Answering some Freedom Questions

Has any thought been given post freedom to giving non VIP players temporary access to the incarnate system with the intention of persuading them that (re)subscribing would be a good idea ?

I spent like 10 min looking before asking but you can snap at me if you want about it. Anyway I'm curious about us time carders, I know they don't technically count as subscribers in the account manager so it got me wondering. What happens to us in this? It would be a pain to lose my well liked lvl 50 mm and lvl 50 widow and a few others due to the permited AT thing while not being a VIP. I've been playing with cards for a while but not technically to the 3 year vet mark I read they will unlock or something with those. Will I just have to wait it out till then if Freedom is released before then or am I just worrying about nothing?

I'm curious... If the new zone will allow Praetorian content to level 26 .. does that mean at level 25 Praetorian will finally be able to get an Ouroborus Portal and will they, will anyone, be able to do Praetorian Flashback missions.

I have a MM I started there and wound up with 4, of the 5, morality missions required for a badge. The badge tracker even stipulated these can be accomplished through flashback but at present there is no way to flashback to any Preatorian content.

Also on the same lines will Praetorian flashbacks be available to anyone. There are probably any number of players that would enjoy the chance to take their Blue side or Red side characters Gold side and run through story arcs.

Well I am glad to see that the devs still seem to still have their respective heads buried in the sand. (I did have a not quite so political analogy there but I am going to try and be nice to a degree here.)

Now, I was a long time player who left after I9. I had serious doubts then with the direction of the game and honestly, having come back for a brief time frame now, I am very impressed with what has been done to the game in the last year or so. However, I will admit that these additions to the game are approximately 4 years behind here. As I recall, many of the systems that are being added now were discussed in some form back at the launch of CoV. But that is a minor point to my rant.

The main point here thought that I want to vent about how poorly F2P is going to be implemented. Now granted, I have been playing other MMO's and one that I am currently playing has a F2P model and it has been very successful. More on that after I break down Posi on his points.

You don't sound crass at all and you have a valid point. The reason that I will return is because this was my first MMO and part of me truly misses the characters I created. So to have the ability to run a character from level 1-50 again on either villain or hero side for free appeals to me.

That being said, I see problems with the implemenation of their system. For instance...LOTRO has 7 classes that you are able to play and 2 more that are purchasable. Now...if I were to let my current subscription lapse for whatever reason, anything that I bought up to this point which is everything, I get. I get all the quests for all the zones. I am only limited in certain aspects of crafting guilds and in game support. EVERYTHING THAT I ALREADY PURCHASED IS STILL MINE TO PLAY.

Now...in the case of CoH. Even though I bought original retail, DVD edition, CoV and Going Rogue, I have to have played for 3 years to get free access to MM and Controllers??? Now granted for me, that truly isn't a problem but if they were going to limit play on characters, then those characters should have been the Epics and Veats. So essentially what CoH is telling me is that they don't really care how long you were gone that unless you did 3 years with them, then you can't play all the toons that you most likely purchased with I1 and I6 respectively. There is no "Freedom" to play if they set those limitations based on server capability. To me, what they are saying is that these cause problems for the server which makes me ponder how well the systems are to begin with.

Look each zone can have a maximum number of players of 50. Explain to me how well the equipment is going to handle 10K free players. Now I know there is no way to predict how many players will actually come try the game with F2P. I really cannot say. But I do know that even during the good ole days, total subs were only in the low 100K level. I would not imagine much more than 20% new player rate here even for a free game. Especially a free game that is now 7 years old with a 10 year old engine and servers that can't handle more than 50 players per zone.

Yes the supergroup transfers are a form of passive server consolidation. Who doesn't want to take their supergroup to a bigger server where it can particpate more. The VIP server is the same way. There are far fewer those who want to help than those who want the elitist part of having the most badges. The VIP server will become a badgers epeen measuring server.

