There is no way it will be free to play in less than a year. There is simply too much money behind it. There have been much worse MMOs out there with much less money behind them, a much lower population that have taken much, much longer to go f2p. I get that you got burned with your first MMO, I have been there - I was exactly the same as you in Champions Online. I went from loving it to hating it within a very short space of time. I made my point and stopped posting in the thread.
I may come back to this in a few months, it depends how they develop it.
I don't think it will be free to play either.
People make the mistake of thinking that something being free to play causes people to come flocking back to it; it doesn't. £9 or so a month isn't particularly a great deal of money and most people don't have an issue paying that, they probably don't even think much of it. The simple fact is, people aren't going to spend their time playing something they don't enjoy, whether it's free or not.
ElliottJames is merely attempting to make the point that he believes the game will ultimately fail. He's not the most astute fellow when it comes to putting his points across, so you'll have to forgive him for that.
For what it's worth, I don't think there is much life left in SWTOR either. The server populations as a whole have rapidly declined, and the early poor support and efforts made by Bioware just shows they are happy to plod along and they weren't and aren't prepared to take any of the drastic action required in order to keep people happy. Maybe such action was impossible in a given time frame, I don't know.
As for funding, this game has more funding than most games of its type would. It has a large amount of support but unless used properly, that doesn't mean a great deal. Developers of future MMO's must be very concerned because Star Wars has effectively collapsed within 3 months of release, and it was a game with a lot of promise and a lot of money behind it, not to mention a popular developer (DA2 aside).
I was playing on 5 or so well populated servers, and they are almost like ghost towns now. My friend who continued to play when I stopped a while ago has commented that everyone he met in the game has now stopped playing and the servers he was on all feel deserted most of the time.
It's a shame because there were some very refreshing aspects of the game and overall I did enjoy it, but people need to be enjoying it for more than a month in order for it to really do well, and that just didn't happen here.
Anyway, sorry for the miserable post, I just wanted to see how people were getting on in here.
