Mark

Ouch, alarm bells are ringing as soon as I read lifetime sub, and I say this as a sucker who has purchased lifetime subs far to often (Champions Online, Star Trek Online, LOTRO and yes even Hellgate London).

Plus looking at what seems to be offered with the XP potions and Talisman's, I'm afraid it looks like an F2P game with all those microtransactions but with a retail price, subscription and ingame store bolted on for triple dipping goodness.

At least they are being up front about it rather than bringing in an ingame store months down the line I suppose, but If you design your game based around the F2P model then I'm sure as heck gonna wait till it's F2P before I get onboard and try it.

They really should make it so that existing accounts have the option of opting in rather than forcing people to use a P7S1 account at gunpoint, at least it would show some semblance of loyalty on the part of SOE to those EU customer that have stuck with them through all the other crap SOE have pulled over the years, but then I guess that customer loyalty means nothing to SOE or Smedley.

Plus as a former station access subscriber I could get access to EQ, EQ2, DCUO, Vanguard & Pirates of the burning sea for £15 a month, that will now cost me £42 a month from the looks of things as I would need the P7S1 equivalent of station access for EQ2 & DCUO, plus EQ, Vanguard & PoTBS are not moving over so I would still need 3 x subscriptions via SOE to keep playing those games.

So not only am I forced to move to a company I know little about and simply do not trust, but it would also cost a lot more to keep playing the same games at the same level. And that's before we get to the issues of monthly SC stipends or lifetime subscriptions to DCUO etc.

This is simply a PR disaster in the making and SOE seem intent on repeating the same mistakes that they assured everyone they had learned from the NGE debacle. The community are once again telling SOE how terrible this decision is, and yet we see little sign SOE are listening, and I'm afraid the fact they have sorted the regional access to all servers out is typical missdirection on the part of SOE, they knew fine well that blocking EU access to US servers and vica versa would be suicide in such long established games, they simply used the threat of it so that they could appear to 'Fix' it and in doing so mask many of the remaining issues whilst being able to say they resolved the main issue people had. Not fooling me.

Call me old fashioned but I like paying my £40 and getting, you know, a full game. It's bad enough already with day 0 DLC and content on discs being locked away for purchase at a later date.

Basically it is this guys wet dream that they 'give' the game away for free, but they have sliced and diced all the content up into teeny tiny microtransaction parcels, so that a full game that would have cost £40 might cost you £4000 to unlock everything.

It just sounds terrible, whatever happened to designing games that are based around being fun to play and reward you with items in a game for completing a challenge rather than through the swipe of a credit card. It is one small step away from games being designed by suits using excel to design a game based around maximum monetisation forcasts rather devs designing games because they're fun.

The sooner scum like this get out of the video games industry the better.

I wouldn't touch any game that didn't allow me to play with anonymity, or at least some semblance of it.

Many fantastic points were brought up as part of the Real ID fiasco and those problems are just as relevant today.

Basically if you take away anonymity it does absolutely nothing to stop the trolls, infact one could argue that it actually empowers them to a potentially dangerous new level, and at best it would stiffle debate on forums, turn certain gamers away from playing games and potentially cause worry and heartache for those who maybe have good reasons to hide things when it comes to playing games online.

Heck, what about a female who was always known as 'Bob the Barbarian' and now everyone knows it's really Claire from England and she is now getting hounded by horny teenage boys, or what about the Gay person who finds much needed support from a GBLT ingame guild and suddenly find their real name out there for everyone to see and linked to characters in the Guild. Taking it outside the scope of games, what about the person researching cancer treatment on a forum who suddenly finds their insurance company cancelling their medical insurance because they linked back to their real name.

Sacrificing the good that some anonymity brings certainly would not even bring the benefit of reigning in the trolls at all, so honestly, what would be the point ?

I used to be interested in Planetside 2, then I took a ProSiebenSat1 arrow to the knee.

I am so, so sorry :p

I've seen some drama's around games in my time, been there for the SWG NGE, EQ2 cash shop introduction, Eve monoclegate etc. But in all my time I have never seen a community stand so solidly together against a decision.

I've been reading through the thread on the EQ2 forums and I cannot find a single person agreeing with what is happening. Even more startling is the number of long time account holders (like 7 and 8 years) with very few post counts coming forwards to join in the debate and who say they are quiting.

SOE have really let their customers down on this, yet again :(

Urm, unbelievable, as a DCUO player from the UK who plays on the US servers I find this is kinda sad. Seems the virtual immigration police are going to be rounding us up and putting us on the next boat back to the European servers, then building a new 'Berlin' wall to stop us from swimming back.

I just don't get it and I thought we had got past this kind of segregation pretty much by now. I've been playing DCUO on the US servers since launch (with the odd break) and now will be forced to change server and no longer able to play with my friends from the US a year down the line.

Just when I thought SOE couldn't sink any lower, they once again manage to prove me wrong.

I've yet to find a F2P or Freemium game I can get away with I'm afraid, yep I'm old school as well, I like to pay my monthly sub and be done with it, with a preference to never having to look at an ingame cash shop if possible.

If they want to put lovely new items in the game they can darn well put them in as rewards for playing the game. And thats where I find issues with these 'Freemium' games, usually they are former subscription based games that have all but died and the change to freemium breathes new live into them, unfortunately it is often followed by anything cool or new being added to an ingame item shop rather than as a reward for playing the game, I've yet to find a freemium game that gets this balance right.

As for out and out F2P, my quest to find one I like continues. The last one I tried was Forsaken Worlds which was terrible. My latest curious attempt to find a F2P I actually like has me installing Vindictus. I remain skeptical that any truly F2P game can be anything other than a game specifially designed to get you to spend more than a monthly sub would cost and ensures that future game direction is dictated by how they can tweak gameplay to get people to buy that weeks must have items rather than to make the game fun.

But that's probably just me, luckily my tin foil hat protects me from the evil mind control rays these F2P companies put out ;)

I think this is a cool idea. I've recently returned back to Rift after finding SWTOR wasn't quite scratching my MMO itch.

For some reason I'm really enjoying and appreciating the game much more the second time round. It really is a fantastic game, sure it won't be for everyone, and there are probably still a few people who are grumpy because it isn't the openworld sandbox hardcore death penalty full loot scifi space shooting fps it never claimed to be, but if you take it for what it is, i.e. a really polished and fun fantasy themepark MMO, it is a great deal of fun.

I just hope to God they can keep enough subs to not be forced down the F2P route, I like having at least one decent subscription based game out there.

Nope, regardless of whether a game is F2P/P2P/B2P whatever, I simply do not use the ingame shops for anything, especially for things like mounts.

I prefer to earn my stuff through playing the game and not browsing some middle earth equivalent of Amazon. I've got nothing against anyone else doing it though, it just isn't for me.