Subscriber Login Event

This past Tuesday the new login rewards event for subscribers started, and it will run until early December. We'd heard a bit about this in the last dev stream back in July, but didn't get any more details about just what exactly it was going to involve until the event actually went live. (Here's the article about it on the official website.)

To summarise in a nutshell: There is already a login reward every week that all players get if they log in four days a week. This is usually something very basic such as 8 bonus points towards your Galactic Seasons progress. Tied to the same tracker, there is an additional reward for subscribers only, which again, is usually something nice but not particularly exciting, such as a valor token or a Personal Conquest Requisition.

However, for the duration of this event, this subscriber-only reward is instead going to consist of 6 "subscriber login tokens" per week. This is a legacy-wide currency which stacks up to 18, and can be traded at a fleet vendor for some cosmetic rewards or endgame gear, with items ranging in price from 2 to 12 tokens. (Swtorista has a full, detailed guide here.)

I've got to admit I was kind of surprised by the inclusion of endgame gear on the vendor. I mean, isn't that a little bit pay-to-win? I seem to remember a time when something like "free raid gear on login if you subscribe" would have generated some outrage, but I've seen very few comments even go in that general direction. I'm not saying that people should be upset or anything, it's just... part of me does bristle a bit at how gamers as a whole have been slow-cooked into finding real money translating into in-game power less and less objectionable. Which does include me by the way!

I know I'm going to use these tokens to buy my alts on the other servers some better gear (since the login rewards are per server, not account-wide), and I can't argue with the people who've told me that it's not a big deal, considering that Rakata has been our endgame gear for three and a half years now - not to mention that SWTOR is generally not a game focused on grinding gear anyway. I just can't quite shake the feeling that it does still feel a little wrong somehow at the same time.

Anyway, if you've ever wanted endgame gear in SWTOR just for subscribing and logging in, now's your chance. With each Rakata piece only costing 2 tokens, you could be fully kitted out after four weeks.

What I'm actually interested in (though I doubt we'll find out) is how much of an impact this is going to have on subscriptions. I was recently told by someone that according to some financial report, SWTOR's revenue was pretty steady, but subscriptions have been down lately and more money has come in through microtransactions instead. While I haven't been able to verify a source for this, it does at least sound plausible if you think about it.

What are reasons to subscribe nowadays? You need to be a subscriber to do operations, but that's a system that receives relatively little support and new content. I'm sure many people sub up for at least a month to check out the newest story updates every so often, but due to the voice actors' strike, we haven't had a new installment of that since June last year. And they just removed a bunch of free-to-play restrictions that were meant to annoy people into subscribing as well. (Which I do think is a good thing for the game, holistically speaking, but I would still also expect it to lead to at least a slight drop in subscriptions in the short term.) So unless SWTOR is one of your main hobbies and you're constantly subscribed because of that (as is the case for me), incentives to become a new sub have been pretty weak for a while.

I guess Galactic Seasons have been another reason, since you need to be a subscriber to unlock all the rewards... but that's not a lot. For the game's sake, I hope that these new rewards find an audience.