The free version of Star Wars: The Old Republic, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, has 4 class stories for both dark and light side. Each story took me about 2 weeks of medium intensive gaming. After playing the first class stories for both side, the next stories started to remind each other a bit too much. Here are a few tips how you can play the game free without too much grinding. Installing the game was a bit complicated. It was available in shady, 3rd party websites requiring registration and installing some extra bloatware. After updating the initial installation messed up the game, I ended up re-installing it from Steam. If you don't want Steam to spy and slow down your computer, you can kill the Steam Client Bootstrapper process after starting the game without any problems.

How to grind less with the free version?

• Use the initial equipment you receive in the beginning for the whole game. You will find it from your mailbox. Just keep updating Armoring, Mod and Enhancement to it every 4 levels and you can easily beat all of the enemies in the class stories.
• Buy a speeder as soon as you can on level 20. That way you save a lot of time in missions what require you to move back and forth many times.
• Do not equip any looted equipment that would replace your initial, modded equipment. When you bond equipment, you can no longer sell it and it is always worse than your old equipment, at least after you update your mods next time.
• Do not hoard credits or waste too much time for looting. Free players have 1 million credit cap and nothing really useful to buy. You can not store excess credits anywhere either. After you get your speeder which will cost you 20,000 credits, you are pretty much done with credits.
• You can buy with credits more slots to your inventory, but hoarding stuff does not really help you at all. Simply sell everything right away.

Things that were waste of time for free players

• Crafting. You need to pay for making it useful.
• Legacy is available for paying customers only.
• Locker, cargo hold and storage space. Just sell all the stuff immediately.
• Cartel coins are an ingame currency bought with real money.
• PvP is pay to win so you need hard cash to buy PvP gear.

My review score is 3/5 stars. Enjoy!