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[Alkhemia]

Dota 2

[Shadowlord]

I haven't played that at all. :p

[BurnedToast]

Yeah, I'd rather play STO than TOR, especially with the F2P restrictions in TOR being much worse than STO's (assuming STO's haven't been made more restrictive since I last played it).

The only real downside to STO would be:
1. Lockboxes which drop and can only be opened with keys from the store, which are/were just traps to trick you into wasting your money on the hope that you'll get a ship out of it (the odds are incredibly low).
2. Premium ships which can't be acquired except with whatever they turned cryptic points into. In theory, you can get those with dilithium. In practice, that would take a long time.

I've never really done any of the endgame content, however (or reached it).

The problem with STO is that there's literally like.. a week of content in the game.for a dedicated player. A casual player... maybe 2 - 3 weeks depending on how casual, and a really hardcore player could probably finish most or all of it in 2 days.

And that's AFTER they added a bunch of content post-release. I can't even imagine how anyone thought releasing an MMO with less then a week's worth of content would be a good idea.

[Thexor]

The trade-off is, almost none of STO's end-game content is F2P restricted.

* End-game ships from the cash shop are only slight improvements over the default ships that everyone can get.
* Ground combat is, as far as I can tell, completely unaffected by the cash shop. Especially multiplayer ground content, where you don't get to use your cash shop bridge officers.

Whether the game has enough content is debatable... but it doesn't enter into the F2P debate, because paying customers don't get a lot more content. A F2P will have a tough time keeping up in the shuttle events, but otherwise you've got almost no limits.

[Lightning4]

STO is basically pure free to play in comparison to this.

If you're willing to put in time, you can actually get cash shop items for free by trading ingame currency around. Some things you can get for straight energy credits from the Exchange (though they have to be cheap, with your credit cap... unlikely that you'll score a ship).
For everything else you can trade in refined dilithium for c-points, which can be spent at the store.
Doing the latter, you can get rid of pretty much all of your F2P restrictions. Alternatively you can just buy something like a ship, since the restrictions aren't a particularly big deal.


STO wasn't really that bad. I agree that there wasn't particularly much content. The game is pretty sparse for how old it is now. I get the impression they're still trying to fill it out though.
Season 7 added some stuff, but I have no idea how much. I haven't really played STO since earlier this year.

[Seraphim342]

SWTOR was a great game, but one of the worst MMOs I've ever played.  It's basically massively singleplayer, 95% of the content can be soloed easily.  Story's good, but incredibly boring the second time through, which is a problem because you can hit the max level in a week easily, at which point it's either grinding daily missions and raids for end-game gear, participating in extremely lackluster PvP, or rolling a new character.  Also suffers from really cheesy darkside play like KOTOR1/2, where you can't be a bad guy without being a petulant melodramatic douchebag. 

BioWare makes great story-driven single-player games.  So good, in fact, that I've basically bought the same game in terms of gameplay from them every year since KOTOR and enjoyed the hell out of them.   That, unfortunately, means nothing in MMO development.  I wish they'd made this into KOTOR 3 to make up for the unfinished bug-ridden abortion Obsidian shat out in the form of KOTOR 2, but after the flop SWTOR has had I doubt we'll ever see a third game. 

I think the most ironic thing is that GW2 and The Secret World, which were both looking to be really good, made a design u-turn to emulate a lot of the stuff in SWTOR when it came out and ended up being turds as well. 

[LordBucket]

Been playing for a week. Now level 15. It's...slow. Pretty much have to do repeatable daily quests so my character level keeps pace with the difficulty curve. The game is completely linear, and there's basically no choice at all about where to go or what do do. You can either do the quests you're offered, or you can wander around in the zone where the quests are without doing them. That's pretty much it. But the quests and rewards were apparently designed to not have the xp and reward penalties free players have, and crafting abilities are nerfed for free players so I can't make my own gear...so everything is pretty much hard all the time.

But Vette is still awesome.

[Digital Hellhound]

I haven't actually done any repeatable quests on my Lvl 17 Smuggler. I think the Sith classes do have a steeper difficulty curve, though - those Mandalorians will slaughter you fresh off the boat in Dromund Kaas no matter what the game claims their level is.

[LordBucket]

I haven't actually done any repeatable quests on my Lvl 17 Smuggler. I think
the Sith classes do have a steeper difficulty curve, though

That's possible. General consensus was that Sith Marauder was underpowered, so I went Sith Juggernaut. But even so Vette had way more health than I did until about level 15, and generally seems to be be sturdier than me unless I'm actively using my 1-3 minute cooldowns. Plus she can easily out dps me and sometimes kills two mobs per one that I kill. Sometimes it feels like I'm just along for the ride and she's the one doing everything.

- those Mandalorians will slaughter you fresh off the boat in Dromund Kaas no matter what the game claims their level is.

Curiously, I found that to be the easiest of all the repeatable quests on Dromund Kass.


Anyway, I'm done with Dromund Kass now, but I'm not sure I'm going to play much more. Vette's snarky little comments are adorable, but the quest grinding is really killing it for me. Some things the game did very right. Having companions do fetch quests so the "Powerful Sith Lord" doesn't have to pick berries and whatnot personally was a great idea. And a lot of attention was paid to detail. It's neat that I visibly put my lightsaber behind my back to deflect blaster fire when I'm running away. But the core of the game just isn't much fun.

[LordBucket]

So...I took the plunge and gave them money to become a "preferred player."

I realize that's pretty contrary to me just the other day saying I probably wouldn't keep playing, but a simple payment of $5 to bump my account status has removed a lot of the gameplay restrictions. Cargo hold access, an extra crew skill, no more xp penalties, no more trade/mail/chat restrictions, and nearly double the credit cap. Plus the $5 wsan't actually for the account upgrade, but it was for currency usable to remove some of the other restrictions.

The game is still mostly a linear questing solo game, but $5 seems to eliminate a lot of artificial nuisance value.

[Cthulhu]

A lot of the stuff I would want is still off limits.  I'll stick to games that make me pay once, or games that don't need me to pay at all.

[fenrif]

SWTOR was a great game, but one of the worst MMOs I've ever played.  It's basically massively singleplayer, 95% of the content can be soloed easily.  Story's good, but incredibly boring the second time through, which is a problem because you can hit the max level in a week easily, at which point it's either grinding daily missions and raids for end-game gear, participating in extremely lackluster PvP, or rolling a new character.  Also suffers from really cheesy darkside play like KOTOR1/2, where you can't be a bad guy without being a petulant melodramatic douchebag. 

BioWare makes great story-driven single-player games.  So good, in fact, that I've basically bought the same game in terms of gameplay from them every year since KOTOR and enjoyed the hell out of them.   That, unfortunately, means nothing in MMO development.  I wish they'd made this into KOTOR 3 to make up for the unfinished bug-ridden abortion Obsidian shat out in the form of KOTOR 2, but after the flop SWTOR has had I doubt we'll ever see a third game. 

I think the most ironic thing is that GW2 and The Secret World, which were both looking to be really good, made a design u-turn to emulate a lot of the stuff in SWTOR when it came out and ended up being turds as well.

How did GW2 do a design U-turn to emulate TOR? GW2 is nothing like TOR except in the most superficial of ways. :S