'Useful' Veteran Reward

If you really want to reward us gamers for our loyalty, then why not give us a reward that will keep us loyal like discount the monthly fee. Or even offer a lifetime subscription as a veteran reward.

Besides, they already offer discounts for certain payment plans, and give bonus time for packs or newly bought additions. I'm also fairly certain there's some sort of time-card you can use. Point being, there's already plenty of ways to earn/aquire free months/discounts. We don't need more.

I heard a story once about a grocery store that had a promotion in which their loyal customers got goods for free if they could prove they'd been a customer for a certain length of time. It was a huge hit, people flocked to the store with their old receipts and loaded up on groceries for free.

The store was out of business in a week.

True story? No. But it does have a bearing on the subject here. If you reward long-time subscribers with the option of a lifetime membership, no matter what the cost is, you will eventually run out of money to support your product.

Do you think it's the people who play for a month or two and quit that keep CoH alive? Not even a little. It's the long time subscribers who have kept enough money flowing in to justify keeping the game online, with enough surplus to afford all the cool stuff they have added since launch. If not for us the game would have dried up a while ago.

The people who play for a month probably got that month for free when they bought the game, and then balked at the idea of paying to play more.

If they offered a lifetime subscription at this point, thousands of people would sign up for it, creating a huge influx of cash all at once.

Say it is offered at $150. Great, a lot of people would sign the check right away for that.

After 10 months, those people are playing for free and no longer contributing anything to the continued life of the game.

After maybe a year and a half, the company would start running low on funds because they lost the support of all the longtime subscribers who bought lifetime subscriptions. The game cannot survive on the "play for a month and leave" players, because they are not consistant.

It would have been a good idea when the game launched, for a limited time, but now a lifetime subscription, even to the veteran players, would go a long way toward the game shutting it's servers down. CoH does not need quick cash, it has enough revenue from continuing subscriptons.

In short, offering lifetime subscriptions at this point in CoH's life would be one of the dumbest business moves NCSoft could make. Yes, it would be cool for the players, but if the game is not making money, the game will die, because the parent company will pull the plug the instant it goes into the red.

You'd see an AWESOME Q4 report as all the income from lifetimes came in, and then next year's Q1 report would be dismal, because of the loss of all those subscription fees. Then as more people got to where they could get a lifetime subscription Q2 would be worse, and Q3 would be abysmal. By the time Q4 of next year rolled around, all that cash would be gone and NCSoft would start laying off or firing employees to stay in the black. When that didn't work, they'd call it quits and the game would be done.

So, it is actually NOT in the long term player's best interest for lifetime subscriptions to exist.