Garielle

Bottom line, you are looking at the question backwards. Instead of asking what you will lose if you stop subscribing, you need to look at what you will GET if you let your subscription lapse.

Right now, if you let your subscription lapse, you get....umm... gimme a moment here... I know I have the answer here somewhere.... let me see.... oh yeah! You get nothing. Nada! Zilch! Except an email saying how they hope you will return at some point, and occasional reminder email saying they would love to have you back as a subscriber and telling you about some of the new features.

Even if they limited you to a single character slot, forced you to play on an assigned server (rotated to ensure an even distribution of players across all servers), and didn't let you play more than 3 hours a week, that would STILL be more than what you get right now.

The truth of the matter is, they are giving you much better than what I describe. Exactly how much is determined, in part, by how long you subscribed, and in part by what boosters and expansions you purchased.

Your argument is like having someone give you a brand new car, and you complain cause it's not a Lexus like the people who PAY for a Lexus get to drive.

It sounds to me like you heard CoH was going to have a Free-Play option and you decided right then and there that you would stop paying, and now you are disappointed that if you do, you won't get some of the things you want.

I've made a note of this and PLAN to TRY to be there. Not sure what character I will be on as but the global name is @Quantum Anomaly

I gotta admit, the extra enhancement trays are looking mighty tempting. The price may be slightly high, but considering that there is no other way to increase enhancement storage, and it is a universal, one-time, purchase.... maybe.

Before I get into this, let me state something very clearly. First, I do not think Freedom, or the players it will hopefully bring are a bad thing. I posted quite some time ago pondering the question of whether this may be something that we'd be seeing. Furthermore, I like most of what I have seen about how this is all being implemented.

I do however, wonder if the timing may be off given the current state of the player-base. In most MMOs where there are two or more factions, the players are, at least somewhat, evenly distributed between the two sides. In CoH, this is far from true. The discrepancy between the two sides is quite large.

Why is this a problem? Because first impressions are going to go a very long way in determining whether or not a new free player will turn into a VIP subscriber. Let's take our new player, who will name John. John logs into the tutorial, goes through and chooses to become a Villain. He exits into the Rogue Isles and sees one of two things:

1. A mostly deserted zone where he feels like he's playing a single player RPG.
   
2. A reasonable number of players, but most of whom are new, like him, and therefore can't form a team.

In the second case, some of the players may be tempted to subscribe so they can form a team. Others will simply walk away with a bad first impression of the game.

In the first case, a much larger number of players will simply walk away without even considering the possibility of subscribing.

Some small percentage may decide to see if things are any different on the hero side, but a large number will simply assume that things are just as deserted there.

It seems to me that it would have made sense to try to look at why there is such a discrepancy between the number of players on the two sides, and sit down with the community and try to address them to encourage a more even player distribution.

A lot of players, myself included, express that we find repetitive grinding of the same content to be boring and undesirable. However, let's take a look at few facts of how a large segment of the community have chosen to utilize the existing game content and other systems.

First there were mission farms. We would find some mission that offered good XP or good salvage drops and put together teams to farm it repeatedly, never actually completing the mission objective, specifically so we could farm it again. For example, the Battle Maiden farm.

Then we got Newspaper Missions on the Villains side, and subsequently Radio Missions on the Hero side. Many players then ignored any contact missions that didn't offer some specific reward they were seeking and instead went from level 5-10ish nearly all the way to 50 with just the Newspaper/Radio missions. Missions, which are essentially all the same.

Then we got the ability to be as creative as we liked and create our own stories with the Mission Architect system. A large segment of the community used the system to create farming missions which didn't even try to pretend to actually have any story behind them.

Now it is easy for any of us to come up with anecdotal evidence saying, "Hey! I never did any of that stuff!" I could even, honestly, make that statement myself. However, take a look around, we are in the minority on that. Even if 100 people reply to this and say I am wrong, it would still be a vocal minority and not representative of the community as a whole. The developers, however, have access to statistical data that we do not. They see exactly what the majority of the players to spend their time doing while playing the game.

Yes, we can say that we hate grinding repetitive content until we are blue in the face, and it won't change one simple fact...actions speak louder than words. We, as a community, have acted, and the developers have heard us loud and clear.