We Paid for These Paragon Points, Mr. Positron

Incarnates, as well as all content linked to it.
Exalted.
Going Rogue and all its functions.
Access to First Ward's content.
Instant access to Signature Story Arcs.
Time Manipulation and future power sets and zones not put solely on the market.
Epic Archetypes.
Creating Super Groups.
12 slots per server.

You get all that without having to spend any more than the subscription. Even at tier 9, non-VIPs can not get all that. Sure, Premiums can buy points to get some of that, but they are spending far more than you are to get only about half of that, and they're not getting 400-550 extra points on top of it.

You're not getting any less.

And you still have not answered my question about people like me that will have to wait for a month and a half to get more points. And will miss even more sales every week because of it. Of course, you are also ignoring the fact that even if they had given you your points on October 1st, right on time, you would still have missed some sales. They have weekly sales, you get your points once a month. By definition, you will have 3 weeks where sales are occurring and you do not receive points.

And seeing you complaining because you are receiving your points at a faster rate than 2/3s of the rest of the subscribers to the game for the next few months, doesn't really make me want to take you very seriously.

No. They never ever said that you would receive your Paragon Points frontloaded at the start of a multi-month subscription. The original plan was for us to receive Paragon Reward Tokens in that manner. A 12 month subscription would get us 13 Reward Tokens when we paid. They discovered just before Headstart that the system would not allow that to work, because it is tied to the old Veteran Reward system. They apologized for the change and are making changes to the way the Tier 9 rewards are cycled, and possibly getting the Token system to work the way they originally wanted.

If you have at any time believed that you were to receive your Paragon Points frontloaded for a multi-month subscription, you were either mis-informed by someone not a Dev, or you did not read the provided information closely enough.

So you mean that I can buy one year's sub, not get my year's worth of tokens (which are technically paid for) with which I use to advance on the Rewards Program Tier where VIP T9 only items are rotating for "a limited time" and that the only way I could get those right now if I lacked impulse control would be to spend more money on points in the store to unlock the tiers?


I'm not holding my breath for that "fix" for the coding/database issue.

The subscription packages CHANGED. What subscribers get now is a different package to what was available before Freedom. As they are included in the price of a subscription, they ARE paid for. Just because you don't compehend that, doesn't change reality.

And I didn't say they're breaking the law, so quit making nonesense up in a pathetic attempt to back up your rather weak argument. I listed a FACT under UK law.

When you buy something, UNLESS they state up front that part of what you buy will be issued at some point AFTER payment, they are legally required to grant EVERYTHING you paid for a the time you paid for it.

Whether Paragon are actually complying with that law or not I really can't be bothered to check because, as I've already said several times, I'm not particularly bothered by the small delay (my payment date is the 9th), and I don't plan to ever buy anything from the store that isn't covered by the points I already pay for as part of my monthly subscription fee. I'm merely adding my 2p's worth to the debate.

Going Rogue is already mine and it is available to premiums as a purchase, so I won't have to go w/o it
Time Manipulation is already mine ans is available on the market
Epic Archetypes are already mine and are available
Server slots are available on the market

It doesn't seem like I would be missing out on all that much if I spend my annual sub on points instead of a sub. I'd get what? About 15000 pts in a lump?

I have the tech for the temporary fix for account issues while they sort things out in the background. It's so cutting edge people may not have thought of applying it to an accounts issue:



;-)

To paraphrase the EULA portion that is standard to all MMO's. "Game play may change without notice."

Basically they warn you up front that anything and everything about what features you have access to and how it all plays may change at anytime for any reason. So yes they state up front that any part of your game experience is subject to change. All MMO's do this. None of them promise that things will never be taken away, changed, added, or otherwise modified.

Not exactly. Basically they do heavily undermine any attempt on your part to use a lawsuit. They are not binding in that they can't really restrict you from doing something but ... They can also be used to show that you are aware of something like the fact that nothing in an MMO is set in concrete and all of it may change without warning or notice. Which pretty much demolishes any attempt to use a civil suit to pursue remediation because your game play experience changed.

Oh some companies have tried to enforce EULAs in courts and failed but the reverse is true also. Some customers have tried to sue and had their suits fail due to the existence of the EULA. It pretty much serves as a first line of defense protecting against lawsuits. And in countries where the loser pays it definitely acts to discourage random lawsuits.

Assuming you purchased GR before the Headstart, you wouldn't even have to buy the components of it. But you would have to purchase Time Manip, EATs, and Server slots. Also First Ward, if you are interested in that. And of course you would lose Incarnate stuff completely.

If you are only interested in playing a few characters on 1 or 2 servers, and the cost of buying all the stuff you would need to in order to play those characters doesn't bother you, then you should drop your sub. I don't want to pay the cost to open up the characters I have on all the servers I play on. Plus the content I would need to buy. I prefer getting all of that stuff for my sub and using the extra 4800 Points for other stuff.

Yeah, your Reward Tokens are "technically" paid for. So were my Veteran Rewards when I purchased an annual sub before Freedom launched. But the system was set up for me to not get them until the actual time had passed. That was the set up and I didn't mind it.

I would prefer that the Reward Tokens could be passed out at the start of my sub period. But stuff happens. And I think that believing the Devs/Marketing deliberately set out to lie about what happened, knowing it would piss off players to have what was supposed to happen changed at the last minute, is moronic.

And there is absolutely no mention that you are specifically buying the points. All reference to those is that they are free, so unless you prove otherwise, and yes, I mean actual documented proof, not some half-handed interpretation that completely misses the word "free", all you said is a moot argument.

Exactly.


I'll be honest here. I've run out of patience with Paragon Studios. Their continual mistakes fly in the face of ANY sensible company, it's almost as if they're trying their best to chase off customers.

They ARE holding all of our toons as hostage.
So it's that's the big difference between this service industry and the many other service industries. We can't just haul our toons to some one else's place of business and carry on.

The relationship between MMOs and their customers would be a lot different and more pleasant for the customers if we could just pack up our toons and take them to another company's business.

That was in a book I read, quite interesting notion.

Gone to the Americans.

The tricky part here is that you (and me) buy things in a different country. I would not be surprised if UK law is not valid when you do so.

UK's distance selling regulations apply to all online transactions, even when outside the country. UK laws have precedence as the transaction takes place in the UK, no matter where the sellers are located.

They have in effect a monopoly on w/e their game is. If you want to play CoX there's nowhere else in the world where you can get it.
That's some of what separates this industry from other service industries. In many other industries, the products and services are more easily or more adequately substitutable. Part of what makes MMOs less fungible than some other services is the investment in our characters. It's not just the awards an rewards that our toons have earned--those could theoretically be added to a new char somewhere else--but the learning curve and time spent acquiring information, experience and technique that is often very context specific to the game in which it was acquired.


That all implies an interesting business model for MMOs--what if NCSoft or Paragon or whoever, licensed their MMO to different franchises who administered the game? You could play Company A's MMO1 or company B's MMO1 where company A and company B would be platform providers of a sort perhaps providing a platform for games from multiple MMO makers.

The game with hobbits (my these forum restrictions are dumb) did exactly that, where their European operations were entirely separate and run by a different company.

The problem they ran into was they recently merged the operations back, which was a pretty huge and ugly mess.