lionsbane_EU

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Also, they're Trial accounts. You're not supposed to have access to all the tricks of a full game in a demo. I can't think of a single game that gives you full access to the entire game in its demo.

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I stated from the get go that I support the idea of limited trials. This is not just limited. It's downright restrictive. And I am oh so tired of seeing this game drop the potatoe simply because it doesnt think things through properly and apply true science to its marketing (and gaming) strategy.

Aren't you? You think we were down to 15 devs because they were doin it right?

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Just because lion chose the wrong words to vent his frustration surely should not detract from the point he was trying to make which seems to be echoed by various other posters in this thread for 1 reason or another.

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Actually i disagree there. If you cannot work your complaint in a sensible post without calling people idiots and such, don't post at all. Ghostraptor actually did comment on the issue if you bothered to read his entire post and not just first sentence. And he's much nicer than i would've been, i'd delete the post and suspend the offender in a heartbeat. But then i might be a little more jaded from moderating a forum devoted to more... *hrm* naughtier content.

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If I say that the people who thought of the specific limitations of the trial are unfit for purpose, have cost this game thousands of ongoing pounds of revenue and should never be near a gaming enviroment again because they clearly don't get it, but I mean that in a nice way, would that be better?

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All MMO's with trials have restrictions on them, Lions. It's called giving the player a taster of what's in the game.

NC's only mistake (IMO) was in restricting the chat, teaming and SG capabilities a little over zealously. Having limits on level and inf storage are very sensible, and something all MMO's with trial, that I know about, implement. If the taster is enough to get you to pay, ALL of those limits are lifted. It's just unfortunate that your son's account was hit with a bug that left the limits in place. THAT is something that definitely needs to be addressed.

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It's the effect of the limits that ive highlighted that are the problem FFM.

I'm telling you, my son, who is pretty bright, a gamer would have quit if i hadnt cajolled him along.

I'm trying to point out theres a wider picture here.
The game needs these trialists to lock on to the game.
It's essential. And, while i accept some people will upgrade from the trial and some wont, some of these restrictions, as is, are harmful to that possibility. And with whats coming up soon, thats a serious mistake.

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Hold more than 50,000 Influence/Infamy. This was done i guess mainly to stop the RMT use this a Money Laundry person and maybe to stop peple to transfer money from one toon to another

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No prob with this. Sensible move.

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Join a Supergroup. To stop people joining a Supergroup and stealing all there stuff to either boost there SG or sell on the market.

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Prevent them from entering the base. Or have the game treat them as it wouf you entered a coalition base. Problem solved.

Sorry. Totally unimpressed.

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Use any chat other than /local, /team, or /friend. to stop RMT to sell there stuff. BUT i have stated in other post there either should be a warning to tell sender that this person is on a trial account or have the power to at least reply to them, but they can get around it i think if they add them to friend to talk to them

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They should be able to reply to tells at the absolute minimum. This is the work of people below required standard. (hope that was more polite.)

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Invite characters into a Team (although Trial Account characters can join a team). This one i don't have a clue why but maybe to slow down there leveling to 14

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I dont see why there is a level 14 restriction. Frightened they may hit 50 too early? What other reason can there be?

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Use In-Game Mail. Mainly becuase everyone did not like get MRT mails

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No problem with this.

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Level up past level 14. This is been put into place for all Recipe TF/SF start at level 15 as far as i know, so it to stop the Sell of TF recipes

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Oh, tell em to get a life for heavens sake. Who cares if a trialist gets a level 14 IO and sells it?

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Enter any PVP Zone. due to above they can't join in pvp

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Then why oh why the restriction? I mean LOL.

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More time????? They've had 5 blood years. How haerd is it to figure this kind of thing out and get it right?

Right now its wrong. The work of idiots quite frankly and I thought we'de seen the back of them when Cryptic sailed away.

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Just a gentle warning that you're treading a very fine line here: personal attacks / flames are not allowed, and that includes generic attacks against the staff. Your constructive criticism is welcome; this sort of posting is not constructive.

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It isn't a personal attack per se, certainly not aimed at you and if it read that way I apologise.

There is (or should be) a logic here. This game is team centric. It's a key part of the appeal of the game.

