I think they should have a 2-3 day pass for people that don't play that much. That way they could just leave it all the way it is. You go into the station store and buy a 2 day pass for the weekend. The prestige gear works for those 2 days and then at the end you either switch your gear or get another pass. I don't think the 2 day pass should allow you to auto grant AA but it should let you go above the F2P cap. I think for the pass $3-4 or equivalent SC would be reasonable.
There ARE still penalties beyond prestige items. My bard bot I keep as full access because I hate the idea of his AA's being stuck at the amount they are forever. Apprentice mercs are so terrible at level 105 they may as well not even be there. The journeyman merc is really the bigger draw for me than prestige gear. My bard has been All Access for 2 months now and he STILL can't equip prestige gear (yea, fun little quirk! I pay and don't get all the benefits, rrrrrr), I just keep forgetting to send in a petition for this since he's just on autofollow wearing Castaway gear
In EQ2 they used to have equipment unlockers so that a F2P person would be able to purchase the unlockers and then be able to wear Legendary / Fabled gear (Read as Raid / Group gear). They changed this though to allow all characters to wear all gear. I am against the Pay to Win, but I am not against giving users a way to unlock gear to wear. This should be an item that is bought that is a per item purchase. I.E. if you have 10 pieces of prestige gear you want to wear, you would have to buy 10 unlockers and unlock each piece in order to wear it. This would still give DBG a source of income from the users that are F2P and since this would be a per item kind of deal, it would be a re-occuring cost as they upgraded their gear. Could also possibly push people to the All Access sub so they do not have to purchase said unlock items constantly in order to keep up with gear upgrades.
All, I just caught this thread and would like to add some input regarding silver/FTP players. I no longer have a reoccuring subscription. I pay using game cards buying unlockers instead. Reasons for this do not relate to the topic but mostly are due to the nerfing trend, lack of groups, and content. As a silver player who restarted from scratch, I primarily play in older content. With prestige, I really do not have much drive or at least a feeling of a needed rush to current content. It is a combination of lack of groups and gear. I can not wear prestige or augs for the most part. If a box were available making items usable, there maybe a reason to move into the newer expansions. The question lies as to which is the best for the game. Will enough players make that path more profitable or, is the subscription path still the way to go. What are your thoughts, Rykard
I am guessing that the reason that the EQ2 prestige stripping box (which strips the prestige tag only for that character with that specific item) never made it to EQ as they had initially stated it would is because they probably found that the amount of recoding they would need to do to make that functionality work in EQ was beyond reasonable. If the Devs decide that removing Prestige tags from older items actually is necessary then I would say that the most reasonable way to go about it would be to have it automated like most similar changes are currently done. I also would say that an item would need to have its Prestige tag removed if it originated from an expansion or event that is more than 2 expansions older than what is available without buying any expansions. The reason I use this is that when EQ went F2P everything older than House of Thule was free with Prestige items appearing on the top 2 tiers of (group and raid) items in Seeds of Destruction and newer expansions. So at present it would work like this: The Darkened Sea is the current expansion which can be bought. Rain of Fear is the current expansion that is free to everyone. In my method, items which originated as part of the Underfoot expansion or before it would have their Prestige tags removed. When the Fall campaign is released then CotF will be made free, and at that point HoT items would have their Prestige tags removed. This maintains a reason for those who choose not to even buy expansions to subscribe for extended periods of time, and it maintains the original spacing between the highest expansion without Prestige items and the highest expansion that is given to all for free. Prestige there is tons of good gear that is not Prestige in the newer expansions. RoF and CotF had a bit of oddity with their use of Prestige, but that was mostly due to the fact that they were staggered releases which SOE felt the need to have some items reserved for their subsribers at launch. I do not think that TDS saw the same issues due to it being an all at once expansion; and I expect the new campaigns to not suffer from erratic usage of Prestige since they too are all in one releases. If the player wants to spend more money to do the same things, then the way your playing is the way to go, if the player wants to spend less and get more than subscription is the way to go.
This is a yes and no. I will pay more initially till I am at the point where I have all the AAs I desire or at the AA cap. After that point, I would only have to pay for expansions and one to two AA unlockers. Rykard
Not only would they have to make a copy of every prestige item, they would have to make and test a trade-skill combine for every prestige item and make updates for any quest or trade-skill combine that uses a prestige item to also use the new non-prestige version of that item. All of that makes this a lot of work and who knows how much it would get used.
Exactly this, in EQ2 databases are designed in a much more dynamic way than the EQ ones. What EQ2 can implement easily, is a huge undertaking for EQ1 because they pretty much need to create a whole new item. The most EQ1 can do is add a flag to an item; it cannot remove an existing one, much less remove an existing one only for the specific character which did it for that specific item. I am sure if they were given enough time someone could make the item flags more dynamic, but the amount of time it would take is likely prohibitive.
Code: I built 3 entirely new PC's specifically to play this game, but can't drop the company that runs it a couple of bucks. One of these things is not like the other one.
TBM gear isn't prestige, even the augs, and its very decent for a grouper if built correctly. I would suggest the very least a higher level FTP player can do to support the game is buy the TBM expansion and have access to the same items every gold group player has. Anyone FTP under 100-105 has access to adequate gear to level up in. Edit: nevermind, just noticed this is a necroed thread
