Dark Sweater

No they aren't. Go to the Freedom site, find me a place where IO's are mentioned.

See what I said above. What if the grocery store advertises that there's a sale for VIP's but Premium clients can buy produce at a discount, and it turns out they only get a discount on the rotten fruit?

Paragon isn't telling everything. Even a veteran subscriber here fell for the trap. Returning players who aren't frequenting this board will most likely fall for it.

I think you have a misunderstanding of the word "everything". The other I think you don't get is that you look at "free" players as freeloaders, instead of the customers or potential customers that they are.

Not at all. Look it up. Bait and switch is a manner of false advertising. It's the seller getting the customer to the store on false pretenses then trying to sell them a product. It's not exactly what's happening here but it's close enough.

I don't think that's a huge problem. CoH was never about the endgame, and people played it for years. CoH has a lot of other things going for it, and IMO it's one of the most fun games to play. There's no need to concentrate on the endgame because the road there is fun by itself, a lot less drudgery than in some other games. Add AE, and there's practically limitless play without a need for an endgame.

I never said all the responses on the thread were like about semantics. There was enough of that though, and I answered someone who discussed that same subject, so please read it in that context.

If I had a month of subscription for every time someone said this I wouldn't need Freedom.

Welcome to the world of semantics. People will argue for days what a particular combination of words means, even though it doesn't matter in the least, even though different people have a different understanding of it, and even though it's not directly related to the post. It's the easiest thing to do. Someone comes up with a detailed post containing ideas and titles it "Freedom? Hardly". Why waste time discussing details and ideas? Let's just discuss the word "Freedom".

I think it will come and go and eventually die after Freedom launches and anyone who wants to be Premium drops their subscription and loses forum access as a result.

Are you sure it didn't translate to "blue moon"?

Far as I remember we were told there would be ample advance notice of Freedom. Zwillinger referred to I21 as separate from Freedom (i.e., I21 is head start, Freedom is access to non-subscribers). Head start was said to come "very very soon".

Which just proves my point: nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

Yes, all the IO's you have slotted will be disabled, and contribute nothing, unless you're at reward level 7. Considering your forum registration date and the number of posts (which suggests you've been continuously active), I'd imagine you'll be at tier 7 or higher, so will have full access to IO's, crafting, etc.

People who aren't there yet will, like you, expect that their IO's will have some effect, but it will be as if these slots are empty.

Far from it. The table really has very limited information about what you'll be getting. You're a long time veteran, but assume for a moment you're at reward level 5 or 6. Now take a look at that table and, for good and for bad, it's missing a lot of details.

I'm saying "for good" because for example if you're tier 6 you'll be able to create story arcs on MA, and that's something you wouldn't expect, since it says "Limited" on MA, and even the Paragon Rewards details page only says "access to Mission Architect", which doesn't guarantee a thing except playing (which in fact is true for lower tiers).

On the other hand there's no mention at all (that I could find) on any page of IO's being disabled, and that's a more breaking change than anything else. If you're below reward level 7 and you drop your VIP status or come back as a returning player with IO'ed characters, your characters are gimped and you won't know it based on the info on the site.

Ah, sorry, that wasn't clear to me. You said the problem I mentioned was easy, then mentioned another problem which to me looked just as easy to solve. Therefore I figured you were generally in favour of this solution, just worried it might not be technically feasible. If that's your only worry, I don't think it's a serious one.

That's because you have VIP blindness. It's a common affliction which prevents you from seeing things from the POV of a returning player.

If you're not changing IO's to real SO's, which is what you suggest with your solution for dividing SO's, then there's no problem handling any level. You're in effect creating a new type of IO, a "gimped IO" (or Lo-O). Instead of hardcoding a conversion from an IO to a Lo-O, use a table that could handle conversion of any level IO to a reasonable Lo-O replacement. Frankly I think any replacement (including disabling) is a more complex solution than just keeping the IO's in place.

I think that's actually a good example of how much heels are limiting. You can see the effort she's putting into moving with them. It's obvious she has a lot of experience with them, but imagine how much more she could do without them.

Imagine her with super powers, hmmm... With 100x strength and high heels, the holes left behind when she walks...

I think incarnate content will not affect most returning players, it's just too new. IO's on the other hand are old, and while the game is fully playable with SO's, IO's are simply disabled, equaling no enhancement at all, so you'll come back to a character that might do a third of the damage or less (due to lower damage, accuracy, etc.) if it was heavily slotted with IO's. That's serious gimping.

