I am well aware that this might not ever reach anyone even close to EA, but I have to write it somewhere, and before I hijack someone else‘s blog to write about something he might want to write about himself some time in the future, I figured I use my own, you know, like a sensible person.
Dear EA,
I know you want to make money (well, anybody knows that) and I am quite sure you want to salvage as much as you can from the wreckage that was once labeled to be the next bright star in the MMO universe, also known as Star Wars: The Old Republic, but the way you are trying to do that right now is just plain wrong. Not open for improvements or worse than other ideas (actually these, too, but that would put it too mildly), but wrong. You know as well as I do, that the F2P option was the last resort for the game, but your F2P idea is not even related to what other people (and especially gamers) understand under F2P. When I read the limitations for the SW:TOR F2P accounts, all I saw was a big Fuck You! sign. Always a bad thing to show to a potential customer. You might say that you only lost a gamer who doesn’t pay, he won’t need the bandwidth he would need otherwise, making this a net gain, but again, you are wrong. You want people to play the game, even those who won’t ever pay anything, since they populate your servers and when they already have fun with the game, they are more inclined to pay some money for it. Someone who doesn’t play your game will never pay for it. There are tons of other F2P games that welcome gamers with open arms. Just providing something for free doesn’t make people use it. It might not take any monetary investment to play your game, the only barrier to entry is a good internet connection, but we have to invest something else: our time. And for many gamers this is an even more limiting factor than money, especially if you have a full day job. People will rather spend their time playing something that looks like it could be fun to play and doesn’t take core features hostage until they shell out some amount of money. You don’t want F2P accounts to feel like they are punishing those who don’t want to or don’t have the means to pay for it. You want players to feel like they are playing a complete game, not some trial, and anything that they can pay for is a bonus, not something they expect from the game anyway and is missing. F2P gamers currently are second-class citizens in your MMO. You even call gamers who have spent money ‘Preferred Status Players ‘ to drive that point home. Stop that madness and remove the limitations you are using.
One thing I nearly forgot. These limitations don’t only hurt F2P players. Your preferred status players can also suffer from them. When the server or client fucks up for some reason, and you are booted into F2P-mode although you are still on an active subscription or have a valid timecard, you have to rebind all your actions to your toolbars when you are back in the full game, you receive all the collectors edition and other promotional items again and it is in general quite the bother for the player (if you wonder how I know so much details about this specific topic, just this happened to a friend of mine today). Think about it, even players who love the game (for whatever reason) with all its flaws are annoyed for no reason, just because of your stupidly wrong view of the F2P market.
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