The Old Republic

[Lissa]

It's not completely free. If you want more than a couple character slots along with limited inventory and vault plus wanting to run Ops and Hard Mode Flash Points, you need to pay for the subscription. So, you can get your feet wet and get to 50 and see all the story of your character, yeah, it'll work for free, but if you want more, you'll have to subscribe.

What's odd at first glance is that this is the one thing people do praise about the game, and yet they are giving that part away. You'll have to also fill me in on what kind of account-wide incentives would stop someone from just making multiple accounts to experience all the class stories.

I can't answer that. They might look at the IP you're coming from and only allow a single account to come from that IP if you don't subscribe (this is already in effect as they ask you a question every time you log in from a different IP address, but once they see you coming from the same IP, they don't ask that question).

It's the freemium plan in essence. You get a character (not sure how many servers you can make the character on and after you make it whether you're only allowed to have the one on that server or not) and can take it up to 50. You'll be capped on the maximum inventory space as well as vault space. You will only be allowed to run a certain number of warzones along with flash points (whether this is per day or per week I don't know) and no access to operations (and likely ranked warzones). If you want to have more character slots, they'll either have you subscribe (which means you get 8 slots on a given server, unsure on maximum slots overall, but probably along the lines of 32 to 40 or more -- ie, fully loaded on 4 servers) or probably pay a given amount of money to open up additional slots. I believe you also need to pay $15 for the game if you do not have a pre-existing account already (and if you don't resub, you'll probably have access to a single character, whether it's your choice or their choice I have no clue). If you want access to everything, you'll have to subscribe.

Likely what they're trying to do is get people in the door, get them up to 50, then have them realize that they do want to do more and they then sub. They've seen what the system has done for increasing the profitability of games like DCAU along with DDO. It could lead to them getting more people in the door to try the game out and they realize that they really like it and it's worth subbing for or it could have the opposite effect. We won't know until they do it and it runs for a bit.

The one thing going in BW's favor here, they are pushing out content patches faster than Blizzard, in one sence it reminds me of the days of Vanilla WoW where you had smaller content patches more freqently instead of the monolithic ones Blizzard has been doing since mid to late tBC and onward. Likely by the time they hit the 1 year anniversary they will be at 1.6 (meaning they'll have released 6 content patch updates in one year's time) as 1.4 is now just a couple weeks away.