(If IO's were replaced with SO's as some people suggested, the drop would probably be to just 70% instead of 20-30% for a high level heavily IO'ed character. It would be hard to do that right, considering the many IO's that enhance more than one attribute, but it would be something. My suggestion always was to just leave IO's as is and simply not allow slotting them. It'd IMO be just as effective or more so in getting money and less bug prone.)

The post you responded to explained that, and you're ignoring the details to make what you say sound true. As I said earlier, if Paragon let players come back with no access to their old characters, there would have been no problem. SOE did this with EQ2X, and me and others came back because we wanted to play again in that world. What Paragon is dangling in front of players is the ability to go back to play their old characters for free. Sure it's with limitations, but people only expect the limitations they're told about.

Unless Paragon puts "IO's = nothing", "IO'ed character = gimped" etc. in big bold letters on multiple places on the website (it's not mentioned now at all) then people will fully expect to be able to play their old characters. Those with IO's but no tier 7 rewards, which should be a significant percentage of returning players, will come back and find that if they want to continue to play their characters as they were they'd have to pay a subscription; not a one time purchase, not unlocks, but a monthly sum, for as long as they want to play these characters in the form they left them in (or until they spend a large enough sum of money to get to tier 7).

I never claimed it's the end of the universe. I'm not saying it'd drive out all returning players or even most of them. But it is a form of bait and switch, or something very close to it. Players would implicitly expect that after they cross any known barriers (buying AT's and character slots if necessary) they'd have access to playable characters. That's the bait. Then they discover they have to pay more. That's the switch.

Note that using the same credit card on three accounts would trigger the anti-fraud measures, far as I know. You might only get to two this time, but it might end up limiting you in the future. I think that the PayPal solution is better when it comes to not angering the NCsoft Store god.


Back to the original subject, but firstly let me apologise for nodding off around page 5 of the topic. Secondly I apologise for potentially repeating anything said on this thread or said by me in the past, and thirdly I apologise for apologising too much.

I feel that Freedom has a completely valid free to play model, and one people would enjoy playing. I played a little free here on the beta, but also considering my experience when I started (issue 4) and recently playing a trial on Live, it looks to me like free players could play this game for a long time without coming against any serious limitation. That's unlike other free games I played, namely DDO and EQ2X, where I felt that free was limiting (DDO due to lack of content, EQ2X mainly due to limited bag space).

I think that $5 is low enough to be an impulse buy, so anyone who feels that tier 2 offers considerably better options will go for that. I didn't feel like it was a problem paying $10 to SOE to get the extras that their Premium equivalent gave in EQ2X, once I decided that I was having enough fun and that this one time unlock would take away some hassles. You get less for your $5 here, but it's easier to spend $5 than $10, and you get 400PP for the store, whereas in EQ2X you only pay for the upgrade.

I also agree that many returning players (those with IO's but not tier 7) will be disappointed. The only reason I won't be too disappointed is that I've learned enough to know what to expect, have come to terms with it, and have decided the solution would be to play new characters. But most returning players will want to play their old characters (that's what initially got me excited about Freedom), and they'll be gimped. The players will have to digest that, learn about their options, and decide if it's worth the time or money required to make their old characters usable. Had Freedom forced returning players to create new characters (like EQ2X did) there would have been no such problem. But being able to go back to old characters only to find that an important aspect of them has been lost would be disappointing.

Still I think that Freedom will be good for the game and will attract new players as well as returning ones. It already has, with me and others getting back into the game for the beta. I never thought I'd pay for CoH again (unless it survived until the point my kids were old enough to be introduced to it), but NCsoft already got some money from me because of Freedom even before it launched. I also think that some players will become VIP's in the long run, and some will become occasional VIP's. I don't think that will happen immediately, though. What I find more probable is that many new players will pay $5 to become Premium.

I'm sure the MPAA, RIAA and the like would sell their CEO's mothers to have someone like this.

Thanks for taking my "looks to me like I21 needs to be there for the head start" into "no doubt about it", but did you want to make another point with your post?

Well said. I really don't get how it'd possible to reconcile "soon" for the head start with "well in advance" for I21. I can understand it for Freedom in the sense of free players being allowed to play, but it looks to me like I21 needs to be there for the head start.

I don't see the new prices as a bad deal. People who feel the need to get everything probably already got the packs. Me, I'd rather pay $1-2 for an item I really want for my character than pay $10 to get it with a bunch of others I don't currently envision using.