Nope nope nope nope nope

They've shafted the F2P aspect of it.


How the hell am I supposed to access my cargo hold now?! :I

cargo hold access I BELEIVE is attatched to A. Purchasing it seperatly and permamently. B. Attatched to anyone whos spent money period. C. Subscriber based.

:I but it's in my ship... it's like charging for using the toilet in your own home :I

It has to do with the venue they are trying to ply. It seems they are saying "Ok you wanted koror 3. Single player content and enough resources to make that accessable will be available to you. But the more mmo stuff is going to be under certain checks and balances."

Plus you cant even color cordinate and the like with a "free" account so its not like you need bank space to store costume stuff.

You know they charge here in Germany to use the toilets. :|

Yeah, just checked the F2P page and you don't get the cargo hold right off the bat, but you can unlock it by spending those cartel coins or if you were a previous paid subscriber you have it unlocked already. Although I agree that some of the F2P restrictions are somewhat ridiculous. I can only die 5 times before I'm forced to rez at a med center? And is that per day? Forever? How long does that last? I will still at least give it a look to see what is going to be "grandfathered" in for old subscribers.

I still play it pretty frequently period.

Begeren Colony

Well it's not quite converted yet, I'm still on a trial account unless I fork out for it, apparently the changeover will be actually happening midenovember, but I was just playing and it hasn't happened yet, so I guess we wait a little longer...

in 2 days. i subbed last minute to get some of the free lootz! ;D

Nifty, so it's good to go now that I'm back.

Well... I played a Solo up to lv 50. I had a lot of fun with the plot. And then the plot ran out, and I'm left with about 5 hotbars of skills that kinda... pile up. I'd stopped enjoying the combat by that point. I've got unlimited in Secret World and Guild Wars 2.

My 2 bit rankings:
Story: SWTOR Wins on story and player agency.
You can play any of a number of characters within your class. You can be noble, dickish, cash oriented, or as snarky as you can get away with. You can talk your way into or out of conflicts in many places. As a role-playing game, this is tops.

Secret World has excellent worldbuilding and acting, but minimal choice.

Guild Wars 2... lousy dialog, lousy characters... but... some of the world events fork chain and branch depending on success and failure. It's not the same as having choices, but it does mean additional adventure can result from success as well as failure. The world was designed with failure as an option in some places.

The combat: SWTOR loses.
I don't like WoW-style. You end up playing whack-a-mole with the powers, and parking your character in the combat area trying to stay in range but not in AoE, unless tanking. You will, inevitably, as you stare at the "You have died" box, realize that you had 2-3 "oh shit" buttons that you could have used that time to live, but have had no earthly use for in 90% of encounters, so the reflex to slap them has atrophied.

However... it's really hard to say which of the other two is best. They do make the problem interesting. See, with both, you unlock powers to equip. Secret World does 7 active powers limited by only being able to equip 2 weapons at once. 7 passives limited by buggerall. So you might use elemental passives to make your pistol shots set enemies on fire, and a sword in the other weapon slot for some focus effects and self-heals and... well, it gets complex in a hurry... even before looking at the "auxiliary" weapon slot... (the 8th power)... and the end-game equipment having slots for procs. Guild Wars 2... Weapon selection determines your first 5 skills. heal is 6. 789 are for your choice of class skills... 0 is your elite. None of these skills actually influence each other. That's reserved for traits... which unlock slots with a selection of powers. 5 categories, 30 points to max, 70 points by endgame. Respec available, price affordable. Don't like what's available? Try another class, they do everything differently.

And both let you dodge attacks by moving around in the world. BEST mechanic ever. Rolling out of the path of an attack that would leave you half-gutted and stunned feels fantastic.

Worlds: Secret World wins.
I know... blasphemy. ;) Star Wars is space opera. The sci-fi is soft, the civil rights of others ignored by the good guys and the bad guys. High adventure, but you can't picture ever settling down there to raise a family. Guild Wars 2... I do not feel connected at all to the narrative. At one point in the story mission, my companion does a heroic sacrifice to buy us all time to escape by ship. She's a wisp of a thing, we've got injured soldiers better in a fight... and she had to lock the fortress's gate behind her to keep the baddies in. Now... I'd point out... that gate could have done the job. She's supposed to be clever. This was a heroic sacrifice done because it was in the script, not because it was a good choice.

Secret World... I can ask people about themselves... their thoughts on the world... local problems... they'll tell me their history if I ask. And not otherwise. I can find things to do by poking at the world, and be rewarded with hints of the larger story. There are answers, although not always confirmation. I think the plot I foiled in Maine involved an immortal once known as Loki. Vlad (the Impaler) Dracula... founded an order of vampire hunters (and you wondered about the stakes) whose lady was turned by... someone nobody dares name. The other 2 games, if you look too deeply, you find the inconsistencies, the flaws in the narrative. This one... you look deep, hunt for the clues, and you get rewarded with an outline that fits. And questions. I don't know if the fellow on the cardboard camelot stage in London is a knight of the round table or a loon... but he is right about excalibur resurfacing. Makes me wonder about the grail.

Community: Weirdly, I gotta award this to GW2.

SWTOR, it's hard to get a group together. If it's your first time through, you're not going to have any idea if you can help someone with a given group quest. The dialog in those quests gets determined by random rolls among the players... although the light & darkside choices affect only the individual. The auction house is bog-standard "nobody knows what to charge" pricing.

Secret World... every dungeon is pretty much 6 bosses and maybe 15 trash mobs. The good loot is dungeon-only, and all but the nightmare-mode dungeons can be endlessly repeated, so you can usually help someone get through their first time. Higher difficulty and cerebral challenges tend to keep the playerbase intelligent, and literate. The nightmare dungeons, due to the lockouts and extremely high level of difficulty tend to inspire a degree of elitism. Auction house is fairly standard and quite irritating (tho the single-server nature of the game helps avoid server surplus/shortages). But... the in-game currency is useful for expanding wardrobe and acquiring more slots of inventory, bank, and builds (screw dual spec. Try 15!)

But GW2... the mechanics favor aiding others. If you happen upon someone fighting a beast... you are both rewarded if you kill it. World Events reward everybody for participation, and set the bar low. More than once, I've died a few times trying to finish one solo (usually works, but usually, you don't have to.) and been rewarded while across the map, having given up, because someone managed to fell the whatsit. There's even XP for reviving a downed player or NPC. You're rewarded for helping. Plus, mechanically... even though more players raises the difficulty of a group quest, players have multi-target attacks and multi-target heals. So the monsters may scale linearly, but the players scale exponentially. So everything gets epic. The auction house tells you what price goods are moving at. Nobody gets ripped off unless they work at it. Everything is shared across all servers, and if you can't get what you want at a price you're willing to pay, you can put in an order for it.


You have NO idea what I'd do for a game with the narrative control of SWTOR, the group rewards of GW2, and the world and combat of Secret World. These are my favorite MMOs, and I'd never contemplated getting to max level in ANY mmo before these.

starwars galaxies still 1,000,000x better than STOR at it's best...when ever that was lolz.

I'll give it a try, much like I gave DCU a try.


... Meaning I'll download the whole goddam thing overnight, play it for about 4 days, then forget I installed it.

Still waiting for Cathar. If I could swing $15 I'd renew for the coins and let the account lapse again after ;)

You know they annouced Cathar as a new playable race right? Spppose to be out before the end of this year

I'll believe it when I see it

was officially annouced at E3 O: prolly be in 1.6