City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

Premium IO's?

8_Ball

By 8_Ball,
Posted on: 2012-02-21 19:46 in CoH and CoV General Discussions

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Moonlighter View Post
We are not talking about new players though.
No we are talking about experienced players that know damn well that MMO's change frequently, especially when there is a switch to an F2P business model. Only a [pancake] with entitlement issues assumes he will get the same access for free as if he were still paying a subscription fee.

 

Posted

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Originally Posted by BellaStrega View Post
Because totally the best use of one's respecs is to clear out all of the IOs so you can slot SOs and play your characters on a premium account. Right...
When your choices are to play the character as is with no IO access cuz you won't cough up at least $2 bucks for an IO license or use respecs to pull the unusable IO's off the build and reslot with DO's/SO's. Darn right.

Quote:
And also because letting your often costly IOs go up in smoke for a relative pittance in a respec is something people are likely to do.
If they don't have access to the consignment house via either license or previously earned Veteran Rewards that were converted to Paragon Rewards when Freedom launched they can't sell their IO's anyway.

Oops, you forgot about that.

Quote:
I would assume that people wouldn't typically suggest solutions that can cost up to 8550 points (19 packs of five unslotters each, ~100 dollars) to avoid paying a $2 or $15 monthly fee.

Every suggestion you've made aside from using the alternate build, requires more overhead and/or money than simply buying the invention license. In other words, you're not really helping.
Learn to do math. Free costs nothing.

Veteran Respecs cost nothing. They were earned on active accounts before Freedom launched. Returning players can have as many as 5 of them on each and every character. Veteran Respecs were discontinued when Freedom Launched and replaced by Paragon Reward Respecs

Trial Respecs and Patron Respecs cost nothing. They are earned ingame by running missions. Players can earn up to 3 Trial Respecs and 1 Patron respec.

Free Respecs by their very name are FREE and cost the player nothing.

Holiday Respecs cost nothing. They are earned by turning in Candy Canes to the Candy Keeper. You can get Candy Canes for free by participating in the Holiday Event. Heck you don't even have to fight anything. You can farm presents in lower level zones.

Only Respec Recipes might cost a player real money if his previously active account hasn't earned enough Vet Rewards to unlock access to the Consignment House.

Secondary Builds - Cost nothing to use, and returning players whose accounts have been inactive more than 3+ years like Moonlighter's friends, won't have anything slotted in their secondary builds because Secondary builds weren't added to the game until Dec 2008.

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The OP's solutions are to go ahead and buy the license, upgrade back to VIP, use alternate builds for SOs if available, or not be able to play his characters. Respecing over and over again to recover IOs so he can use them later, buying 95 enhancement unslotters, etc. are just not practical solutions.
And that's the sacrifice one makes when one chooses to play for free. Suck it up like an adult and deal with it. There are consequences one has to live with when they make decisions.

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Why I think it's disingenuous: Your suggestions are not helpful and I can't imagine that you don't know that, given the sarcastic manner in which you've delivered them.
No, the only ones being disingenuous here are you and others that repeatedly ignore solutions that are free and insist that it would cost money to use them.


Edit: corrected spelling errors

 

Posted

Maybe the trick to getting people to pay for their IOs isn't to say "NO! You can't have your IOs! Go slot some SOs instead", but rather "Check this out! Remember how awesome you were with IOs? Hey, the IO license is super cheap too!" How? At the same tier that you get permanent Auction House access, grant an Invention License too. Not the permanent one that Tier 7 gives, but just a regular 30 day IO License, granted through the Reward System, as a one-shot Account item.

We know that a character can do something in-game and unlock a license that opens IOs on the full account; that's how the merit-based one worked when it was still around.

It may not get every "I WANT MAH IOs!!" player to pay for a license, but the free sample is a tried and proven method - it would get some paying.

@Roderick

 

Posted

Some would say I tend to lean heavily towards the give-everything-to-everyone-for-nothing point of view, and yet even I think that what is currently given to Freemiums is more than fair. Indeed, as someone upthread stated, perhaps they give away just a bit too much.

The temporary free-sample type idea doesn't sound bad, though.

