Note: This post expresses the views of Jounville Blackferne and may not necessarily reflect those of the Church of Alvis or its membership.

It has been a long and windy year. Last November many people in the Church were in various forms of the Beta program. We had a huge shared experience in the Thanksgiving Weekend Beta, and SWTOR was largely praised as real potential rival to World of Warcraft.

About a year later we have gone through two rounds of server mergers, seen subscriptions drop, layoffs at Bioware, and are almost at the dawn of the Free to Play era.  Some say that SWTOR has been a failure, though I’m not sure I agree.

This last summer for me I will admit was a fretful one in regards to the future of SWTOR. Before the first server merge (I’m sorry voluntary transfer), Juyo was getting 50-100 people on the Republic Fleet during prime time. It was a small but stable community, but I knew it couldn’t last. Without new players coming in, that would drop. As the mergers happened I saw more people, but I was wondering if it was sustainable.

The layoffs probably bothered me more. I knew one of the people laid off and I genuinely worried how he’d do. Luckily he landed on his feet with Fire Fall. Still the whole episode did leave me shaken about the future of a game I was finding myself emotionally invested in.

The biggest shock however was the announcement of the switch to Free to Play (F2P). I’ve never played a F2P mmo before and my thoughts initially were rather pessimistic as F2P read in my mind as “prelude to a funeral”. However I did talk to some people who just couldn’t justify a subscription to a game they could only play a few hours a month. Also lonomonkey of Screaming Monkeys made a comforting case of how F2P has worked for LOTRO.

With that I find myself pretty optimistic about the future of SWTOR. I do feel that as long as I pay my monthly subscription that I should not be put into a position where I have to pay extra to see content, or be competitive. I think the best example of this in WoW was the sparkle ponies in WoLK. Blizzard offered a mount that wasn’t any better than normal in game mounts in exchange for a one time $25. It was purely a cosmetic thing. If I find myself having to pay real money beyond my subscription to list more items on the GTN or go to Hard Mode Operations or the like, that is a deal breaker for me. But if my $15 gets me the all you can eat platter of SWTOR I’ll be happy. If they want one time pay extra for sparkle speeders or lawn chairs for you to sit on on fleet? Go ahead, but keep the core game accessible to all subscribers.

The thing that worries me most with F2P is the demanding content schedule Bioware has set for itself. Every six weeks getting something new seems like a high bar to reach and I really hope they don’t set expectations they cannot meet. Though in playing alts this past month I realized there is still a whole lot of story I have yet to see.

If Bioware can manage to keep up content production and continue to add polish to existing game systems and content, reduce bugs, find the quality of life benefits to all players, I don’t see any reason why F2P would necessarily be a bad thing. So Bioware if you read this, best of luck, I’m hoping you pull this off.