F2P can be a great thing to generate revenue for games. It did wonders for the revenue stream in LOTRO during some very hard times. However, I will contend that CoH needed to have done this years ago probably around I9 for the greatest impact. Now this game is going to be an lazy day afterthought with the likes of WoW, LOTRO and TOR out there.

There are a few things wrong with the above.

1) Badgers aren't discriminatory. Absolutely zero of the badgers I know would turn down a request to help someone get a badge. The badge community is largely built of people in "friendly competition." Yes, we all want the most badges, but we also want everybody else to be close.

2) I'm pretty sure you're saying "i9 would have been the time to go free" because... that's when you left. Far more people would say that the time was i13, because virtually no one liked that issue. But the time to do it is when they're ready to do it right, and that's in Issue 21--they've been working on this for over a year, and they'll still be working on it for at least a couple more months before release.

3) 50 per zone isn't a measure of how many concurrent players the servers can handle. In fact, at this point, it's more of a kindness to the players on low-end systems or with slow internet connections who wouldn't be able to handle the added traffic. Have you ever seen what happens when more than 50 people enter a zone? A copy of the zone is created, which can hold 50 people, upon which another copy is created, and so on. During events, Freedom has seen (I think) 12 or 14 different copies of Atlas Park. I'm not saying there wasn't lag... but it was playable for most people.

Also, if a server does fill up, free players will be kicked in preference for VIPs. I'm not entirely sure that that's a good thing, but I agree that they do need to give priority to those who are paying a subscription.

4) I don't want my supergroup on a bigger server, and I wager that 90% or more of the SG feels the same way. We're happy on Victory--we're not a big server, but we're not a small one either.

I'd further wager that the new VIP server you're so up in arms against will certainly NOT be more populated than either Freedom or Virtue, even after the uppity players transfer away. I'd be extremely surprised if the VIP server even became #3 in terms of traffic.

Finally, there's nothing saying where you have to put your characters. I may make one or two characters on the VIP server, but I'm not transferring anyone away from Victory. Not permanently, at any rate. Most people are just viewing the VIP server as an additional 12 character slots being added to the subscription and have no real plans to migrate.

5) I don't really disagree with you having issues about them taking Controllers and Masterminds away from existing customers who have less than 3 years of veteran status, especially those who purchased the boxed versions. I admit that I'm not terribly familiar with how LotRO's swap to F2P went with regards to what players had purchased beforehand, either... but are you sure that if a new player had signed up the day before they went F2P, they'd maintain access to those 2 additional classes after dropping their subscription 30 days later?

There's also the fact that you don't actually "own" anything on their servers, aside from any microtransaction items you may have picked up. Everything you've done up until now has been to pay for access to the game.

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Look, you can think and say whatever you want, and again, I'm not totally disagreeing with you on some of the big issues. However, you're going to garner more sympathy and more consideration from the developers if you post in a little more thoughtful and respectful way. Instead of shouting in ALL CAPS, think about what you want to say and the reaction you want to get, and limit your finger pointing and comparisons to other games, because 1) it's technically against the forum rules, and 2) this isn't those other games--what maybe worked for them might not work here, and vice versa.

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Originally Posted by Nethergoat it's NEVER too late to pad your /ignore list!

#1 I have never pulled my punches when it came to the Devs. I was critical of them for 8 straight issues of regen nerfs largely based on PvP balancing and I was critical of the slowness that they exhibited for the first few years of the game claiming that they were going to give us 3-4 issues a year which dwindled to 1-2 per year. I have been especially critical of Jack and Matt because I have felt for several years that this game suffered under their lack of leadership and willingness to listen to the player base.

#2 I am not here to garner sympathy from anyone. I am simple stating that they way they have designed all of this was poorly implemented and quite frankly smacks of desperation. Look at it this way

Nice new things are fine. Holding back the Incarnate system really doesn't irk me as much as attempting to hold back the Mastermind and Controller sets. Holding back certain areas and quests would be fine. But to downright take everything that was included into boxed sets is bad for business.

If you want to have incentives for VIPs, then by god...start putting out content. But you can't simply remove what was already purchased. That really is not good.