EC: 180 days stupidity

Restes

My accounts got eligible for EC so im doing casual PVE with bit RVR.
I understand you have to restrict F2P Accounts...i get all that, thats fine.

But now i'd like to subscribe to access my guild vaults...but if i subscribe for a month and cancel my subscription after that, i get less than i had before? not being able to play at all for 180 days unless i subscribe again?

So you're punishing returning players who subscribe, can someone enlighten me please?
Shouldn't it be the other way round, keep people engaged and not thinking like 10 times, what if i subscribe now and get punished for that afterwards?

Love this game still, but this restriction is pretty dumb in my eyes.

DaRedANT

Costs more to go out to dinner once, then to sub to play for the ENTIRE year.

QQ

Kroko

DaRedANT wrote: »

Costs more to go out to dinner once, then to sub to play for the ENTIRE year.

QQ

Wow, thats a nice dinner!

But yea, the restriction is stupid, most people agree.

Tyrantanic

DaRedANT wrote: »

Costs more to go out to dinner once, then to sub to play for the ENTIRE year.

QQ

Makes me wonder why they spent all that development time on a model that clearly isn't working then if the solution is to sub.

Kat

It is a free trial, atm..not a f2p option. Grab bag said they are looking at restrictions

Armagedden

I was in the same boat. Came back a few weeks after EC dropped, had been gone for just over a year and was on the fence just like you. Was unsure if I wanted to take the chance to subscribe only to not be able to play for another 6 months if I did not like the game. In the end only reason I subscribed was because of the 12 Days of Christmas. Now I will keep the sub until March when work picks up then quit because the game population is still not where I want it to be

I do hope they remove the 180 restriciton. It does nothing but harm them and inspire more hatred from the player base. Not a good move on Broadsword's part.

@Carol_Broadsword I know there are business models and strategies to getting players to come to a game. I'm not pretending to know how to generate revenue for a game, but what I do know is I never would have subscribed if it wasn't because of 12 Days of Xmas and the fact that work is slow so I got time. I could do /who nf and see that population was still not really any better than when I left. This low pop only made me more angry at how EC was released and how IMO getting people in the game with far less restrictions would make them happy and ultimately subscribe. End-game DAoC is MUCH more attainable and casual-player friendly than when I left, but you absolutely need to entice people to play.... for free... with little to no restrictions... and people will eventually sub once population is healthy.

I'll come back for good once I see more than 12 people in NF again

Menos

To my knowledge no other game has a restriction on returning f2p once your subscription ends, and that's for a very good reason: it motivates people to not subscribe at all, because if they do they are blocked from the game.

Now some argue that an expensive dinner costs about the same as a year of subscription, but a lot of people don't have the money for neither an expensive dinner nor a year of subscription. Some can only afford to pay every once in a while, yet still would stabilize the population if they could be a f2p player. With that 180 days restriction BS voids the potential of casual customers and hurts the game long term.

Claverhouse

I'm sure, by now, BS has seen the error of their ways with the excessive restrictions. I'm just wondering how they will deal with it. I've returned to the game and subscribed to two of my three old accounts (not easy on S.S.) and have been really enjoying what they have done with BPs, etc. I almost entirely PvE (mainly due to health issues which cause a huge loss in coordination), but with the ToA weekly quests and other activities I have a really good time, even without the RvR. I do, however, feel like folks might think me being rude when I turn down group requests. It's just that I would most certainly be a liability and likely ruin it for others. All that aside, I just hope people coming back will give it enough time for BS to get all the kinks out. Hopefully they will make some sweeping changes so as to further entice folks to come back. Even after all these years it's still a great and unique game.

elninost0rm

DaRedANT wrote: »

Costs more to go out to dinner once, then to sub to play for the ENTIRE year.

QQ

This argument will never stop being totally hilarious after they dumped over a year of development into a failed project.

Drane

I doubt I have much to add to the EC discussion that hasn't already been said to death, but here's a relatively small complaint I can make.

What was the thought process behind buffing the King's Armor set (presumably to help new and returning players quickly jump back into RvR without needing to grind beforehand, right?), but then locking EC players out from using the champion XP pots so that they can't actually get the full benefits from the armor without first going out and grinding? Even if you want to hold to the XP pot limitation, does locking the king's armor stats behind CL actually serve a purpose? Does BS think that they stand to make enough money from EC players buying xp pots in the Mithril store to hit CL10 that it outweighs compromising the returning/new player experience of being able to jump into the frontiers without having to worry about that sort of thing?

With a population this low shouldn't we be figuring out how to get people in the door in the first place, then figure out all of the ways we can milk extra cash out of them once they decide they like the game and want to stick with it? Rather than coming up with ideas like nerfing EC account XP rates and hoping that they'll fork out money for some XP pots?

Kroko

@Drane
Do OW and Curse and you have CL15.

Dale_Perf

Theyre trying to force F2P into subbing, which is a bad model. Most F2P games will try to keep their F2P players around with, well, good content. Even if theyre playing for free, you want them to spend $$ in mithril shop. Not force them to spend $$ to be competitive. F2P is already at a huge loss not being able to use Sup pots or get bot buffs. Any fight they get sheared theyre just SOL without spending $$.

