At one point, you refunded Burst of Power AA to players during an AA consolidation change. You basically reset burst of power to 0 and refunded the AA. But players who returned to the game on a free account, can now no longer invest those AA into burst of power because they are over the AA cap for free accounts. This is terrible. You basically took away AA people earned. This needs to be fixed. You can't just take people's AA away. Especially not AA that are so essential to player damage output being stuck at 0. Most F2P MMO have full progression access. EQ is the only one I know that chooses to restrict F2P character development. But to then actually nerf players by taking away AA they earned previously? That is one step too far.
They didn't really take anything away from most players. Until 2016, when you earned it, you had to pay to use it. If you aren't paying, you receive an intentionally reduced trial product (no luck, no prestige, capped aa). The second you pay/krono, you can turn on autogrant and your burst of power aa will be restored, and kept even if you subsequently let your payments lapse. Only exception would be players between 2016 and the 2017 AA change I guess, and if you came from that small window, just need to earn some plat and buy a krono to fix every character on your account. I kinda doubt the devs are going to grant FTPs some AAs or change the FTP AA cap over a very small subset of players who are looking at the game with an eye to never even spend a krono, let alone subscribe.
Not true. F2P characters, when faced with AA refunds like this, are allowed over the 2x level cap for banked AAs. I had several chars at that time with well over 300 banked AAs, unable to spend them til the next time I subbed.
The cap is 3x your level before you start losing AA which would be 360 AA at level 120. You just can't earn them by killing things after 2X your level or 240 at level 120.
Thanks for that reminder, yes, it did only allow up to 3x level to be banked. But I do seem to remember that it did let me spend some to get to/below that 3x cap, even though I was F2P. Technically, the accounts were Silver, so that may make a difference. And it should be a pretty rare instance where you'd get more than 3x your level in AAs refunded to you
It encourages Krono use or subscription or if you want to spend even more money you could buy the AA unlockers. Aside from the last one, it is the opposite of counterproductive. If you want, to have more AAs, then either go the expensive way of buying the unlockers or sub for a month and auto-grant and buy the non-autogranted AAs that you want and let it expire until you need more AAs. That said, they do need a wider variety of options for AA unlockers, such as a 500 count, 1000 count, 2000 count options. Also, there needs to be one which sets your cap equal to, or ideally 500 above, your current Total AA count for those who were previously gold or otherwise had thousands of AAs before F2P was an option. That would at least make the unlocker path a more viable option to take vs currently where the only viable option is to just sub or use a Krono for a month or two so that you can grind out AAs before leveling more.
It does also affect F2P accounts that were AllAccess and those that bought the AA cap extension bundles. Removing AAs that got paid and which cannot be re-applied without additional costs is fraud. This does happen about one time each year and each time when it happens it does confirm my decision that it is better to stay F2P with such unrighteous business behaviour.
Just looked at one of my enchanters that went silver 31407 / 1000 that means 31407 - 1000 = 30407 / 150 = 203 unlockers needed = 203 * 250 DBC = 50 750 DBC needed 10 000 DB for $85 * 6 (may as well buy more since that is not even close to capped AA) AA unlockers is silly expensive for the amount you are paying may as well just subscribe.
True, subbing for a month is way cheaper. Remember, when they introduced AA unlockers, the total AAs a char could have was probably less than 2000. Like so many things in EQ, it's something that was implemented and then never updated as the game changed. edit: Just looked up some data I keep handy. As far as I can tell right now, total AA for my Druid is 69,152. Going back to CotF (9 expacs ago), the total at that time was 13,404! CotF was the 18th expac which had AA available to a character. So the average through those 18 was 744/expac, and in the last 9, it's been 6,194!
Kronos now are going for more than I have ever had in-game. I honestly don't know how people are generating enough plat to buy multiple Krono at one time!
I stopped buying krono a long time ago. I do wonder how folks generate the large amount of plat. needed. I would like to learn a new trick. I still won't buy krono though.
A few years ago I made a post where I calculated that the AA unlocker packages are about five times more expensive than AllAccess. All other AllAccess benefits not included. Instead of 100 AA the packages should grant 500-1,000 AA. Come to AB, its "only" 3.8 mio there.
