Welcome aboard. What was the driving reason you played mostly on freeshards. I could never bring myself to do it because of the instablity factor of the shard could be here today and gone tomorrow. With a paying shard there is motivation to keep the shard online.
Sorry for the delayed response: finals and setting up summer work.
Well to start with, they were free. And that was just a better option for a 15/16 y.o. at the time than trying to weasel a monthly charge out of my parents. I'd sneak in playtime on my sibling's OSI accounts for about a year, but in the end smaller end player-shards had more to offer:
1. Customizable content. Players could suggest ideas, or prepare scripts, and present them to the admin for implementation. This catered to a sense of community in allowing players to create and participate in development and allowed for:
2. Originality. Some people prefer strict adherence to OSI standards, but I like exploring outside of the box.
3. Smaller communities = closer knit. You're more likely to strike up a conversation in a group of 50 fifty players, as opposed to just being a name that flickers by in front of the bank.
4. Variety in GM-run events: there is a lot more freedom in event creation, they were story/strategy based and it wasn't just some scheduled Sunday pvp event.
5. Smaller population = lesser competition for housing plots & less hassle/more help with Felucca based champion spawns.
Downfalls to the free run shards outnumber what I've listed here. At the top of my head, those include: unstable shard-up time, preferential treatment, cheating, jail-happy staff, etc. I guess if you enjoy the people you play with on any particular free shard, you put up with some of the silly things for a while, until you get smart and try elsewhere. As for paying to play, outside of OSI, I guess I could see motivation for keeping a shard up through donations or some sort of web-based store for in-game items, but that doesn't necessarily guarantee the admin won't move on to something else 2-3 years later.
