Random disconnections without warning when an account hits the second it goes silver is a real pain, and I'd argue a bug. Happened to me last night, my cleric suddenly went LD mid fight. There was no warning. The account had a krono in it's posesstion. Can we please have a checkmark in options that will autospend the krono in such a case? I totally understand that people used to just stay online forever and delay having to pay, so you're solving one problem, but you've created another especially since the time remaining has been removed from the inventory window. A checkmark in options to autoconsume Kronos if I'm online to avoid the frustration of random disconnections would solve this at least in my case.
While I agree it's certainly not a bug, it would still be GREAT to have a pop-up appear. Maybe a 5-10 minute countdown or so. Your subscription is about to expire, please consume a krono or pay to subscribe before you are disconnected.
Find a day you pay your electric or cable bill or whatever lines up with your Everquest account and pay that bill and eat a krono on the same day.
There should be a separate forum for "Terrible Design Decisions." Then they could mark them as "Confirmed" and ignore them afterward, just like they do with bugs.
Does this only happen with Krono or does the same thing happen with AA membership expiration? It seems like they should give you a grace period after the sub expires. Put up a popup and give the person 24 hours to re-sub before booting them.
Or use a credit card. Its not that difficult and something most adults should be able to keep track of. After all the complaints about this resulted in the information being removed from the character screen because Krono have different time spans than credit cards so everyone thought their bill date was wrong. I would hate to see what fix they would implement for further hand holding. *** UI *** - Removed the 'All Access Days Left:' label in the inventory window. This most accurate place to find this information is in the Membership Info section of your account at everquest.com.”
This is really something that EQ should address rather than expect their customers to come up with solutions. We wouldn't put up with that kind of service from our other recurring services, like phone, TV, etc. We expect the company to send out a bill or notice rather than us having to put something on our calendar to pay the bill before the end date. EQ has an in-game email system. It should be relatively simple to add in-game reminder emails a couple of days before non-auotpay subs expire either from the end of the AA sub period or krono expiration. Or send regular emails to the address associated with the account. The easier and more pleasant the payment process is, the more likely customers will stick around and keep paying.
They also only allow you to pay with credit cards or checking accounts. Would you rather not have the Krono option?
The Krono option is fine. They know the expiration date of that and can send a reminder for that is well. It should be pretty similar whether it's an AA or Krono sub. I would hope it could work like regular services. I get email bills from my services which either say "Your bill is due on 10/31" or "Your bill due on 10/31 will be paid with autopay". It seems like the same thing could be done with subs whether AA or Krono. If there is no autopay option, then the email could say the membership will expire unless payment is made.
Krono do not operate on "monthly bill dates" - a Krono gives you 30 days. Even if the month has 31 or 29 it would not matter. You would still get only 30 days with a Krono. So the day of the month you need to pay on always changes. Credit cards give you a month. Does not matter how many days in that month. So your bill date never changes - its always the 10th or 22nd or whatever. Their system cannot understand this rotating bill date which Krono causes which is why they altered the "all access days left time" in game and force players to go to account management to see exact date. If they could figure it out then it would have shown there and they could have fixed it.
why waste the time. when one signs up for auto renewal there should be no reason to remind people that its coming up. one a person sets it up they know the day of the month it happen on. just remember that. as for using kronos. why should it be on the game to remind someone to click one to resub up. between me and wife we have 12 accounts 5 are paid for the year. the other 7 we have spread out over the month to split between paychecks. but we know what day of the month they going come out so we make sure there money on the card to pay for it. the only time getting a monthly bill is needed is if its a different amount each month such as power. anything that stays the same each month there is no reason to get a reminder of it.
These don't sound like hard problems to solve. And from a business sense, they should be solved. Prepaid phones work in a similar way. You get $X for 30 days. You get notices before the 30 days are up that you need to re-up your balance. EQ knows when the Krono expires. At expire-X days, they send an email. If it doesn't fit into the rotating bill date system, then tack on a Krono expiration system to send out the notices. Since this has to do with their revenue, it's really something they should focus on. Making the payment experience better and smoother typically leads to greater revenues. Booting you from the game abruptly with no notice sounds like something which would frustrate customers and lead to fewer paying customers.
Just have launchpad show you have X days left on your subscription and make it a little more bold/flashy if it gets down to 5 or so. Maybe an automated tell kinda like when they're about to shut down the server 'Hey, your account is going to expire in 2 hours', 'Your account is going to expire in 1.5 hours'. Then it's easy to do something about it. I would have happily clicked my krono if I knew I needed to. Yes, I can operate a credit card, I pay for my expansions. But why would I not use the kronos to pay for account time if I have them since that's what they're designed for?
Why didn't you click the Krono when you logged in ? Or a day before? Or a week before? Evidently, you had the Krono, and you have actually intended to consume it for the purpose of All Access status extention. But you didn't. I wonder, why? I am asking because one of my accounts is Krono-supported and I gather Krono(s) and consume those well in advance. Days, sometimes weeks in advance. And I check how many more days I have until the time expires by chacking my "DB" button and reading when my next 500 dbc "Claim" will be available, which gives me a good estimation of by when I need to click on the next Krono. And you wait until the last moment to consume Krono. Why? What am I missing?
Its not the same, housing in real life is much more important than a game. So click your krono and be happy
Or just put the 'time left' indicator back on the inventory window and next time 3 people complain about something, check with the thousands of folk who are perfectly happy with it before changing/abolishing it?
Obviously the system they put in place knows when the access is going to expire. I can't think of a good reason why it couldn't share said information with the customer.
good thing they fixed this, before people would stay logged for days despite account being expired. this is not a bug, its an anti theft system. its not hard to tell when a krono is going to expire, via logging into the account system on the website. if anything they need to remove the consume krono button from ingame and add it to the website so people actually log in and know what day the account is going to expire. would probably save them a bit of dev time and annoyance dealing with this.
