One Subscription. All Games.

When Smed said there was a lot of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) he might have pointed at SOE for causing a good portion of it. The whole 500 SC a month versus a single, use it or lose it freebie worth up to 2,000 SC was a bigger deal than you are admitting.

In a world where everything in the store was 2,000 SC, the once a month plan would be great.

In EQII… and the thread in the EQII forums was pretty packed with complaints as well, so you can’t just blame PS2 players… where most items are under 1,000 and many are 100 to 200, things can look different. I could still only buy one item under the use it or lose it plan, be it a 2,000 SC item or a 50 SC item. But people will feel like they have “lost” 1,950 SC if they buy the latter.

Meanwhile, I could buy 5x 100 SC items under the old plan. Or I could just accrue SC until something I wanted came up, including items over 2,000 SC. My own problem with the SC store was just finding something I would want to buy, which is why I have a pile of Station Cash sitting on my SOE account.

Add in restrictions on the new plan, like no Player Studio items and other potential off-limits areas, and you can see how this might get people riled up. It was change… which people hate in general… with some easily understood downsides.

All in all SOE, with their need to fix their currency after screwing it up with too many heavy discounts, thought they had a decent plan but really didn’t seem to think it all the way through… or look willing to stick to their guns, which seems to support the “thinking through” conjecture. They can make unpopular decisions. They have in the past, like raising Station Access to $29.99. But when they aren’t strong on something, they seem to fold pretty quick.

“There’s no way I’m saving 4 months to get a big item, and there’s no way I’m paying a sub AND paying that much to get one of those big items.”

I would buy into that sentiment if you had previously complained about having to save up SC for a purchase. Did that even matter to you before this came up? Or are you now throwing a fit of your own about something you never actually had in the first place? (Courtesy, as I noted, of SOE not thinking this through before opening their collective mouths.)

In the end, I do not believe this deal really matters one way or another. If there is a game you really want to play, you’ll pay whatever. I didn’t see you complain about the price of those Landmark pre-order packs. You were all in for the $99 Trailblazer pack right away. But buying some SC for something you really want is a non-starter? You aren’t convincing me.

But if you don’t want to play a game, if you don’t find it fun, then no incentive plan in the world is going to make you enjoy it. Pricing and fun are completely disconnected and there is a long history of people, including myself, rationalizing a price based on fun.

It seems like SOE is saying to players here is a big slice of pie, but instead of an additional 4 bonbons you can only have three, and the players respond…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYvLahRzabs

Hmm. Keen, the fact the discussion was on Reddit may be more a reflection of things than the PS2 player base at large.

That said, after talking to someone I know that actually does play PS2…the issue is that there’s no actual interest in the 2000SC items as compared to distributing the stipend across multiple items. From the sounds of things, the Planetside players would have been *far* more interested a Loyalty Point setup similar to DCUO (given that one of the primary aspects of this whole thing is stopping the practice of subbing to one game, then spending the SC in another).

SOE has been known to change things on a whim due to player, may it be, complaints, requests and so on, basically when the community gets vocal. Some things for the good, others they just postpone, like selling character levels. I do think they try to keep the majority of players happy, they just make some really poor choices these days, then have to smooth things out. Which always seems to be the way of things lately.

Take a poll, not a gauge on posting on Twitter or reddit. It just causes too much of an uproar. I’m a huge fan of their games but I think they go about changes the wrong way, like slowly peeling a bandaid off. ..

However, I am excited to hear about the possible sub changes. I’d play more of my games on a regular basis. The free sc, eh… I see both sides, but if I really want an item I’ll just buy it. I won’t mind at all supporting a vast portfolio of games I love, especially if the change goes through.

Rolling with what Gankatron said, I can’t even begin to understand that the following two groups exist on the same planet as me and each other:

Group A: F2P players, who refuse to play a subscription game because when they are paying monthly subscription they feel like they are wasting money whenever they aren’t logged in. If you don’t believe these people exist, I can link you any article from Massively on a sub game and you will find several in the comments section.

Group B: People exposed to me today by Gankatron, who apparently pay $15 a month and don’t even log in every month? Complaining that they need to log in once a month to collect their funny money?

Yes, I can see that for pure PS2 players the change in the deal would be unsettlingly for those that preferred the hoarding situation over being granted a monthly larger CS reward allowance; at least they got what they wanted in the end.

Nonetheless, I believe that is one of Keen’s points, that a vocal community who I envision represents a minority opinion will set policy for the greater community.

In the end I really won’t fault the screamers for screaming as much as I do the policymakers for listening.

As far as the analogy goes, and of course most analogies do not stand up to close inspection, I believe the most troublesome aspect of the voter’s rights situation you describe would be the final inequity between members of the citizenry, in both situations; in other words regardless of whether the final result was relatively more or less punitive, it still was a punitive result, and the parades on the streets would eventually turn into marches on DC.

Why this is not an adequate analogy for this situation is that after the proposed change no member of the SOE community would have been unequally rewarded or punished depending upon one’s SC reward preference; again in other words that tinge of inequity that gives emotional strength to your analogy is absent in this situation.

I in turn would propose this alternate analogy, it would be like a gym deciding that now a membership at a specific location also allowed use of the facilities at any locations, and instead of a voucher for 5 powerbars that they could save and cash in at any time, they would get up to 20 powerbars/month, but the voucher was only good for that month of issuance.

Is it a less favorable reward to be allowed to have up to 20 powerbars/month that need to be eaten in 30 days, as opposed to 5/month that you can eat at your leisure? I suppose it depends upon if one enjoys a good year’s end powerbar binge, but I am hard put to consider either scenario punitive.

…and one final highly pertinent question, how do I upload an image to my Soviet bloc grey anonymous avatar?

tis odd they changed it for sure

Thanks guys for the info.

I was worried that my comments might be taken lightly without a sufficiently dignified avatar.

Pretty petulant and disengenuous to anthropomorphise an entire community – they are not hive minds.

I’m also pretty sure there’s a shed-load more PS2 players than EQ since the server I was on when I played was usually rammed to capacity (several thousand).

Personally I’ll take a look at the offer when they finalise how it works: I’d like the chance to dip back into PS2 but also try out future incarnations of EQ for example.

Perhaps we should be happy that a company listened to a vocal minority over the masses?

Isn’t that basically what we are hoping for, we deluded old retro MMO gamers?