You issue trials, hopeing to get new customers. And yet you do everything to prevent them from getting into teams. Or SGs.

By definition, someone new playing the game wont even know anything about teaming, how it adds to the game.
Apart from local chat, they may not realise they can pm, team speak etc etc.

So you wont even be enticing them to play the game to get those things cause in all likely hood they wont know they exist!

My son sure as heck didnt. I cannot understand why the game constantly puts up these barriers to getting peoplle to really want in on this game.

Cryptic were masters of mediocrity and not applying science to actually what gets people to play and stay playing this game. I thought and still hope that NC are different, more forward thinking.

But these restrictions on the trial are a poor showing.

While I understand the thinking behind a limited trial, the actual detail and application sucks and was badly thought out.
So in this instance NC arent showing me the innovation and forward thinking I want to see to encourage me that at last we're with the main team.

And then, on top of that, you cut them off at level 14 after doing everything to ensure that we fly the toons through the levels.

How does any of this encourage people to play the game?

Where is the logic?

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the express train IS coming and CoH has to get its act together now in order to withstand it.


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You must have quite an interesting definition of "now", since I could swear I saw you say the same thing a year ago.

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A nd the year before and the year before that too. And guess what? Since I started my rants Cryptic went from (i think) 70 odd staff on CoH to 15. So I clearly wasnt on the wrong track was I?

Oh and just under a year ago NC bought Cryptic out and now lo and behold, things are on the up again.

But as someone who has played this game since day one I am not stupid and am concerned that they will be left with their trousers down when DC hits.

In the games first year WoW came out and the game lost about a third of its base. If that kind of hit happens while our subs are still in this range, the game wont survive it.

And the game WILL take a massive hit. the question will be wil the subs be high enough by the time it happens to withstand it.

At this rate the answer is no. And I dont want that. I want the game to be ready.

Sorry to anyone whos offended that I want the game to survive the next 12-18 months.

Oh and actually, on the subject of "now" didnt you know all time is simultaneous?

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Now the flip side to that is that if they DO get their finger out they will be fine.

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Well thank goodnes they have you to tell them that because otherwise our game would be dead by now, I am sure.

You have stated your point previously and it is, indeed a valid one. However, if you really thin tha they need to be repeatedly told that something new is coming out so they had beter do something special to counter it... well.

Even then, I don't particularly believe they need to do anything that special, just cary on with what they have planned. The snippets released to us have been exciting enough to keep me more interested in the future development of this game than I am about the others.

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What snippets? Apart from the mission thing what do we factualy know?

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They're gonna get drowned in the anticipation of the other two games unless they start fighting their own corner soon.

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So after the huuuuuuuge thread already discussing the same thing you had to infect this one with it Lionsbane?

DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM

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You know what, Gil? this isnt aimed at you but I'm tired of people calling doom whenever I state warning. I am not saying the gameis doomed. I am saying, if they dont get theyre finger out they are gonna get flattened by the DCU express train.

Now the flip side to that is that if they DO get their finger out they will be fine.

Think of mec as a fan of Newcastle United. I'm stauch, dedicated to the cause. But I'm also long suffering and now want to see the game head in the right direction.

The fact I view the game in a realistic, rather than idealistic light doesnt make me a doom sayer.

the express train IS coming and CoH has to get its act together now in order to withstand it.

I want that to happen which I why I get frustrated when I see no indication of movement.

It IS the time to start putting future plans out there. Even if they dont go into specifics.

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Heres the rub, theres less people moaning in this thread than in all the "i keep getting e mails selling inf" and "im sick of unwanted tells" threads.

I guess we got what we asked for.

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I'm not convinced this has anything to do with griefers actually. I think its more likely its part of a give em less theyll want more practice that I now flatly disagree with.

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Give it more time.

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More time????? They've had 5 blood years. How haerd is it to figure this kind of thing out and get it right?

Right now its wrong. The work of idiots quite frankly and I thought we'de seen the back of them when Cryptic sailed away.

