Why F2P Chat woes make me so angry...

I've been going out of my way to group with brand new f2p players. It's kinda difficult since they, y'know, can't answer tells or anything.

The way I've been doing so is by sending tells to players in the 'Search' window asking them if they'd like to group with me. If, after a minute or so they haven't responded, I'll send them an invite.

However, you're never given any kind of warning that a player can't send tells if you send them one and they don't have access.

This evening, using this 'hesitant blind invite' method, I grouped with a new storm corrupter in King's Row. She'd been playing the game for three days and was really enjoying it. She'd made a really good lizard woman costume and wrote an interesting bio.

I'd already run into a few frustrations trying to drop inspirations on her when she was low on health and being told she didn't have permissions to trade. But what really took the cake for me was when I sent her a tell praising her costume and bio. I realized after a few seconds she probably wouldn't be able to respond. However a few seconds later she sent a message to the group window saying, "Thank you! I'm sorry I can't figure out the tell interface."

"If you hit backspace, you can reply to tells," I responded. "But you may not have access to it if you're a free-to-play player."

"That's probably it. I'm poor. " was her response.

I grouped with her for quite a bit more during the evening, and was very careful to let her know exactly what was going on since she was a new player. The whole time I was seething.

By keeping BASIC chat functionality away from f2p players, I realized, the restrictions are also making the game more difficult for me. I'm a paying player, a 'VIP', yet I have to go through EXACTLY the same hoops to communicate that f2p players do.

This needs to be fixed.

In addition to a 'Free to Play' channel, we need an option like 'Receive tells from free players'. At the very least, if I, the paying VIP, send a tell to a free player, they should be able to respond to me.

I would love it if free players could REPLY to tells. Even that would make a huge difference.

i think the best option that f2p players have right now to get attention is the help channel since local is only good if your around a lot of other people

personally with how this is set up the "help" channel should be changed to a "lft" channel to help newer players communicate with everyone else, global channels would still be my first option however when forming stuff like tf, but if i saw someone saying lft in the help window then i would invite them

I have to agree with the OP. It is also concerning that we may get a big group of players jumping in and then leaving because they couldn't team etc. due to lack of communication.

I would really love to hear why the devs decided to implement the new model this way. I am not a huge gamer and I could be missing something. Anyway, I think this oversight or error could be a HUGE mistake by the devs...it just seems they did all this work to change the business model and forgot the one of the biggest pieces.

It'd be great if they added server-wide teaming channels and allow free players to REPLY to tells. I also wish they promoted this as much as they promoted GOING ROGUE. This would be worth while most of GR turned out to be very weak or a bust.

Despite the server lights showing a significant increase of population over before F2P, I'm having a significantly harder time finding teams. I suspect this is because as zones are capped fast, having a % of the population unable to talk is going to reduce the available options for teaming, if one isn't proactive. Broadcast is often dead even though there's four instances of Atlas Park each of them with 50 players...

Before anyone suggests that, I'm not interested in forming my own team or joining a global chat channel. This is a mere statement of team availability before/after F2P for people who aren't willing to do that stuff.

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I couldn't care less about RMT, I was here during the supposed worst parts and it was merely more than a blip on the radar, blown out of proportion by some forum goers. If you ask me, stopping F2P players from communicating in tells and broadcast is throwing out the baby with the bath water.

being able to reply to a tell should be an ability for sure.
And a channel (not help) for them would be good as well.

Freems need the ability to reply to tells.

Players that send tells need to be informed if someone cannot reply.

That is all.

Since the tech is already in the game to limit emails to those on either your local or global friends list, how about extending that to the tells too?

I was pretty dismayed last week after befriending a free player to find that he still couldn't respond to me after doing both of the above. Like others, I'm using the friends channel as a ghetto chat system but it's far from ideal.

Jagged summed it up nicely. This has been discussed several time during the beta, and I think there's a general agreement amongst players that this needs to be implemented. It's probably not trivial to do, but hopefully the devs are at least considering it.

Years ago, back when the silly idea of disabling hero-villain chat by default still existed, when you sent a cross-faction tell and the person had enemy chat disabled, you got a little system message telling you "The person you are trying to contact has enemy chat disabled." or something to this effect. This needs to happen with Free players.

Beyond that, Free players need to be given the right to respond to tells. At lest one response per one incoming tell. I'm not sure what the technicalities are around this, but I'm also not sure I really care, because this needs to happen. Unless it's functionally impossible, it needs to happen.

Finally, I'd like to give Free players the ability to at least chat and team with each other. Not necessarily with Premium players, but at least Free-to-Free. A while back, I got into a Free game that I liked, and I then I tried to get my friend into it. Turns out we can't chat or team with each other unless one of us pays, at which point we both essentially walked away.

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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.

If I were in control I'd want at least two things done with free-player tells:

• Allow free players to respond to tells to the person who contacted them.
• And allow free players to freely communicate to those on their server & global friends lists

The reason the chat restrictions exist is the game would be flooded with gold farm spammers if they could access our normal chat for free. That said, it would be nice if the game was smart enough to allow a free player to respond to a tell from someone who sends them one first.

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Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

As someone else who's been making an effort to team with new players, I still want to know why we can't drop Inspirations on Freems... That's just a silly and annoying limitation all around, and one that did NOT exist for old trial accounts.

I see no issue in allowing free players to use normal chat functions (ie, local, broadcast, lfp, help and tell) and simply implement a "reject tells from free players" option for those high and mighty VIP's who wat nothing to do with free players.

I realise the restrictions are in place not only to encourage sales but to keep gold farmers at bay but the level of restriction is ridiculous.

Especially when you consider that most people play F2P games because they can't afford to subscribe, all you're doing by being so restricting is pushing customers away, rather than encouraging them to spend.

Just my view, please spare the flames.

It could be the size of the inspirations. Free accounts only have access to 'small' inspirations, and its not until t8 that you finally gain access to 'large' inspirations as well.

While I can see how not having access to tells can suck, you can always add the person on your friends list, and chat to them via 'friends' channel (which free accounts have access to) you can also team with them, and chat via team channel. Especially if your running missions together, team should be used pretty often.