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.

It’s been a busy week! The Secret World continues to keep me entertained, as can no doubt be seen in all the blurbs I put up about it. Next week I’ll be putting up the second and final section of my review, as well as starting a weekly TSW-related article. I’ve flopped around on it so much, but I think I’ve finally decided what I’ll be focusing on! Huzzah! So stay tuned for that, if you like reading what I have to say or The Secret World. Or both. I’m good if you like both of these things. I may even do two, if there’s enough interest.

This week brought more SMITE divine lore, tons of interesting things for The Secret World, musings on stocks and CEOs, as well as a contest, a giveaway, and some interesting opinions! Click the button below to check it all out!
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With BioWare and Electronic Arts reassuring players and analysts that Star Wars: The Old Republic is doing fine – both in terms of content and growth – the company has shown quite the opposite. Actions like free time, server mergers and layoffs generally point to disgruntled players and underpopulated servers. Clearly, the companies have taken actions to stem the bleeding, but few expected the idea of free-to-play to come out of Lead Designer Emmanuel Lusinchi’s mouth.

In a since-pulled interview with GamesTM, Lisinchi stated that “We are looking at free-to-play, but I can’t tell you in much detail. We have to be flexible and adapt to what is going on.”

Talk about a bombshell.

Lisinchi goes on to say that the investigation isn’t specifically related to the drop in subscription numbers. The main issue is competition coming from the F2P sector. Perhaps the first outright admission by a AAA game, Lisinchi states that “there are definitely good games out there and good games coming out.”

I’ll say. Firefall, the subscriptionless Guild Wars 2, SMITE, End of Nations and many more point to the F2P business model finalizing its stance as a disruptive innovation. Ushering in MMOGs as piecemeal consumption items instead of a retail product with Software as a Service (SaaS) attached.

Why the article was pulled? That’s a completely different story. Without a specific retraction coming from GamesTM, the safe bet is that the news wasn’t supposed to get out in this fashion.

In an interview with PC Gamer, Lead Game Designer for Star Wars: The Old Republic Daniel Erickson, replied to a question about the group finder and whether or not it will support cross-server searching at launch. Daniel replied stating, “They will not be cross-server as we are coming up on a huge move to servers with massively higher population caps than we have today.”

Now this is not the first MMO game to merge all their servers into a few. DC Universe Online did this last year when they merged all their servers into four massive ones as the player population fell. So it seems BioWare has the same idea. This is all good and fine, but are mega-servers really anything to be excited about?

Mega-servers do sound like they’d be awesome, ten of thousands of more players all on the same server, I mean, that sounds awesome to me, right? However looking at it logistically, there’ really won’t be any noticeable impact to players.  Illum is not all of a sudden going to be able to support thousands of PvP players at the same time. Hell when I was playing, my frames per second dropped to single digits once there were more than 50 players there.

Dungeons in SWTOR are also mainly instanced, so again this has no greater benefit than a cross-server group finder would have. The only conceivable difference I can think of would be that the auction house would have more activity in it and people wouldn’t have to worry about server-transfers to join friends.

On top of that SWTOR is basically an co-op MMORPG at best, so more players really doesn’t make a difference. I soloed the entire game, grouping maybe three times total. For a game like SWTOR that is very single-player oriented, it just doesn’t seem like Mega-Servers would matter at all. But then again, it’ll save BioWare some time from constantly having to merge servers.