F2P needs to be playable. Trying to force people into subbing results in what we see now, people are not going to sub for countless reasons, including Broadswords/ @John_Broadsword track record of decision making. So I'd imagine some players would want to stay F2P until they see changes are going in the right direction. Boost their XP rate, remove the shitty restrictions that make no sense and limit playability (why not give them CL abilities and sup pots?).

But BS still doesn't understand their OWN PBAE changes gathering from skimming the discord this morning, so GL.

Armagedden

Dale_Perf wrote: »

Theyre trying to force F2P into subbing, which is a bad model. Most F2P games will try to keep their F2P players around with, well, good content. Even if theyre playing for free, you want them to spend $$ in mithril shop. Not force them to spend $$ to be competitive. F2P is already at a huge loss not being able to use Sup pots or get bot buffs. Any fight they get sheared theyre just SOL without spending $$.

F2P needs to be playable. Trying to force people into subbing results in what we see now, people are not going to sub for countless reasons, including Broadswords/ @John_Broadsword track record of decision making. So I'd imagine some players would want to stay F2P until they see changes are going in the right direction. Boost their XP rate, remove the shitty restrictions that make no sense and limit playability (why not give them CL abilities and sup pots?).

But BS still doesn't understand their OWN PBAE changes gathering from skimming the discord this morning, so GL.

^^ THIS 100%%%

I came back as EC/F2P... I quit because of the terrible OP content that took forever to get for each character. It was too time consuming, as well as the class changes that left everything out of whack. Being only gone for a year and having it all still fresh in my mind, I did appreciate all the changes that Broadsword made towards making this game more playable for the casual player, as well as balancing all the terrible patches they made in the last 3 years...

However, I thought the current F2P restrictions were absolutely horrendous, and I explained in a post how Broadsword could remove 90% or more of the restrictions and people would still want to end up paying a sub in the end.... They have a lot of things to change with f2p. Right now it's completely negative and pushes people away... Let's hope they get it right, and soon

Dale_Perf

F2P players are also likely to never sub at all, no matter how well EC is done or how well the game is doing. Once you open those gates, there will *always* be a market for BS to tap into. Making it so restrictive that nobody wants to hang out for free, BS loses this revenue. There will ALWAYS be a good portion of the F2P players that will never sub to a game, and will spend some $$ every month in cash shop on skins/QoL/etc. But not if they can't compete in RvR thanks to RSP caps, supremacy pots restrictions, and more.

Missing out on revenue here.

And if you increase the value of subscriptions (like giving us free mithril every month, say 200-400), you wont get too many subs unsubbing.

Drane

BS seems afraid of allowing even a small handful of EC players to enjoy the game without spending any money, apparently not realizing that even a non-paying player is still valuable for a game with a population this low. People are more likely in general to sub or spend money in a cash shop for a game that's more active; just look at recent posts from people saying they're quitting not because of recent changes, but because NF is too empty or the existing realm population is too out of balance. If we had more those filthy non-payers running around could then maybe we have kept those active subscribers from leaving, making more money in the long run than trying to milk people from the start.


@Kroko I'm aware that you can do content to gain CLs quickly. My point is that the gear is meant to allow you to just slap it on and run into NF the moment you ding 50, so what purpose is served in limiting the stats based on CL and then making it more difficult for EC players to earn those CLs? It's just one of many pointless inconveniences specifically added to the EC experience in the hopes of getting them to buy stuff in the Mithril shop, when it's more likely to make those players just quit before they ever buy anything in the first place.

Every defense for a pointless or bad EC policy is some argument along the lines of "it's not a big deal." No, individually they're not but when you add them all up they become a clear turnoff for the sort of players that would otherwise take advantage of a F2P option. I won't say it's the greediest and most shortsighted example of a F2P option adding arbitrary restrictions, at least BS isn't pulling a SWTOR and restricting the number of hotbars free players have access to. But it's up there.

Menos

And even SWTOR allowed you to play f2p right after your subscription ended. If the worst F2P implementation in history did it better, then you most certainly did it wrong @BS.

rocketait

Ya it's a trial not ftp, and if you see the light and unsubscribe because of the current state of the game, it's probably won't change in 180 days anyway because the game devs are setting records for slowest development ever.

Kroko

@Drane
Well, this one is ok for me. It isnt really a F2p restriction, because everyone has it. It is sth about progression. Your gear isnt bad with CL0 either, its a good start. But for getting a better gear you have to do CL. I think thats a good feature. Its NOT meant, that you can run rvr with lvl 50 just like someone who is templated.

But i agree on all F2p restrictions.

Jron

Just noticed that my main account was closed after I resubbed for a month. That's pretty stupid. Ah well, it was nice for nostalgic reasons but the game state really is bad.

Morsanto

Jron wrote: »

Just noticed that my main account was closed after I resubbed for a month. That's pretty stupid. Ah well, it was nice for nostalgic reasons but the game state really is bad.

+100