Limited Rewards For Free Players

Thanks for reminding me of the scumbag woman that pulled that very stunt
at a local club store I used to live near. (A friend whose a cop told me about this) Seems she was showing up with her kids every day for several months and slowly going round and round the store hitting all the free sample food stands with her 2 kids and then leaving without buying anything.

No one actually cared about what she was doing, but one day the store changed it's policy and cut back drastically on giving out free samples. When scumbag came in with the kids for free food and found out she went ballistic. Started a huge scene at the CS desk and screaming at the manager demanding compensation etc.

Just to shut the scumbag up and get her out of the store the manager decided to refund the membership fee. He got her name and went to pull it up in their computer, but he couldn't find it. He asked for her husbands name, and she said she wasn't married. So he asked for her membership card to pull up the account.

Turns out the scumbag was using someone else's membership card. The manager called the cops and while waiting for them to show up apologized and said there was a computer problem causing a delay. When the cops (my friend) showed up and questioned her about her identity it was discovered she had stolen her grandmothers cards, including a couple of credit cards. Needless to say she was arrested.

The problem with the slippery slope is, if it WAS false, there'd have to be one LAST step.
Which one is the last step? Is this the last step? Will YOU tell the next one asking for just one tiny step that they cannot have it because the last step taken was clearly the last step?
Won't they then say that is ludicrously hyperbolic, slippery slope fallacy, and their tiny step can never hurt?

I agree that the current restrictions for freebies are pretty harsh, but I follow the argument that 5$ is not to much to buy this game for a lifetime, and the spammer issue. I think that the goal is not only to keep spammers out because 5$ is so much money though, but to make people register with valid credit card info, so that they can instantly buy when they see something nice, instead of then being too lazy to fill out all that credit card info first.
DCUO does pretty much the same btw.

My point was: This is nothing more than a slippery slope, and assumes far, far too much to be a reasonable argument. To be perfectly honest, I'm finding it hard to take it seriously at all since the two "extremes" as you've helpfully outlined are apparently either the game dies, or people act more annoying on the forums.

And if that someone doesn't have a credit card or another valid means of online payment? Or if that someone just plainly does not have the money? Let's keep things in perspective here - we're talking about chat channels. Not Praetoria, or First Ward, or Beam Rifle, or the Mission Architect. Just basic communication systems. I just don't see how wanting some improved means of talking to other people for free players is tantamount to stealing from Paragon Studios.

I'm not speaking to you in particular here, Claws, but I'm honestly a bit shocked by some of the posts in this thread. For all the abrupt claims of entitlement being levied against free players (who, might I mention, have not and can not contribute to this discussion, so I'm not sure where those claims are even coming from), there's been so much more verifiable elitism displayed here by VIPs.

See, now this is an angle I can at least understand. Not so much having a valid CC for impulse buys, but rather for security purposes. RMTs are less likely to be signing up lots and lots of accounts with valid CCs, after all.

I still stand by my original point though, which is that restricting free players from interacting with the community as harshly as it is now is bad for drawing players in and keeping them interested. Especially when those restrictions were very badly cobbled together without further thoughts of usability and accessibility.

Maybe I'd be less sore over it if the system was revamped to make it clear that the person you're sending tells to cannot respond back. Or just allow free players to respond to tells, just not send them. Or if the /Help channel of my favored server wasn't a huge cluster-mess of fact, opinion, and falsehood.

They can buy a prepaid credit card over the counter at many stores or even use paypal.

If their budget is that tight then they have more important things to be worrying about than not being able to chat in the game.

If I may use your own phrase, let's keep things in perspective. We're talking about a one time expenditure of $5 bucks, not a monthly subscription. If they were charging $5 bucks each month I'd say you had a valid argument.

And as I keep saying, players aren't going to get to the point where they feel like spending $5 if they're treated like dirt to begin with.

Would they feel less like dirt if the company went back to the old business model where they had the same chat restrictions, but could only play for free for 2 weeks, couldn't get a character above level 14, and had an inf cap of 50k?