Goodbye may seem forever
Farewell is like the end
But in my heart's the memory
And there you'll always be
-- The Fox and the Hound

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Knights View Post
Even that is going to take a long time just to use IO's that I've earned throughout my game time.
I... I don't get it.

See. Prior to this change, if you wanted to play your characters in any way whatsoever you had to pay $15/month.

Now, you can play them without paying, but they aren't full-powered unless you're paying.

How is this worse?

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Forbin_Project View Post
If they don't have access to the consignment house via either license or previously earned Veteran Rewards that were converted to Paragon Rewards when Freedom launched they can't sell their IO's anyway.

Oops, you forgot about that.
I forgot about what? I had access to the market when I didn't have access to my IOs. Which, I should add, I didn't complain about. I just played characters without any IOs until I got paid and upgraded.

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Learn to do math. Free costs nothing.
Learn to read English. I said "requires more overhead and/or money." In other words, your suggestions are time-consuming and require pointlessly complicated procedures or costly.

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No, the only ones being disingenuous here are you and others that repeatedly ignore solutions that are free and insist that it would cost money to use them.
You either misunderstood or are misrepresenting what I wrote. I said it would cost money or simply be too much work. As in, the overhead necessary to manage multiple respecs just to reclaim ten IOs at a time, and finding a way to store them may not cost money, but it requires a pointless degree of work.

The guy can choose not to take the only reasonable advice he's been given, which is on him. If he doesn't want to spend the $2/month to get the license, there's not much he can do about his problem except I guess complain and be sad, but did you really think it was clever to post exactly the same thing multiple times just to make a single point?

Elsegame: Champions Online: @BellaStrega ||| Battle.net: Ashleigh#1834 ||| Bioware Social Network: BellaStrega ||| EA Origin: Bella_Strega ||| Steam: BellaStrega ||| The first Guild Wars: Kali Magdalene ||| The Secret World: BelleStarr (Arcadia)

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Forbin_Project View Post
Funny how you keep forgetting that an IO license only costs $2 bucks.
Funny how all you seem to be capable of doing is giving a snarky response.

Some of these people spend ages patching, realise the first character they log in (their favourite with all the IOs) is unplayable, log out/uninstall and give up, and we only find out months later IRL by chance that they ever came back, and meanwhile they've spread a load of bad publicity about the F2P offering. They never find out about the cheap license.

Many people playing free are doing so because they don't want to commit any cash to the game for a while (I've had a couple of unemployed friends who did so and resubbed when they got another job). They knew that they might be resubbing, so were not going to ruin IO builds just so they could play them in the interim. If you lose their interest by making the toons they want to play unplayable, maybe they never come back.

Also burning one of their say 4 or 5 character unlocks on a toon that's unplayable is not good.

What's to be lost by making IOd toons playable at SO levels ? which is what the content is balanced around.

Edit: also most of my friends are european subscribers to the US servers. If you're short of cash hence buying points in small quantities, you can get hit with a flat currency exchange charge each time you buy points which with the European currency weakness makes the license cheap but not as cheap for us as you think.

It's true. This game is NOT rocket surgery. - BillZBubba

 

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Originally Posted by seebs View Post
I... I don't get it.

See. Prior to this change, if you wanted to play your characters in any way whatsoever you had to pay $15/month.

Now, you can play them without paying, but they aren't full-powered unless you're paying.

How is this worse?
Because it doesn't appease their entitlement issues.

Just look how they consistently ignore/dismiss the free alternatives and insist the only resolutions cost money and imply that the pittance ($2 dollars a month) that it would cost if someone actually chose to spend money is too high.

 

Posted

I think this is a framing issue.

When a game is "free to play!!!!" but then imposes restrictions, those feel like restrictions and limitations that contradict the premise that it is free to play; there are kinds of play that aren't free.

If you had a subscription-based game, with a "limited free trial!", that wouldn't feel the same to players.

So first, people are coming in, unaware of the fine print, the existence of IO licenses, or the fact that subscribing gives everything. They are told they can play for free, they try to, their character is broken. That's freaky.

And they're comparing that to what they had before, not to what they would have had before had they not been paying.

 

Posted

I was actually surprised by how many things I did have when I logged in as premium. Was really nice, actually.

