Discussion: Retiring the City of Heroes free Trials

As the launch of City of Heroes Freedom™ draws nearer, we wanted to thank all of you who started your super powered adventures in our universe through our free Trial program. Some of you were drawn to City of Heroes®' amazing character customization options and flashy spandex costumes, others followed friends and relatives or simply wanted something different, and the Trial program was the perfect first step!

With City of Heroes becoming available for free by the end of the year, free trials are however no longer necessary and we are planning to retire the Trial program on August 17, 2011.

What does this mean?

• No new free trials will be able to be created starting August 17, 2011 BUT all free trials started prior to that date will run through completion, even if the end of the trial falls after August 17, 2011.
  
• This also means that the current "Refer a Friend" program that utilizes trials will be discontinued. We will be introducing a brand new program in the coming weeks so stay tuned for more information on this!
  

What, if anything, does this mean for the "invite a friend back" program?

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

Freedom launching in August?! Or do I have to wait longer?

It means that when FREEDOM launches, they don't want to have to deal with anyone starting or in the process of being on Free Trial.

So, this means FREEDOM will not launch in August. But I'm sure everyone pretty much knew that already.

EDIT: Scratch that, I thought the trial was still a two-week one, not seven days.

This does mean good news though if you think about. After August 17 once all the RMT spammers have been banhammered they wont be able to get anymore trial accounts to spam with. So we may have no RMT spammers for a few weeks before freedom launches.

If only names on accounts dubbed "Trial 59602" were going to be freed up...

I completely understand why that can't be done, returning players and all that. I just tire of coming up with a name, seeing it is taken, and finding out (through /getglobalname) that the account that's holding it is a generic trial. Oh well.

As for the release date, I'm still betting October or later, considering Mac users cannot yet access the full version of the open beta, nor access the paragon store, and Zwillinger stated here that i21 would not go live until that was fixed. Granted, that could be fixed tomorrow and a September release would be feasible. But I would rather plan for a later release and be pleasantly surprised if it shows up earlier.

You guys (and gals) are doing it all wrong...

You heard it here first...
Freedom launches in August!!!!

The ski slopes are also being opened up until August 28th.

bu-bie infrequent inf sellers - bring on the mass inf seller army with F2P!

I am going to go out on a limb and speculate that Freedom might be released for or on the Labor Day weekend. Nice long weekend to get people hooked, re-hooked, and such.

My take is this. I wouldn't imagine the folks at PS would want a long period of time where potential customers could not take advantage of some kind of free trial program. It does make sense to discontinue the free trial program prior to the launch of CoHF, but not ridiculously beforehand. I foresee a September launch.

Of course, this is strictly idle speculation. Just my gut feel.

It makes sense that trials are going away due to COH Freedom.

As to the speculation of a September launch...well I wouldn't mind seeing it launch before the holidays so that any lingering bugs can be smoothed out before the holiday events activate. But I'd prefer it to stay in testing/beta phase for as long as it takes.

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