Feldon The #1 reaction SOE has been receiving from players re: station cash, rmt, and free to play has been a resounding Not in My Back Yard. We commented about this on Wednesday.
And this may need to change if we want to have eq2x to eq2 transfers. If there is one thing I know about EQ2. If enough players ask for it, and it will make SOE money, they will add it. So who knows they might put Beastlord class on stationcash. 🙂
Can you get more information about the Trakanon server and EQ:Next please~
But that would only end up being available on the EQ2X server(s)… =P
Look, we all don’t want the RMT stuff on live… but are these people deluded or something? The live servers are going to die unless new blood can come to it. This either means EQ2X -> EQ2 transfers or just making the EQ2 servers RMT. Honestly, if you want the game to have the biggest influx of players and have sustainability, going with the latter option is a better idea.
Exactly Feldon. And here are two quotes from SmokeJumper to back that up:
“If you folks ended up changing your minds and instead demanded that we move you to an F2P model, then, well…we’d probably do it.”
“F2P without RMT is a recipe to a very short-lived game.”
I personally don’t agree with the second quote but if that’s their belief, I doubt we’ll change their mind.
Why the heck does SoE take these good ideas and mess it up. Put the F2p people on live servers… geeze. Do it like DD0 and LOTRO.
If they weren’t so committed to having stat items in the Marketplace, I think we could all have the best of both worlds and have F2P on the live servers.
There are already enough restrictions on the lower-level F2P accounts (level restrictions, class restrictions, race restrictions, char slot restrictions, and more) to make someone want to subscribe to Gold or Platinum. So just let people play for free on the Live servers with those restrictions, and then sub when they are ready (or buy expansions, race packs and such via the Marketplace). All current accounts on the live servers would become Gold, and could upgrade to Platinum if they want to pay by the year. They could even keep adding the fluff Station cash items to the Marketplace on Live, as long they didn’t have stats.
The only thing I see preventing that from happening is their commitment to sell stats for real money 🙁
That’s where you’re wrong. It IS about current subscribers. They are cutting off the flow of new players to the live servers which will inevitably lead to their demise. They keep saying that they’ll give new players a choice but that choice is Pay $40 to try the game on the live servers, or try it for free on the EQ2X servers. If they were leaving the free trial, there would be a lot less complaints. THEN at least new players get a real choice. This isn’t a choice. This is a quarantine.
Methinks yaris hasn’t really read anything else about this issues and appears to understand the player’s concerns about as well as anyone at SOE.
Of course people are going to be pissed at F2P in any incarnation. How did you ever think that presenting any version of it in any configuration was going to get the current playerbase to not be upset about it.
However, the current approach is about the worst implementation of F2P I can imagine short of just closing all the live servers, deleting all existing accounts and stating fresh with new F2P servers.
The current approach has the real risk of finishing the gutting of this game for reasons already covered.