I'm almost always bouncing between one MMO title and another - one of those "tourist" gamers the hardcore crowd like to deride for lack of commitment and yadda yadda yaa.  But let me ask you, dear reader - what's the point of playing a game if not to have fun?  Some folks - like your's truly - enjoy an almost entirely solo-PvE-balanced diet of content with a dash of grouping and some PvP sprinkles, just to keep things interesting; others group exclusively to tackle the hardest content; still others PvP until they spit blood and howl at the moon.  There's many types of gamers, just like there's many types of games for them to play.

And after I've returned to SWTOR since the F2P conversion, I've been doing just that - having fun!

I won't lie to you guys - I think the restrictions Bioware placed on non-subscribers are harsh, unreasonable, and just plain stupid.  Look at Guild Wars - either incarnation - and you can see that the F2P model DOES work without those restrictions.  Not for everyone, or all the time, but they worked.  However, Bioware sunk MASSIVE amounts of money and time into SWTOR; I consider myself - and so should all of you, whether you play or not - fortunate that they didn't shit-can the game when the subs dropped off.

That aside, the game's much as you might remember it, with a side of cash-shop thrown in.  Without getting hopelessly mired in that particularly thorny bush for the time being  I'll say this about the Cartel Market - Bioware did their homework.  They trade in XP boosters, vanity goodies and (Legacy) perks; that much is pretty common in the F2P/cash-shop option market for games. None of it's terribly expensive, but these days people scream blue-murder if you so much as ask them for a penny .

Was it the smart move?  I'm gonna go against the grain here and say yes - yes it was the right move for the F2P option rather than death for this game.  Restrictions aside, the game's still fun; and thanks to the lower number of servers you don't go for hours without seeing another player onscreen, or seeing activity in General chat, or take an hour to get a group together to run local Heroic content; all three were common issues I remember from the early days of SWTOR.  Of course, now the game has a useful Grouping tool to lean on for things like that.

It's still much too early to see how well the the transition will help the game in the long run, but with more content on the horizon and recent announcements for the possibility of long-promised same-sex relationships to the game, things are still happening in the galaxy far, far away.