Leveling Pacts

Any word on when/if they are coming back? I thought they'd have fixed them by now.

Pretty sure they weren't broken. I think they just took them off when freedom hit so you couldn't level pact a toon with a second freebie toon and pl yourself to 50. (yes, i'm guilty. was too tempting with the $1.99 account deal they had just before freedom. i'm a bad person, et al.)
Would be shocked if they came back.

I would be shocked if they don't come back. I would expect restrictions, possibly as significant as pacts being VIP-only, but I do expect them to come back.

Not really 'gone' per se. I still have several pacted duos with my wife that are working as they always have. We just can't create any new pacts.

Really, leveling pacts aren't needed as much anymore thanks to super sidekicking. You don't have to worry about matching exemplars to mentors anymore, and even if you exemplar you get 2 or 3 more powers than you otherwise would have had at that level.

People with varying play rates don't have as many problems adventuring with each other anymore, which was the problem pacts were meant to fix. With that in mind, I wouldn't be surprised if they never came back.

Yes, but why do you want to share progress with offline toons? The "intended" purpose of the feature wasn't so you could powerlevel a character while they were logged off, it was to make it easier for people who wanted to play together to do so. It removed the problem of "if I play without my friend, we'll be mismatched and won't be able to play together later". The upgraded sidekick system makes that a non-issue in most circumstances, so I agree with Robotech that it wouldn't be surprising to see the feature never return.

Not to say that I don't want it to return, quite the opposite. But I could believe that they might decide not to do it, especially with its potential for powerleveling.

If I remember some of the discussions correctly, part of what they were trying to figure out how to handle was making it apply only to VIP character.

There are a few problems with implementing that solution that are likely holding up their solutions.

Both players are VIP, create new characters and level pact them, one or both of the accounts goes Premium. It's possible that neither player intended to go Premium but simply lapsed for a few hours (or a day) for various reasons.

How do you handle that? If you simply break the pact, that causes a problem if it was just a matter of someone not getting the sub renewed in time. I've seen several times that people have commented that their sub lapsed for a few hours for one reason or another. Sometimes it is not from anything a player did wrong either.

If you break the level pact in that situation you risk losing two subscribers and possibly more when word spreads.

So how long of a grace period do you give if a sub lapses? And what do they do about the pacted XP being gained while that sub is Premium? Even if it's only a few hours, a character can gain quite a few levels while pacted in just a few hours and then it's supposed to be shared with the pact-mate when they log back in.

I'm not sure that they have the tech to just suspend the Premium account from gaining any pacted XP while it is Premium. If they did, they'd likely have implemented it already.

I think they want to find a solution to bring it back, but haven't found a way to do it so that it can only work for VIP accounts and not penalize people for small lapses in subscription time, especially inadvertent lapses or something out of control of the players.

OK, I have just confirmed - my second account going temporarily Premium when my cc company froze my card for suspicious activity did NOT break the leveling pact between characters on my two accounts.

That said, I didn't log the character in on the second account while it was Premium, so maybe any "pact breakage" never occurred since I reactivated the VIP status of that account.