Freedom? Hardly

What was great back in the issue 1-3 days was having a long conversation with a friend on F-chat only to have someone else, about 30 minutes later, ask why you are talking to yourself since they were only friends with one side of the conversation.

One limitation that's very irritating is the inability to give or receive inspirations. That means if your F2P friend dies in a mission and doesn't have a Res inspiration, or can't combine to make one, you can't give him one. Which may mean he has to go to the hospital, which may mean a five or 10 minute delay depending on where the mission is.

It's reasonable to limit some trading of items, like inf, IOs and recipes. But you should be able to give F2P players all the things that normally drop for them: inspirations, DOs and SOs, in particular.

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

I have just one thing to ask sir:

I have a very close friend that wants to play but does not have a credit card. Now, I don't mind paying for them, and I want to give them the things they want (I hear the angel wings might be for sale, but that's irrelevant) without having to tie my card directly to their account. Would letting them play the account with me paying for occasional points and gifting them things be possible? Or would tying my card be considered against the rules? They live a distance away is why I'm asking.

THAT is excellent news! That was the only real complaint I had about Freeb restrictions.

My impression has been that these issues tend to stem from people expecting to play the whole game for free and finding out that City of Heroes: Freedom is not actually F2P. Simple as that, really.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

This is also called a "gross misunderstanding".

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

I have no problems with the freemium model at all, there's no misunderstandings to be had.

I play two MMOs. City of Heroes is my sub game and LotRO is my free game for when I need a break from CoH. I like LotRO but I only have budget for one subscription game at a time so when I do play I might pay out a few dollars for the next piece of content I want to play.

Looking at what CoH is offering does not compare favourably. As a newbie to LotRO I had access to tells, server-wide player made chat channels, the majority of the crafting system and could buy items from the auction house. I could theoretically (if I put enough time in) unlock the entire content of the game by earning Turbine Points just through playing the game. As it is I have bought points, although 2/3 of the points I've spent in the store have been earned rather than purchased.

It's a lot closer to personal freedom and choice than CoH is offering.

Did I give the impression that I was refuting the post I quoted?

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Sort of, since you called it simple. I can see it going either way.

(edit: Since you're not English-as-a-first-language, a quickie clarify...gross misunderstanding means huge misunderstanding...not typically simple.)

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

You do not understand what a bait and switch scam is.

A bait and switch scam is when something is advertised at a low price and when you get to the store the item in question is not available but a higher priced substitute is.

The goal being for you to feel like you have put enough opportunity cost into the trip to the store that you feel compelled to buy something.

City of Heroes is advertising exactly what they have to offer and you can make an informed decision to play or not to play. There is no attempt to hide details, obscure facts or make it seem that Free players will have abilities that in fact will be locked out when they decide to play.

The Freedom overview let's a free player or premium player know where they stand in regard to what content and abilities will be open to them. The game website for all intents and purposes at this points funnels you to that part of the website. A person trying to make a choice of whether to get into City of Heroes would need to make a conscious effort to avoid the info list here http://na.cityofheroes.com/en/news/f...player_cho.php among other places.

AFAIK, anyone can pay for an account. There's technically no way for someone to "gift" Paragon Points through the in game Market (lots of customer service concerns) there's no such restrictions on who pays for an account with whatever credit card.

The only thing that you may want to be sure of is that you don't trigger our anti fraud measures, which I believe you should be good on.

I would strongly suggest contacting Customer Support for answers to these questions. Their email is support@ncsoft.com. This gets you a direct line to billing support, who can most definitely confirm these answers for you.

Yes!

I'm firmly convinced that as time goes on, some things will be opened to free/premium players that are locked down right now. The thing is, it's much easier to start them out as restricted and slowly open things up if need be than to start them out too empowered and take capabilities away from them if need be. Plan 1 gets you, "Woot! Thanks, devs!!!" Plan 2 gets you, "You sons of #@*$es!!! YOU CAN'T DO THIS!!! Let's SUE!!!"...

EDIT: First post after a Z name!

For some reason FPAZing sounds...wrong.

Did you actually test this? When I tested with my VIP account and a free account on beta a week or two ago I was completely unable to drag-and-drop or target/right click to gift any items. I tested inspirations, enhancements and event salvage and nothing worked. The gift-giving character simply received a message that the giftee was unable to trade.

It is a case of misunderstanding, more specifically that people keep calling Freedom a F2P model when it's not. I should have added "more specifically" to the front of that sentence. Also, when I say "simple as that," I mean it literally - that's all there is to it. I don't mean "it's simple, why didn't you understand it," just that that's the entirety of the subject.

I've seen a lot of these threads, and they all read the same way - "Free players don't get this and that, this game is going to fail." And... Yeah, you can't get a lot of things for free, which you couldn't get before for free, either. At no point in official communication have I seen the term "Free to Play" used, nor have I seen a complete gaming experience promised to either Free or Premium players. About the only promise I've seen is "you keep what you pay for."

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

As long as the account doesn't risk setting off any red flags, I can work with that. Thanks for the reply.

That is not my experience, though I haven't tested it rigorously or recently. When I first made my free-member hero, a fellow player told me that he attempted to drop an enhancement on me and it was rejected. Have you dropped something on a free member (not Premium) and they received it?

Actually i think it sounds so right. It has more pizzazz to it than FPARN.

I'm not sure if you can't have your friend set up a PayPal account, to which you can just send money from a PayPal account of your own, and your friend can thereafter pay for in-game items using that PayPal account for his/her own Paragon Points. I'm not sure what PayPal's policy on this is, though, but I do know they give accounts unattached to a card of any kind still some leeway of use, they just limit amounts on them by quite a bit.

And I DO know you can subscribe to the game using PayPal and Customer Support assure me you can use PayPal to make in-game purchases, as well. I haven't done this and I'm not sure how one could do it, but they assured me it works.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

yes

I dropped a DO, an IO, an insp, and a recipe on my freebie account from my VIP account. (I was able to vendor the recipe but could do nothing with the IO. [edit: I wonder if I bought a respec if I could sell it like normal after the enhancement portion]) I haven't done it since we first got the freebie accounts, so it might have been a brief buggy period.

This is a huge letdown if they changed that.

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

Oh... OK, that's not how I read it. To me, a "gross misunderstanding" is rather a simple misunderstanding in a specific, very crucial element of a deal, like those comedy sketches where a woman walks in on a man holding a bloody knife over a bloody, prone cat and faints, when in fact the man just spilled tomato soup that the cat went to eat and lay down in when it was scolded.

What you describe is something I'd call a "complete misunderstanding," in the sense that it's a misunderstanding on all or most possible aspects of a given subject, such that the two sides in question are talking about completely different and totally unrelated things, like me describing a 2011 movie to my mother while she things I'm talking about a 1988 movie and interpreting everything I describe differently.

Pardon my misunderstanding

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Am I think only one who somehow reads FPARN as "pon farr" for no good reason at all?