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If they let trialists joing supergroups then theres going to be the call to let them also have full access to thesupegroups content. For the newer, less experienced sg leaders this could be VERY BAD.
A griefer could simply get a trial and go in and boom boom boom, base/enhancements/salvage gone just like that. Then the players of that supergroup will get angry/upset because there is nothing that can be done about it since it is JUST a trial account

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Ok, but can't SGs restrict access to these things on a membership level basis? I don't run an SG, but if I did, I'd make it so that the lowest level member wouldn't have access to as many of the facilities I could restrict, as far as taking salvage/etc. Give them a week's trial or something, then promote. Being in a pretty well stocked SG at the moment I know how good it is and wouldn't have minded waiting a while to access the extra resources.

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To answer your direct point, sadly SGs have been, to the detriment of the entire game, ignored for years now.The facility to do this is tied up with uses for the limited number of promotions we can give.

But, the trialist can join an Sg and not have the facilitity to enter a base. That would work as they would gain a flavour of what an Sg and teaming is about, but be unable to gain the benefitsa of the bases, meaning either they cant steal or else have a reason to upgrade the account. Sorting out the problems isnt hard which is why it aggravates me that they are problems in the first place.

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No, nothing. The price structure is similar to that of other games. Good value, but similar. If it were to cost more, I doubt I could justify it to myself.

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I probably would pay that for a genuinaly spectacular game where you can see on the screen and in gameplay why its so expensive. But I dont think CoH or any other game I can think of can match my expectation of what that would be.

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I can understand why people on trials find it so restrictive and yes maybe it is a little too restrictive but there are reasons for trials being as restrictive as they are.

In the past, trial rules were alot more relaxed but in the past year or so before the restrictions were put into place, people had been exploiting that and using 'bots' to send advertising mail and even using the tell system to advertise to people that if they pay a certain amount of real money to a particular site they'd trade millions of influence in return and also these trial accounts were powerlevelled to get the influence, which is not only dangerous to the safety of your PlayNC account, its against the EULA rules and regulations.

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I'm aware of this. I do not accept however that everyone, new players, should suffer because of a minoritys exploits.

Most stupid of all these restrictions is the inability not to reply tell. After all, what the heck?
You think= an exploiter is gonna stand there waiting for a pm and then say "oh while youre on wanna be powerleveled?"

It's nonsense.

And second is the inability to join an Sg. Again, what gives? They gonna go on the SG and say "Hi all. hey guess what- you want inf?" Or whatever?

It's rubbish. I run one of the most active SGs on Defiant and have done for years. I have never had anyone come in in that manner.

You want people to sign on the game following a trial?

Give them at least some of the flavour of the game proper.

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Please open a support ticket - if you've upgraded the account to a full account and paid for subscription time the trial restrictions should *not* be in place.

While I'm here, we've become aware (thanks to the recent issue that required a patch be reverted) that if you make changes to your account in PlayNC (eg upgrading from trial to retail) while logged in to the game, there is a possibility of the changes being overwritten and reverted when you log out. The support team can fix the problem if this occurs, and the dev team are investigating the best way to eliminate the problem. In the meantime, please keep in mind that you should not be logged in to the game while making upgrades to your account via PlayNC.

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Great. How on earth would someone know that?

NCs aware of the problem yet no one thinks of putting a disclaimer on the site that you go to when you press "upgrade"?
Are you aware that, as a trialist, there is a button on the top of the screen as you play saying upgrade? To encvourage you to... press the button while in game to upgrade?
That is sloppy. Very very sloppy. And,to my mind unacceptable.

And how much do you want a bet that even after this no-one will put one up?
Even I can update a website. Takes 5 minutes.

You want new customers or not?

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Hmmm, year on year thats a 10% decrease.

Wish they'd get a move on announcing i13 and what's going to be in it. Game really seems to be treading water at the mo. Even i12 wasn't that amazing content-wise.

Come on NCNC, time to live up to the hype.

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Agreed. 100%. It really is time to let us know what's in store. At least whet our appetites cause I don't know about you but I feel like I'm treading water too. NC may find they're riding their luck a bit if they don't start publicising at least some of the plans they've (presumably) laid out to match the upcoming competition.

They're gonna get drowned in the anticipation of the other two games unless they start fighting their own corner soon.

Ok. When NC first announced the trial restrictions I was pretty pleased. Not because of the restrictions, but becausefinally, it showed that someone, at last, was looking at our product and applying market logic to it.