Elsegame: Champions Online: @BellaStrega ||| Battle.net: Ashleigh#1834 ||| Bioware Social Network: BellaStrega ||| EA Origin: Bella_Strega ||| Steam: BellaStrega ||| The first Guild Wars: Kali Magdalene ||| The Secret World: BelleStarr (Arcadia)

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by seebs View Post
I think this is a framing issue.

When a game is "free to play!!!!" but then imposes restrictions, those feel like restrictions and limitations that contradict the premise that it is free to play; there are kinds of play that aren't free.

If you had a subscription-based game, with a "limited free trial!", that wouldn't feel the same to players.

So first, people are coming in, unaware of the fine print, the existence of IO licenses, or the fact that subscribing gives everything. They are told they can play for free, they try to, their character is broken. That's freaky.

And they're comparing that to what they had before, not to what they would have had before had they not been paying.
If this was back when DDO first went to a hybrid business model I'd agree with you 110%. However this isn't the case. The MMO community as a whole, has had several years to get used to the idea that F2P in MMO's (DDO, LOTRO, CO, STO, AoC, DCUO, Warhammer, WOW, Lineage II, Dungeon Runners to name a few) doesn't automatically mean unlimited/unrestricted access when playing for free.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Forbin_Project View Post
If this was back when DDO first went to a hybrid business model I'd agree with you 110%. However this isn't the case. The MMO community as a whole, has had several years to get used to the idea that F2P in MMO's (DDO, LOTRO, CO, STO, AoC, DCUO, Warhammer, WOW, Lineage II, Dungeon Runners to name a few) doesn't automatically mean unlimited/unrestricted access when playing for free.
Point of order:

Not everyone who tries this game comes from "the MMO community", whatever that is.
Hell, I play this MMO, for a half decade in fact, and I don't identify myself as part of "the MMO community".


.

 

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Originally Posted by Johnny_Butane View Post
Point of order:

Not everyone who tries this game comes from "the MMO community", whatever that is.
Hell, I play this MMO, for a half decade in fact, and I don't identify myself as part of "the MMO community".


.
This is true, of all the MMOs I've played (which is not a huge list but probably high single figures), this is the one where I've come across most "one MMO only" or "first MMO" players.

It's true. This game is NOT rocket surgery. - BillZBubba

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Johnny_Butane View Post
Point of order:

Not everyone who tries this game comes from "the MMO community", whatever that is.
Hell, I play this MMO, for a half decade in fact, and I don't identify myself as part of "the MMO community".


.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Minotaur View Post
This is true, of all the MMOs I've played (which is not a huge list but probably high single figures), this is the one where I've come across most "one MMO only" or "first MMO" players.

If they have a pre-existing account they are part of the MMO community regardless of how they personally regard themselves, and even if this is the only MMO they've played, they know from personal experience how quickly MMO's change. Thus they know that things will be different when they return from an absence.

 

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Originally Posted by Minotaur View Post
What's to be lost by making IOd toons playable at SO levels ? which is what the content is balanced around.
Building sandcastles. People in this thread have clearly stated that they absolutely do not want to play since they lost ther IO _set bonuses_. Give them SO level access, and the first thing they are going to say is, "why don't i have the set bonuses i spent so much time/money/effort to get".

Sandcastles. No matter what you do, they get washed away, and the tide of angry "I want" free players will never cease.

-------
Hew in drag baby

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Forbin_Project View Post
If they have a pre-existing account they are part of the MMO community regardless of how they personally regard themselves, and even if this is the only MMO they've played, they know from personal experience how quickly MMO's change. Thus they know that things will be different when they return from an absence.
That's no excuse to treat them like rubbish and pile sarcasm on them.

Elsegame: Champions Online: @BellaStrega ||| Battle.net: Ashleigh#1834 ||| Bioware Social Network: BellaStrega ||| EA Origin: Bella_Strega ||| Steam: BellaStrega ||| The first Guild Wars: Kali Magdalene ||| The Secret World: BelleStarr (Arcadia)

 

Posted

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Originally Posted by BellaStrega View Post
That's no excuse to treat them like rubbish and pile sarcasm on them.
These are internet gaming forums. Isn't that how these things work?

