expansion to F2P” FAQ.

So, it’s actually 9:30am when I am writing this and all the little names are in crumpled up bits of paper in a box to my right. I know, I promised you guys it would be done in a bowler hat not a box, but, you see, I am moving later this week and I accidentally packed my bowler hat so the box will have to do. If anybody is seriously upset you can call our complaint hotline at: 1(325)234-9876. Operators are standing by. . . no they aren’t. Don’t actually call that number because I literally just made it up off the top of my head right now. To any person that owns that number and is accidentally called by disgruntled contestants complainng about some hat and/or box, I’m sorry. . . you can go ahead and call this number so as to reach our comments/complaints operator: 1(678)432-7654. Sorry, I lied again. . . we don’t have a number. :( You see the horrible conditions Mike makes us work in, we don’t even get telephones!

Wow, ok so now you know what its like to begin writing a blog that you can’t actually publish for a half hour. I would normally go ahead and pull the contestants names right now, but there might maybe possibly just be one more entry in these last 15 minutes.

Now, without further ado (it is 10am now :) ), the contest winners are:

• Joshua Tompkins
• Dan

Congratulations to those winners! WhooOOooOOO! I seriously hope both of youo enjoy Mythos. Feel free to give me a hoot while in game if you are lonely, my Mythos characters are Wrenches, and Bloodface. I could be on either one at some point today.

Also, as a side note, we had no people disqualified during this contest, which is a good good thing! I was a bit worried when I went to sleep with 3 contestants and then woke up to find over a dozen. Which leads me to another side note, we got 17 contestants! Not a bad start for a first ever contest that we in no way advertised at all. I think we all deserve a hearty pat on the back. I can’t wait until we begin offering real prizes like actual games. . . maybe an Age of Conan contest when it gets released? We’ll see. . . enjoy Mythos guys.

P.S. Both invites were sent out to the email addresses provided. If, for some reason, you don’t get yours then their must have been a problem with your email address. We don’t have anymore to hand out at this time so it’s not like we can just send you another one.