Customer Service Announcement: Premium Membership

Unfortunately SOE already got themselves covered with this fineprint:

"SOE reserves the right to end or amend the terms of this promotion at any time in its sole and absolute discretion."

Essentially what this does is forces you to buy station cash for lower priced items as well as for sales. Unless you want to get screwed out of a larger purchase. This is a decrease in membership perks not an increase. Also I do not see how you can legally change a product after people purchased it for the people who have multi-month packages. Also this penalizes people who have advanced far in the game. If you are high rank chances are you have most of the items you want from SOE all that is left is mainly player studio stuff and lower priced items such as visual addons like camos and hood ornaments. The dedicated players stick around despite all the times you consistantly break the game with poorly implemented and tested updates. This often due to no incentive to get people on the test servers and listening to what the Dev's want instead of the players. Please stop this nonsense and focus on making a better game. As a leader of one of the largest and most active outfits in game please quit making our job of keeping our number of active players up and making members out of casual players. If you build a good game they will come. Don't milk the people who actually keep this game running as a consistent player base. Please rethink this policy. On a good note I did enjoy your holliday sales. This was a good marketing strategy as it brought a lot of people back to activity. Please do not undo what you just achieved by thinking with your pocket book. Please like this post if you agree to let your voice be heard.

Sony, you obviously already forgot what happened to Microsoft when they made a bunch of stupid decisions. Do you honestly think players will not rise up against you?

As a player who literally just subbed for 6 months.. I feel betrayed. The monthly stipend playef a huge role in why I actually subbed. I like a return on my investment and that SC helped me get over subbing for a F2P MMO.

This attempt of an announcement absolutely is an insult to our intelligence.. I get that it is an SOE wide move, but as our devs there must be something more you can do? We need assurances.. We need more of a statement.

I will send a message with my wallet. I will try to dispute the charge I just made days ago due to this sudden change. I refuse to purchase any SC until you appropriately rectify this situation.

Minor troubles here.
As much as I am aware, it was mentioned earlier, that we won't see double or triple SC sales anymore.
Buying SC won't get you 50% exp/resources boost (which are quite neat to be honest).

I missed that, thanks for correcting me. I've been away playing other games these past few months. This just makes it all even worse then, holy crapola.

True, but resources generally aren't a huge problem with the current system, and at some point you stop really needing certs. I've considered buying membership more than once, but it doesn't seem worth it for a lot of reasons, and this is another. I got the free month in May, and wasn't sold then when we got frequent updates and I still needed a lot of things, and am less so now.

Welcome to Planetside 2! Glad to have you along.

Hope the tutorial wasn't too harsh on you - I understand it still likes to drop BR1's in the middle of frantic firefights where they die a second after leaving their drop pod. It's a great game though, so don't let the perpetual 3 way stalemate grind you down. Besides, a fully functioning meta game and a new continent called Hossin are on the way any day now! Won't that be fun?!

why dont you give us the option to pick between having one free item of our chose or 1500 SC each month ?

It's times like these where I really feel bad for the dev team.

I know they don't want this for the game. But the suits that control their budget want to see profits, and those same suits also control how things are sold. And it's obvious that they don't understand their customer base at all.

The greatest companies were always founded by a visionary, somebody who knew the market and understood people, and the suit, a guy who kept the visionary in reality and helped make it happen. Walt Disney and his brother are an excellent example of this dynamic. Of course, once the visionary goes away, then the suits take over. Their forte isn't understanding the customer or navigating the treacherous waters of possibilities, figuring out what direction to take their organization. Their forte is taking plans and making them happen.

Of course, the suits invariably think they know what's best, and everyone else gets dragged down with them. Since the Dev team are the face of the game, they get all the flak, but the people who actually implemented it and set it in motion get nothing. It's unfortunate.

Also some correction here.
We don't call lowly creatures who initiate DDoS attacks "hackers". Furthermore that group tried to atttack multiple online games.
They did not take down servers, but basically overloaded the ISP where the servers belong, thus the servers could not be reached most of the time.

By no means should you consider this an amazing feat, anyone with some money can rent a botnet. It is a very lame thing to do, aside from being a crime.

I'm just saying it's a huge boost. With a 50% resources/exp boost and auraxium membership you can just pull MBT after MBT without having to worry about anything. Of course, in case it's on cooldown you can always pull an ESF/Liberator, run Amok with a MAX or throw some C4 around.
If it wasn't for the resources, I'm not sure why else would veterans have subscription.

