Wait and see.

At the expense of sounding like a homer for SOE or a defender of the EQ2X faith, I think I am going to refrain from further posts arguing against those whose sole knowledge on the new F2P service is ignorance. Frankly I am just tired already of reading the same type of comments from people who have decided not to wait and see but instead offer up their prophecy of doom for SOE and EQ2.

Honestly no one will know what the short term and long term effects will be till after the beta starts in the middle of August. My goal from now till beta will be to flood the forums with questions about the new service in order to learn more about what I am getting for free. Free. I think I will say it one more time, FOR FREE!!! Community concerns aside, it seems some are forgetting that if they if they do not like the free service, there is a perfectly good paid server that is still available for them to play on.

I am going to make an assumption here and say that although the community may be great, it hasn't been growing much which means little revenue coming in, and the popularity of micro transaction based games was the fuel for this move for EQ2. Let's not forget that in June Massively had an article about another SOE game called Free Realms hitting 12 million registered players. I'm not going to pretend that Free Realms actually has 12 million players, kind of like WoW still has 11 million players, but they certainly are not new to the F2P model like some may think.

My hope is that everything works out, the community on both sides grows really strong and SOE continues to bring substantial content to EQ2. Why not hope for the best instead of just spewing out irrational uninformed commentary on a service that hasn't started yet?

On a side note; I activated my free Fallen Earth key that Werit game me almost two months ago. So I think I might do some progression posts on detailing my experience starting with the tutorial and how different the game is now from launch. That is of course if I can remember the game from launch, but it will give me something to do for the blog. And thanks to Anjin I am like this close |-| to reactivating my Champions Online account. Problem is the new City of Heroes expansion comes out in a few weeks and that has some interesting things in it. Who knows, I have a bad habit of wanting to resub to games, but not doing it.