But now I'm not so sure.

My son has taken a trial. And I've come to the conclusion its too draconian, to restrictive.

if you follow the logic of these restrictions, leaving the customer wanting more, thats fine, but... my son hasn't had a single team when I'm not on. Not one.

After all, if someone Pms him he cant reply.

He's playing a totally solo game and this game is built to be team centric. He cannot possibly be grabbing a flavour of what really makes the game cool.

He got to 14 then saw he couldnt progress. This was after about 9 days of the trial. (I'm sorry. the time it takes to level now is ridiculously quick.)

And he didnt want to create a new alt. He's a kid. He created his idealised super hero and wanted to play it. So, now he's playing another alt, half heartedly, encouraged by me.

But here is the kicker.

Being a good dad I tried to upgrade him early. Pressed the button, filled in the paperwork, gave my details and.. and nothing.

There is no indication (or at least no easy to see one) of what happens next. So we just get a code? Do we get the entire game with a code on it? What happens?

Indeed, what has happened? Nothing. The account shows hes paid for the month but online he's still on a trial.

Now, maybe there is a glitch. Fair enough. But as we didnt know how the transfer from trial to full game was going to take place we dont even know that.

Have we missed something?

The whole experience is simply not good enough. If I wasnt cajolling him alongf he'd have packed in the game days ago because of the way the restrictions made him play and now this has even me thinking to tell NC to stick it.

Not because we have an issue but because we were not given steps as to what should happen in the first place.

Sorry NC. These restrictions, designed presumably to encourage more trialists to sign up, are not, by my sons experience, cutting the mustard.

We need better than this.

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5.. I'll stop there.

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Three times?

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How did that hapen?? Deleted them.

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1) The damn endurance slog till you hit stamina. How can running out of endurance every few minutes be fun?

2)The cut and paste missions.

3) TFs because of the way they're constructed I can rarely, if ever, join one. Generally i can only play an hour or two at a time and Ide leave a hole in the team.

4) The way the devs have completely disregarded SGs.

5.. I'll stop there.

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How is "outer space" still hypothetical? We already filled in a survey about it. There's even in-game half build launch pads in for it.

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those lazy idiots haven't made ANY progress in the last few issues now



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Thats because it got axed when most of the development team got the chop after issue 7.

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Because of the hash they (he) made of things BEFORE issue 7.

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It is not my intention to troll in anyway... but I really do think people are a bit paranoid about these new mission evaluation thingie..

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The bottom line is each mission should be graded, maybe like ebay and the mission creator should have the choice of whether they want to put their name to the mission or not. Everyone happy.End of.

Not to have that function available at all because there are a few griefers is like giving in to "MMO" terrorism. Never I say!

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I want to play a comic book, not write it. And, while I'm all for new ATs; "City of Not-quite-heroes-but-not-really-evil-villains-either" just doesn't float my boat.

Sorry NC, but mission creator, power customisation and new zones are great - I just don't want anything to do with your "moral compass".

And yes - I think that it may be enough to push me away from the game.

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There is an irony to what you are saying you know. It's easy to be a hero in this game because you dont have the choice NOT to be. (I'm referring to an alt you actually play on CoH.)

As someone who likes to play a comic book, wouldnt it be more involving if you actually have to make certain decisions, avoid temptations to steer you away from the dark side?

Isn't it more heroic to make the right choice ratherthan be a hero because there is no choice at all?

And on your last point, why throw away an entire game just because they introduce something that you can ignore simply by playing the way youve always played in the first place?

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[Edit2] You don't, I saw you on Blue-Jay, my current hero main. At least, I saw the character in your forum avatar. Even said Hi, but you (or they) were AFK. [/Edit2]

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That would have been me, Jay. Next time youre on Defiant look me up. Would be nice to put a "face" to a name.

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[Edit] Post may contain sarcasm, due to Global handle being a few lines below this [/Edit]

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Yeah I saw after I recovered from the shock of anyone here knowing me.
Which is why I also edited

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Me? Ide publish name AFTER I got a good rating.

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In that case, you should probably use a false name.

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Ahh Stas, to know me is to love me.

Sides Ide use my global not my forum name and I get a very different reception on defiant than I do on these boards.