Trial restrictions- I'm not so sure..

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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Don't get into a flap. It's only my opinion and I'm thick

Arc 56763 Lord Anarchys heaven

2 mission arc. Bring friends cause Lord Anarchy means business...

iirc there is(was?) a problem where trial accounts upgraded still carried trial restrictions until the trial time was over.

This used to mean, well, nothing, its probably alwayexisted in the code for it "thanks for subbing, finish the trial time too and then use your free/paid time."

Now it really limits people who shudnt be and thats just wrong and really should be fixed. PM GR or open a support ticket, im sure they can deflag that account as trial.

and even tho another "restrictions" thread probably isnt the best.

Yes they are far too limiting.
I would never have purchased the game had I been affected by these trial restrictions.

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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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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. People also paid these rogues to powerlevel their characters to 50 by using bots to control them, providing the 'botmaster' with the account name and password so they can access it. Occassionally these rogues would change the password of the account so you could no longer access your own account and when you do finally manage to get in they'd take away pretty much everything you had in your account and if they were even nastier, that of your SG also. The leaders of the SG can find out who took all the dosh, trace it back to you and boot you off, not caring if you were 'hacked' or not.

I don't know the ins and outs of PlayNC but my theory is that trial accounts could be incredibly difficult to trace to any one person because with the securiguard features of some ISP's like BT Yahoo you can actually create 'false addresses' which are connected to the customer's main account and these addresses can be deleted. Anyone with programming knowledge (although I'm technologically sound, I'm not a programmer, I could never get my head around it even in college) can take advantage of that. IPs can be traced back to a specific area or computer but in a business sense, that is a dangerous move without legal permission. Not only that, IP's can be masked so the IP shown to PlayNC might not be the correct IP for the account.


So PlayNC's solution to solving the advertising problem, powerlevelled trial accounts and trading in 'illegal influence' was to tighten controls on what trial accounts can and cannot do. It seems draconian but many decent players were leaving because they couldn't put up with the advertising smeg and PlayNC gets its revenue from paying players, not those on Trial Accounts. Thanks to these restrictions these illegal traders cannot do business on CoX because they cannot reach the maps that provide them with the influence they need to trade with others. If you want someone to blame for the changes, blame the ones who exploited the relaxed rules of the past.

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Most of the Trial restrictions seem fair enough, but I have to agree that not being able to reply to Tells seems too restrictive and really isn't needed.

Of course, it may be technically very hard to set things up so that Tells can be replyed to but not initiated, but if it can be done, it should.

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However, it turned out that Smith was not a time-travelling Terminator

I agree Kiken, Must be a first I'm agreeing with you

I was trying to get a low level team together last night, sending tells to players in the correct level range and getting no replies. Now thinking about it I would guess that most were trialists and couldn't reply

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[ QUOTE ]
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.

[/ QUOTE ]

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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Don't get into a flap. It's only my opinion and I'm thick

Arc 56763 Lord Anarchys heaven

2 mission arc. Bring friends cause Lord Anarchy means business...

[ QUOTE ]
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.

[/ QUOTE ]

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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Don't get into a flap. It's only my opinion and I'm thick

Arc 56763 Lord Anarchys heaven

2 mission arc. Bring friends cause Lord Anarchy means business...

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 (sure lets ask that player if they can tell us their real account name, sure they'll give it to us).
So who are you wanting to upset? The already loyal fanbase or the people you giving a TASTER too?

Just to add that i agree one or two items i think are a bit too harsh on the restrictions level (return /tells for one) but for piece of mind for present players (spam emails as a BIG example) i think it more than justifies it. After all when was the last time we had a "ANOTHER PL e-mail?!?!".

The only thing i would revert back is the private tells, everything else doesnt seem to be having too much of a negative effect. Your thoughts/opinion will probs differ from mine but thats my two slices of pineapple for ya.

(a notice DOES need to be put up about the upgrade problem though hehe )

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@Damz Find me on the global channel Union Chat. One of the best "chat channels" ingame!

[ QUOTE ]
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?"

[/ QUOTE ]

Unfortunately yes potential new players are punished because of the minority because there is currently no other way of stopping the scams from affecting paying players. As I said before, these rogues use bots to control and level the characters and the bots are also programmed to send out automatic tells. There have been numerous occassions where I told the advertiser to f*** off because I get frustrated by the amount of tells and often when I do that I find that the character no longer exists. Its not just a problem on CoX but it also affects many other RPGs like WoW, and Guild Wars and for paying customers there is nothing more annoying than having to deal with these idiots when all you want is to play and enjoy the game. Before these restrictions were put into place I was close to leaving because I was wasting alot of time emptying my mailbox in CoX because of the spam. Since the restrictions, as overkill as they may seem, I've not had to clear out my inbox or get flooded with advert tells.

