Marketplace: Equipment Unlocker Packs Go Away Tomorrow (May 8)
With Chains of Eternity, Research Reducer potions/totems were removed from the Marketplace in favor of an “Upgrade Now” button directly on the Research tab. While there has been some debate about slight changes in pricing, the end result of being able to peel days or weeks off of Spell Research right from within the Research tab has been a simpler, more streamlined experience.
The old way — digging through the Marketplace to find the correct consumable with the right duration that best matches the number of hours/days left on your research — was less than intuitive. Further, consuming a Research Reducer without the Research window open didn’t provide much feedback of what was actually happening.
With Game Update 66, the ability to Unlock gear on Free-to-Play accounts right from within the Equipment tab by right-clicking items and unlocking item-by-item or choosing to “Unlock All” was added. Tomorrow (May 8th), this will become the only way to unlock gear as the [eq2u]Equipment Unlocker Pack[/eq2u]s are being removed from the Marketplace.
Once again, the fine details of cost are being debated on the forums. For players who wish to unlock all their gear (up to 22 equipped items), this is clearly a more streamlined approach. But those players who prefer to individually manage gear unlocks, this takes away those options. Some players have also pointed out that the individual unlocks through the interface are 35SC each, while the Equipment Unlocker 5-packs worked out to 30SC each. Streamlining is good, but longer term, players wonder if the new “built-in Unlock” feature will enjoy the periodic discounts and rebates that the Unlocker packs used to.
From Abby “Ahma” Watt on the EQ2 Forums:
Greetings Norrathians,
We want to give you a heads-up on a Marketplace change coming next week. With the Scars of the Awakened update, we added a new way to unlock equipped gear on your character. Now if you have several items want to unlock, you can click one and have the option to unlock them all instantly–and for a discount! Since this new “unlock all” functionality is available we will be removing the Equipment Unlocker Pack from the Marketplace the morning of Wednesday, May 8th. If you’re thinking about acquiring an Equipment Unlocker Pack, get it now while you can!
Thank you,
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Comments (6)
Avianna
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Well I have had gold accounts since beta so this really does not affect me however if this keeps up we will soon have more SC buttons on our UI then we will spells in our knowledge books. Additionally each time they make one of these changes the price goes up a little and/or the quality of product goes down. SOE thinks they are being sneaky about it but in reality it is quite obvious the nickle and dime game they are playing with us.
I would much rather see them actually listen to the customer base and be active and participating on the forums, Even in such a case as PR nerf, I understand the throw them to the mob fear however, if they at least get on there and participate in their thoughts and reason it would go far to calm the mob. Not just a community relations person either (no offense Dexella)But hearing it from the horses mouth so to speak is huge with me personally and I would go as far to say that I feel it is the same with a lot of others who are passionate about this game too.
If everyone who has anything to do with marketplace items and products in SOE were to switch their attention to Bug fixes and content correction starting in queens colony and going all the way through to Cobalt Scar every zone, every quest, & every item, every possible combination of character, and not just look at it but play it. The quality of the game would improve and the result would be more and more returning players and that = more revenue for SOE which results in more quality content being released and the end result is EVERYONE is happy except possibly blizzard entertainment…
Or you could continue to nickle and dime us and see how well that works when you keep pissing off your player base….
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Kruzzen
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agree, it would be nice to have the m all on bug fixes, but on the flip side, how will they pay the staff. It is a catch 22 for having a F2P game. :/
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Lunastaria
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I agree, the Krono button and the repair button annoy me, I constantly repair and remain at 100 % as much as possible so that I can avoid that button, and I hate having the station marketplace on my xp bar.
A paying subscriber shouldn’t have to see annoying free to play marketplace features, we need to be given a clean UI. That alone would give people a reason to buy a subscription!!!
Why annoy us paying customers who have been here for several years, with worthless features like repairing your equipment for station cash? Seriously? What is the point of that when you can usually repair for 60 gold to 1 platinum, and it is way easier to make in-game platinum than to waste real life dollars on repairing your equipment!!
Do people really die that many thousands of times to be broke, and have to pay station cash to repair? It’s a needless annoying button on my inventory screen, and all of the vendors for horses now show station cash horses, why didn’t those just remain in the marketplace? Now I have to avoid station cash items like the plague everywhere, because I am not rich…
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Lunastaria
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Oh yeah, and funny thing about blizzard they won’t give more content and people quit every expansion after about 3 months and beating it.
So, if Sony could fix bugs and glitches like the broken launchpad invalid password error that won’t let me log in, they could easily surpass Blizzard with their extra content game updates…
Blizzard releases 1 game update a year, and won’t even add any fun fluff world event content… It’s so boring there lately, but at least the game is polished and bug free, without an ugly cluttered up UI…
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Arabel
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Thinking about it, this has probably been planned for quite a while. It was probably planned before they ever did the “Look at all the restrictions we are taking away for F2P accounts!” They (logically) figured this is what people actually spend money on, so we’ll just give all that stuff for free and bump the price on these.
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Trueflight
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I actually commented to Brasse about the unlocker packs a while back. It was actually more expensive to buy the pack of 5 unlockers (150sc) than to buy 5 single ones (25sc each). Stupid oversight, I can’t believe that it took them this long to do something about it.
SoE where buying in bulk gets you 5 unlockers for the low price of 6…
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