Dark Sweater

It's a valid way to play the game, I would just suggest that you create special characters for playing in Premium mode. That way you won't have to worry about anything lost when you switch.

Strange. My (very low level) toon which I created before the game went free is locked, and has a "convert" button to allow me to convert it to a character I can play. Maybe they have changed things since you played.

Thanks. I ended up making a copy of the beta directory and pointing the launcher to it instead of the original directory and it worked. Nothing to download.

It's just a matter of expectations management. When you can't play the game without paying, you accept that. When you expect to be able to play the game but in practice the limitations make it impractical, you're disappointed.

People tend to be optimistic. When limitations aren't mentioned specifically, they'll imagine a version that would work for their purposes. The Freedom site has little real information, which will lead practically everyone to imagine a version that's better than it really is. Playing their existing characters is an important thing to veterans of the game, and Premium limits that enough that in most cases it's impossible to play the character without at least extra work or paying a small monthly sum. Nobody expects that, and since it's the one thing most people want, it's bound to disappoint.

Freedom is a good thing, it's just the combination of letting players play their old characters while limiting them significantly, without even specifying the particulars on the site, that makes it disappointing to people when they finally learn the particulars.

I copied over the piggs, but what do I need to delete to get the updater to check what it has again?

Thanks a lot. This suggests that it would be easy (as in, less than an hour to create) to write a tool which shows all the characters on each server. Just take the part of the scripts which gets the characters on each server, put it in a loop by server, and output the results. I hope someone at Paragon would see this and decide to do it.

I'm sure many who have thought about playing Premium share your frustration.

I really hope that the website will be updated with more details soon, because there's really not enough there to provide an understanding of what going Premium would mean for a subscriber or returning player. Which means that you read what's there, try to read into it and guess what it means, construct a vision in your mind of what you'll be able to do, and then it all gets shattered when you learn the real limitations. That's a lot more frustrating than if you knew up front what to expect.

You get to pick which characters to unlock. Since you have Going Rogue you get two more slots, and it looks (from your forum join date) like you've had a year of subscription, so that's another slot. You will have a total of 5 then (on the assumption that you've subbed for a year), enough to unlock most of your characters.

They aren't altered. If you're at reward level 7 or higher they continue to function. If not they become greyed out and are equivalent to not having an enhancement in that slot. You can pay $2 a month for an invention license which will keep them alive, or create a second build and populate it with SO's.

You will have SG access and will be able to use the channel. Broadcast unlocks at reward level 3. Assuming you've subscribed for just over a year you will be at either level 3 or just hit 4 when I21 goes live. If you're not 4 you will be if you keep your sub another month.

No, and you don't have a forum to get help from other players. You can try NCsoft support.

For Going Rogue you will get everything except Incarnate access.

AE will be available to you, but may be limited. By default you can play it without rewards. At reward level 4 you can play and get rewards. At reward level 6 you can fully access it and create your own arcs.


Unfortunately the website currently doesn't describe the reward levels unlocks, but if you want comprehensive explanations of them, see here and here.

DDO lists free access to chat as "limited". Premium and VIP (CoH uses the same names as DDO) have it "unlimited". Chat ability for EQ2X for Bronze (free) players is "/say /tell /group /guild" while it's unlimited for Silver (Premium), Gold and Platinum (subscriptions). (These are two games I played, so that's what I'm comparing.)

So limiting free players is not unheard of, but Freedom limits more than most, including limiting Premium players.

For other communication channels, DDO has limited mail and limited forum posting for Free and unlimited for Premium, while EQ2X has receive-only mail for Bronze and Silver and everyone can post to the forum (but it's a separate forum and game from the old EQ2, which old subscribers can still play without interference from non-subscribers).

For guilds, DDO requires that Free and Premium players buy a charter, while it's free for VIP's, while EQ2X allows Bronze players to join, Silver to create but need to pay, and Gold and Platinum can create for free, far as I know.

I'd say wait at least until Freedom launches and you know how many reward tokens you get. Presumably you're basing this question on the beta. If you still think the number is wrong, support would be the place to go IMO.

I just went to my account and was happy to see I got veteran rewards for the account I just reactivated and didn't have any. I even got one for a month I didn't play (I think they rounded the time up in some way).

And if they told you: "we're sorry, we don't have the attachment in stock, but we thought you might not want to wait on the vacuum just to get them together; we'll ship it at a later date" you'll likely accept it and perhaps even be grateful that you got the vacuum quickly.

You won't be losing any tokens from this change, you'll just get them more slowly.

I agree, they didn't have to do that, and it makes the CoH model special amongst MMO's. I still think that disabled IO's suck for those of us who aren't at reward level 7 yet, and that this could have been tweaked, but that doesn't mean the idea as a whole isn't great and special.

I hate you. I love how this meshes with the character concept, but it lays to waste my carefully laid plans of world domination using Premium accounts. I will have to take a careful look at this and consider whether it's a good enough reason to buy Controller for that account.

I apologise, my response was smart alecky. I really do subscribe to your idea and think that VIP's are the best source of help, but was a bit too annoyed seeing some people talk about Premiums as if they were freeloaders.