I think the whole low-level F2P thing is more likely to be a way to generate interest than to test for a complete conversion to F2P. The game had an exceedingly rocky start (too many servers, world PvP that encouraged attacking when the other team was not there, unplayable lag in the big battles, an awful 'warding' system tied to specific gear for dungeon progression, and major balance issues mainly) but under the new team it seems most of those issues have been fixed. So, this is a good way for people who mainly disliked the game for those reasons to try it out and perhaps end up resubscribing if they are happy with the changes. I suspect though that if this model has a noticeably positive response that EA or some other company publishing P2P games may try releasing a big-name mmorpg with the f2p+CS model for once.
Personally, I find the game just feels too slow in some areas (questing, moving around, overall pacing) and too fast in others (skill cast/cooldown times) and my main issue with it is the fact that instead of having tiered versions of the same instanced PvP 'scenarios' for different level ranges (like in WoW) each level range has an entirely new set of scenarios and ditches the old ones (since my favorite scenarios are in tier 1 and 2 but most of the game is spent in tiers 3 and especially 4, this system is horribly flawed to me).
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