You Can Leave Your Hat On: SW:TOR

When Star Wars: The Old Republic transitioned from the original subscription model to Free to Play, the climbdown was widely seen as an act of desperation. The game cost an estimated $200-300m to develop and was fronted by one of the biggest global I.P.s in existence, yet it had failed to pick up significant traction, either with the wider Star Wars audience or within the MMORPG genre itself.

By 2012, subscriptions had fallen below a million. With numbers continuing to slide and the confirmed break-even point standing at 500k subs, something had to be done.

The humiliating climbdown almost certainly saved the game but any P.R. bounce the developers might have hoped for was undermined by what were widely seen at the time as some of the worst F2P restrictions ever. Re-reviewing the game on the back of its new payment model, Eurogamer concluded:

"Over time, yes, all of this may be fixed and improved. As a starting point though, it's impossible not to see most of it as an acknowledgement that The Old Republic isn't a good fit for the free-to-play model and that BioWare isn't really that interested in it anyway. It's less like they've set up a stall than actively taken offence that the game failed."

Of all the petty restrictions against which people took umbrage, the hill on which many commentators chose to die was
the sale of Hotbars. Chopping up the default UI and selling it piecemeal through the cash shop was seen as a sign that these were people who would sell anything. Probably their own grandmothers. To The Hutt.

By the time I finally got around to trying TOR the game had been free to play for more than six years. More than enough time to let the payment model bed down, sand off the rough edges, fill in the cracks. You'd think.

According to the comparison chart on Reddit, you still have to buy your Hotbars. You also have to pay for extra character slots, races and storage. You get crucial utilities like Sprint and Fast Travel later or on longer cooldowns. You don't get Rested xp at all. You're limited in who you can talk to, how you can trade, what mail you can send, who you can have in your guild and how many Operations, Space missions or Warfronts you can go on. Oh, and everything costs more.

Those are the highlights. The list purports to be exhaustive but actually it's not. There's at least one more thing F2P  scrubs can't do: hide their hats.

I knew this going in. I read it somewhere a while ago and it stuck in my mind because it seemed to me to trump even selling pieces of the UI for outright miserliness. It also lingered because I'm in the habit of hiding the headgear of some characters in some MMORPGs I play. Usually the ones who wear heavy armor.

I love hats, in real life and in games. Can't have too many hats, I say. The problem when it comes to many games is that "hat" ends up meaning "helmet" and I hate helmets. Most of them  make my characters look like they have a bucket on their head.

I was aware there might be a problem but the first twenty or so levels passed without incident. At first I had nothing in the head slot anyway and then, quite early on, I got a tracker device that displayed as an earpiece and mic set. It looked cool. I liked it.

And then, at Level 27, I got a drop. The Alderaanian Engineers Cap. It sounded great. Caps always look good, don't they? I moused over it to check the stats. It was a big upgrade. I put it on.

When I was a child we had a thing we called a "meat safe". It was used to cover meat or any other food, protecting it from flies while it waited on a table to be cooked or eaten. It was a rhombus with gauze netting stretched between struts. You could pull a central cord to collapse or extend the sides.

I haven't thought of that meat safe in fifty years. When I saw my Scoundrel wearing the Alderaanian Engineers Cap the memories came flooding back, all jumbled up with Deborah Kerr in Black Narcissus.

I know very, very little about Star Wars lore. I have not the vaguest idea who the Alderaanians might be. All I can say is, if this is what their engineers wear to work, they must be a deeply, deeply twisted people.

The Alderaanian Engineers Cap is so utterly hideous, so entirely ill-conceived, that from the moment I saw it I developed a conspiracy theory. Did some nefarious designer, either out of personal spite or acting on instructions from some shadowy suit, construct this atrocity with the purposeful intent to create something so obtrusive, so vile, so utterly impossible to ignore that players would be forced to pull out their credit cards and subscribe just to retain their dignity? Not to mention their sanity.

It's not even just about looks. The hat is so vast, so monolithic, it literally endangers life. On several occasions I've been rendered blind as the flat canvas back of the awful hat filled the entire screen, blocking the camera, leaving me at the mercy of RakGhouls and Pirates.

It even obscures the faces of my conversational partners in cut scenes. It has no redeeming features of any kind. It is the hat from hell.

So why am I wearing it? Well, it's an upgrade, isn't it? You want me to take a stat hit? Do I look crazy? Ok, don't answer that - at least not while I'm wearing The Hat.

I have this weird feeling there's someone behind me but for some reason I can't see anyone...

At Level 33 I'm hoping another hat will drop soon. If not I might have to look into buying one. So far I haven't needed (or even thought about) buying any gear at all but I can't go on wearing this thing indefinitely.

I have already decided to subscribe to TOR for a single month to bump my account up to "Preferred" status. That gets me permanent access to much of the post-50 expansion content and relaxes a number of restrictions, among them the toggle to hide the head slot.

That's fine, but I wanted to get to 50 first to see how the run feels as a full F2P player and I really don't want another seventeen levels of screenshots featuring my Scoundrel looking like a pantomime nun. Also it's very unclear whether the ability to toggle is something you keep as a Preferred player or something that freezes in whichever state it happens to be when the money runs out.

The cost of unlocking the toggle for the head slot is 280 Cartel Coins per character or 775CC per account. Obviously I'd want to take the account option, which would work out at something like $7.00.  That is quite a lot of money to ask for something almost any other F2P game gives you for nothing. I still might pay it, though.


I was planning on waiting until I hit 50 to post on my impressions of the F2P experience. It's very generous in some ways, giving you what amounts to hundreds of hours of AAA quality single-player narrative-driven RPG gameplay entirely for free. So far I haven't found the inventory or travel restrictions to be significantly more arduous than those in many other F2P MMORPGs. At a level of basic accessibility and enjoyment TOR's freeplay model seems quite attractive.

All that good work and generosity, however, can be undone in a moment by something like this. Nickel and diming F2P players with expensive unlocks for basic UI utilities that virtually no other game charges for just leaves a bad taste.

It absolutely isn't going to put me off playing the game but neither does it make me want to subscribe. Yes, subbing would remove these little anoyances but they shouldn't be there in the first place. Subscribing should get me more, not take away less.

After six years you might have thought that would be a lesson learned but I guess the money must be coming in okay because here we still are. I don't imagine much is going to change now.

There is an other solution, of course. Failing another perks revamp, maybe they could just give the guy who designed the Alderaanian Engineer's Hat a job in the mail room and hire someone who knows what a cap looks like instead.