[ QUOTE ]
And second is the inability to join an Sg. Again, what gives?

[/ QUOTE ]

I suspect that again this is due to the rogue minority stealing from SG vaults, though the main purpose of a trial account anyway is to get a feel for the gameplay without actually paying for the game and its unlucky that your son didn't get any teams during the trial. People these days use tells to ask for team mainly because the majority of people are playing on alts and want to do so in solo rather than teams. There are many places where trials are as restrictive, if not worse than the conditions on CoX.

[ QUOTE ]
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.

[/ QUOTE ]

Then you're lucky as I've heard it happen several times in the four years I've been on CoX. Many of the well established SGs nowadays though are very picky on who to invite and often have to team with one of the members of that SG before they'll get an invite.

Like I said, the purpose of trial accounts are mainly for people to get a feel of the gameplay. If you get a team while still on a trial account it makes it all the more better but trial accounts are meant to give you just the basics of the game and show you the basics of the different character professions. PlayNC in the past allowed pretty much free access to everything but that was exploited by the rogue minority so now its restricted to lvl 14, no tells and no sg invites which is perhaps fundimental for people who want teams.


Tell ya what though. When I get my computer back from the repair shop (possibly tomorrow or Friday. PSU sparked at me on Sunday ) I'll keep an eye out for your son and team up with him when I can

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[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
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.

[/ QUOTE ]

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?

[/ QUOTE ]

Actually i am sure that on the accounts management screen it does say to ensure that you are NOT logged into the account whilst modifying your account details.

Granted, i seem to remember seeing this when i was entering my details for CoX a few weeks ago.

Ah yes, when you click on the "upgrade account" which you do to apply a retail code to a trial account it pops up a box with "Please make sure that you are not logged into the game before you upgrade." written on there.

But generally speaking though... i would have assumed (as would most other people) that being logged in to the account whilst changing "features" of said account is a bad thing.

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[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
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.

[/ QUOTE ]

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.

[/ QUOTE ]

Actually if you click on upgrade a box pop ups which says: Make sure you aren't logged in.Pretty hard to miss as you have to press OK to continue.

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The M.A.D. Files - Me talking about games, films, games, life, games, internet and games

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@Lyrik

[ QUOTE ]
But generally speaking though... i would have assumed (as would most other people) that being logged in to the account whilst changing "features" of said account is a bad thing.

[/ QUOTE ]

Been there done that lol. I tried doing that with the wedding stuff some time ago and didn't realise I needed to actually log off before it could update. While mine sorted itself out without a hitch it is something I had to learn from experience.

Sometimes actually reading the 'small print' does help lol

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[ QUOTE ]
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

[/ QUOTE ]
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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@craggy see me on Union for TFs, SFs (please!) or just some good ol fashioned teaming.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
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

[/ QUOTE ]
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.

[/ QUOTE ]

the access restrictions within the sg controls is by rank within the sg not by actuly lvl of the character itself this is were experiance in control of an sg comes in coz you do need it to sort when best to give people promotions an thus access to the base storage systems

altho the trial acount system as it stands at the moment seems extreme its not that far off what alot of other mmos have dun in the past coh for a long long time was one of the very few that actuly aloud trial acounts full access to the game and the current changes were only made because of abuse of the trial acount system so altho some of the restrictions may seem unfair i think they are needed for a large nnumber of reasons

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[ QUOTE ]
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 (sure lets ask that player if they can tell us their real account name, sure they'll give it to us).
So who are you wanting to upset? The already loyal fanbase or the people you giving a TASTER too?

[/ QUOTE ]

Thats a stupid reason to dissallow acess to SGs, just earlier in the week there was a thread of a fairly inteligent sounding SG leader who lost stuff to someone that built up trust over months. Since the guy was using a full account I guarantee the worst punishment he would get would be a 72 hour Ban, and thats if they decide he was at fault. and thats a main account.

Yeah the 'punishment' for offences like that is quite poor at the moment. Afterall if someone in an SG gives you access to the storage, then thats their fault, you've got access you can do anything.

