In light of the Age of Conan "F2P" experience what do you guys think? Is making a Psuedo F2P experience (with heavy limitations for an unlimited amount of time) better in terms of grabbing players or getting people to sub than having a fully featured free trial with a time limit?

I mean I understand that having the label F2P draws in many people who normally wouldn't be willing to throw down money to lets say try the game, but with heavy limitations could it really be seen as a free to play title?

I know people's gripes with F2P games as of now and to be honest most of the problems players run across with them are the issues of competition and difficulty of later levels (i hate the term end game) without the aid of cash shop items, which may or may not be as bad as some would say. But in just about any F2P I have ever tried, the core game is there.. It is available for play from start to finish. The cash shop usually only adds extra or bonus features to compliment the core experience and those games which try to funnel funds usually present such at later or higher levels after the user has already logged plenty of hours into the game..

Back to my question though, on the other hand you have the Free Trial, where the whole game is available and unlocked for a set period of time. This allows the player to achieve anything and everything one usually would as if playing the real game (save for some exploit abuse control such as money trading and such) however only giving them a set amount of time to do so before a sub is required to continue..

Which would you say has the best effect in swaying a user to subscribe to a service?

A limitation heavy unlimited time "F2P" model or the fully featured time capped free trial?

i am subscribing anyways, if the game convinces me. so i prefer a trial or a freemium-model, where i can test exactly what i like to test. so it makes a lot of sense, even in a freemium model, to give exaclty the attractive features for free in order to attract people. its better to make the additional content buyable, like Lotro and D&D did, than restricting the features too much. 

the AoC model is ridicoulous, with limiting character creation to 4 classes. if i could buy an additional class for 5$ or such like in EQ, thats ok, but in the current state i will not test AoC.

of course, there are other reasons for playing F2P, like limited playtime (not worth 15$) or playing more than one game (not worth 30,45, 60$). but thats another topic. just from a test perspective i sometimes feel, that the game -provider is not willing to attract me to subscribe, he is just trying to enforce me to subscribe. no thanks, there are other games, i dont need yours.

i also know trials, which are too restricted in time or even missing or blocked features. the next disadvantage of trials is, that i usually can start it just once (ok, you can do it more often with tricks). at the end , i dont care about freemium or trial, if its just done right.