So now your benefit to membership is access to daily sales that are meaningless without spending even more money. You have to find at least one item a month to buy or you get nothing. And you are likely excluded from the coolest things that are coming from player studio.

So for example instead of currently watching sales and being able to buy two camos in a month, or a few really cheap trinkets I can...buy a horn or golden gun, or lumifiber.....since that's the only thing that would make fiscal sense in the top end. If I accidentally used my premium purchasing power for something like the liberator tank buster I would feel like an idiot.

No thank you.

If premium isn't giving you an allowance of station cash per month and diversity in choosing how to spend over that whole month, why would I have it rather than just dropping the 10-15 when I feel like it on sc, and buying any single item and potential boost deal as I see them coming. This is a direct nerf to the rate at which a savvy premium member could acquire new cash unlocks. People get to keep paying the same but will get less things, just more of them will be more "valuable" (which in a virtual goods store is a meaningless term), and less diverse since player studio stuff is .

the 1 item rule bugs me because iw as able to take advantage of most of the christmas sale with my membership bonus that i had been saveing. also i'm not a fan of it only being redeemable for one item, especially as items are starting to come down in price (camo bundles, you slashed the proces of the composite helmets. plus if something you would buy any way goes on sale you would be shooting yourself in the foot to get an item on sale so to speak. i would much rather being givin a wallet to spend my allowence and spend it how i choose.

i am going to go out on a limb and i suggest this change is due to SC being giftable in the near future and i can see how giving members sc included with your membership might be detremental to your own cause but please get your guy's heads together and figure out a way to make our member bonus a seperat wallet than SC or something. so that we are not limited to 1 item only and that we can save it for the next month if we can't

overall i can't complain too much because after all it is a better system than the one we have now (most i have saved my member bonus without spending it was 3 months or 1500 sc but i also was able to buy more than one item for that same 1500 sc. (although it did not take 3 months to "earn"

also i used 1000 sc of my member rewards twords buying the aniversary deal i bet the bean counters really hated that ...

So we all have a single item we can choose, or each month there will be one single item we can get for free? what if I already have the item? The current daily sales and single-cert items are not much help for me, as I already own most of them.

Am I going to find myself in the same situation? Oh this week I can get a [insert item here] but I already have it. so I lose out? Or is it each month I can pick an item *of my choice*

Wow.. I might have to cancel my membership after all this time.

Looks like an item of your choice LESS bundles and Player Studio items..

- I don't like premium because you are sucking the customer in and punishing him if he cancels it later. (The whole what if you cancel it is rather confusing and maybe some people avoid it as a whole, hell, some even got banned because of the charge back confusion)
- Buying SC in the same amount as a yearly Subscription is no different, money is money.
- There are very few Items in the shop. Why not instead make thousands of in-game texture items and 3d models which almost anyone can make in no time, lower the prices. (PlayerStudio is a good start)

There is a camo and the only camo that I find appealing in the early access and its 1000SC. A few pixels for 1000SC, there should be thousands of them. Its no fun waiting for it. (I did check out the PlayerStudio items on SOE, mainly Factions specific colors and some helmets)

I don't want to lvl fast and neither do I want to grind, so I buy some SC to make my game-play more fun and to support the game, buy occasional boosts on 2x exp events. In FPS games you get for what you play instantaneously, unlike mmorpg games where you grind for your retirement, I don't like mmorpgs anymore, so I mainly play fps and strategy games like TotalAnnihilation, Freespace, CSSource, Doom, Quake,..

Sell by the masses, go big. Everything for everyone. Or go small and charge a lot for the few.

Wow im very glad i didn't buy a yearly membership today, it was tempting given how good the holiday sales were. But this, this is just laughable. Please revert the changes so we have more freedom in what we can do. This forces us to buy an overpriced item offsale only once a month....

My friend bought a 6 month sub doesn't play this game anymore but was saving his SC for everquest landmark.

He was going to buy a 100$ early access pass to EQL. You just pissed him off SOE. I can imagine how many times this will be repeated. The last game he played by SOE was SWG before the NGE. Lol way to show him you have changed SOE.

I am trying to reassure him that SOE will come to their senses and offer some sort of grandfather clause for existing subs.

EDIT I and I assume many others do know that this is a move to eliminate "old" SC being used on EQN/LM. Along with the absence of x2x3 sales this Christmas.