 

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Originally Posted by Chase_Arcanum View Post
These are internet gaming forums. Isn't that how these things work?
It shouldn't be how things work. "It's the internet" is just an excuse.

Elsegame: Champions Online: @BellaStrega ||| Battle.net: Ashleigh#1834 ||| Bioware Social Network: BellaStrega ||| EA Origin: Bella_Strega ||| Steam: BellaStrega ||| The first Guild Wars: Kali Magdalene ||| The Secret World: BelleStarr (Arcadia)

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by BellaStrega View Post
That's no excuse to treat them like rubbish and pile sarcasm on them.
In all truth reading the thread that only started to happen AFTER he was told the deal and then continued to express the entitlement deal.

The development team and this community deserved better than this from NC Soft. Best wishes on your search.

 

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Originally Posted by Darth_Khasei View Post
In all truth reading the thread that only started to happen AFTER he was told the deal and then continued to express the entitlement deal.
Like I said, he has an easy out and if he doesn't want to take it, that's on him. Is it really necessary to inflame things further by posting the same thing over and over again as if it were some clever form of sarcasm?

Elsegame: Champions Online: @BellaStrega ||| Battle.net: Ashleigh#1834 ||| Bioware Social Network: BellaStrega ||| EA Origin: Bella_Strega ||| Steam: BellaStrega ||| The first Guild Wars: Kali Magdalene ||| The Secret World: BelleStarr (Arcadia)

 

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A response from Z. Nice. All the GREAT points I have brought up, he never said nothing. Knights, you were heard.

 

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Originally Posted by BellaStrega View Post
Like I said, he has an easy out and if he doesn't want to take it, that's on him. Is it really necessary to inflame things further by posting the same thing over and over again as if it were some clever form of sarcasm?
Yeah it is but only in response to repeated entitlement posts.

The development team and this community deserved better than this from NC Soft. Best wishes on your search.

 

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Originally Posted by Zwillinger View Post
Hello Knights and welcome back to the Community.

I certainly understand your feedback. It's something I've passed along to the development and business teams prior to this. If anything, know your feedback is being heard.

That being said, as has been mentioned, the licenses are a mere 180 Paragon Points/Month. Also, I'm not sure when you left the game, but did you know that you can use an alternate build to play with as well? Visit any trainer and you can switch your active build to another one. Many of our returning players keep a SO/HO based build in that slot, in case they decide to revert to premium status from VIP.

Rest assured, all content available for Free/Premium players is balanced around Single Origin enhancements being used. Thanks to the adjusted difficulty option, our VIP/Premium players who have access to IO's can enjoy the same content at a higher difficulty, if they so choose.

Again, welcome back, and I will be sure to convey your sentiment along.
Thanks a bunch for the feedback. I did know you can use a different build, though would take me some time rebuild the powers in the right order and such. The only problem with it is that, my Hero won't have as much potential as it used to be. I know it's free to play, I realize there has to be some drawbacks and I understand that. I just wanted to know why they would do this. I'm fine with all the other restrictions such as me not being able to publish my missions in the AE, that is a downside for me but I could live with that. But my IO's made my character. Nonetheless I appreciate your feedback and and glad that I am being heard. I mean all of this in the nicest way and I wouldn't want to get attacked by people saying i'm asking for too much, but I just want to be heard, and let NCSoft know how I feel about it. Thanks again.

 

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Originally Posted by Darth_Khasei View Post
Yeah it is but only in response to repeated entitlement posts.
Excuses. Dude's probably just frustrated right now. I know I have my own moments, as do many on this forum.

Elsegame: Champions Online: @BellaStrega ||| Battle.net: Ashleigh#1834 ||| Bioware Social Network: BellaStrega ||| EA Origin: Bella_Strega ||| Steam: BellaStrega ||| The first Guild Wars: Kali Magdalene ||| The Secret World: BelleStarr (Arcadia)

 

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Originally Posted by BellaStrega View Post
Excuses. Dude's probably just frustrated right now. I know I have my own moments, as do many on this forum.
That's truth mate I require no excuse to convey same. YMMV.

The development team and this community deserved better than this from NC Soft. Best wishes on your search.