TBH saying "dont let it cos griefers will steal from people" is one of those nice little rules that people set up to protect idiots. No sensible SG leader would or should operate their SG in a way which allows promotion or access to resources based on anything but sheer trust. So if a trial account managed to get that much trust within 14 days to be able to grief an SG, then the leader probably needed the wake up call that they have problems in how they operate.

As I have said many many times about this issue, if just one person is put off from the game by any of the trial restrictions then it was a very very poor way to handle the issue in the first place.

You shouldnt shoot potential new customers in the foot just because a couple of people abused the system.

In Guild Wars iirc trial accounts had full access for a long time (infact they only changed just after i switched to here, iirc) and they delt with their Gold Sellers by being able to monitor all accounts that the trial accounts had had dealings with and from that track the purchesers, and the accounts which collected the loot.

Sure it wasnt a fool proof system. Gold Sellers ended up passing amounts through stupid numbers of proxy accounts. But so what?

At the moment CoH/V costs as little as £9.99, a quick google around shows that power leveling can easily cost mroe than that, as well as most 'high' amounts of Influence (£9 nets you 50Mil, not enough for some expensive IO build these days)

So all they have to do is pay £9.99, (or have been really cheeky and baught a bunch of those PCZone or w/e mags for £5 that included the game) and recruit one person willing to use their services per account, and they have recouped the costs of setting up that account, bipassed the trial account limitations, and made a profit on this game.

While the OPs son, my friends, and i'm sure everyones in general, is left wandering around Atlas, or Galaxy wondering why they can't seem to do jack.

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[ QUOTE ]
£9 nets you 50Mil, not enough for some expensive IO build these days


[/ QUOTE ]More like not enough for some expensive IO's.

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A better line needs to be drawn.

Before the current restrictions Trial accounts were too abusable. Now however they offer so little that you can actually try out that they can't be much encouragement to potential players.

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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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[ QUOTE ]
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.

[/ QUOTE ]
Give it more time.

There's already been a monster thread on the French boards that had to be closed (even though full of proper constructive suggestions).

I too believe the trial accounts should be looked at more precisely. Knock on effects are discouraging rather than inviting for new potential players, imo.

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[ QUOTE ]
Give it more time.
I too believe the trial accounts should be looked at more precisely. Knock on effects are discouraging rather than inviting for new potential players, imo.


[/ QUOTE ]

I agree, in fact i think they should have just left things exactly how they were.

So what if we had to delete a few e mails (or even a lot of e mails)

How hard was it to ignore a few idiot tells, or a bit of [censored] in broadcast? Theres enough idiots still spamming it anyway.


I think we just got what we asked for on this occasion.

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[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Give it more time.
I too believe the trial accounts should be looked at more precisely. Knock on effects are discouraging rather than inviting for new potential players, imo.


[/ QUOTE ]

I agree, in fact i think they should have just left things exactly how they were.

So what if we had to delete a few e mails (or even a lot of e mails)

How hard was it to ignore a few idiot tells, or a bit of [censored] in broadcast? Theres enough idiots still spamming it anyway.


I think we just got what we asked for on this occasion.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm lucky if I can even open valid emails half the time, so its not like a couple of spam ones ever bothered me, there delete button is right next to closing the tab down anyway.

And the most a tell ever stopped was a conversation, and now since you can scroll back up, click on the name of whomever you were talking to and continue the conversation, (which makes it easier than haivng to retype the name, or go back to your friends list" i really fail to see the harm of those anyway.

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As someone that has recently started deleting the help tab from quiet a few toons as the trialists are using the help channel as a means of conversation i whole heartedly agree that the restrictions are not best thought out at all. Surely there has to be a better compromise that gives the trial users a better taste of the game than they seem to be getting at the moment and upsetting the gaming of the rest of us.

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*reads through thread*

You just can't win! REstrictions to limit inf sellers demanded...given...now it's scaring off this apparent mythical plethora of would-be Heroes/Villains

*rubs eyes, goes back to bed*

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I know when I dabbled on the US servers a couple of weeks ago it was a nightmare trying to do anything. you couldn't send or reply tot ells, you couldn't speak in broadcast at all to state your interest in the teams being broadcast for. basically I felt like I was dumb, blind and Mute all at the same time. It was very difficult and if I didn't know how much fun the game was I'm not sure I'd pay and continue playing.

The current restrictions are too much at the moment. Somewhere in between what there was before and what there is now is required.

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