Customer Service Announcement: Gold Membership

So let's see. We got 500 SC per account, which we could use across toons, or save up for more expensive items if we see fit. That is being removed for a one-off, enforcable, single character purchase? And you can't even buy more than one item with it?

This is ludicrous. You lot are inflicting lots of small pressures on your paying customers - don't you realise we'll crack eventually and stop paying you fortunes? This won't make me any more able to afford SC, unless you get my bosses to give me a rise, so don't expect extra income from me. In fact, expect less. My box accounts don't need gold access any more. I've already stopped buying expansions on them because of the near-fraudulent way you handle those.

(to clarify 'fortunes' - $25 for a bag in a game is just nonsensical. £30 for an expansion that gives almost nothing new in terms of content, not even a promise.... )

Honestly, this feels like your board meetings start with the question "how can we fleece the clowns that pay for this game even more?" Gold members have recurring memberships - perhaps for a year in advance - guaranteeing you income. We're also the ones most likely to pay for what you laughingly call 'expansions' these days. We are your forecastable income, you DON'T shaft us to the point of cancellations!

The only way that this will be bordering on acceptable is if you can buy a stack of items as your 'free item' - like 4 potions of merc amnesia, for instance, storable and heirloomed to transfer to any new toons if needed. Or better yet, as others have mentioned, give us the 2K and make it expire each month, but let us spend it as we will. THAT would be a benefit.

Frankly, we all know that this is about forcing people to spend more real money on SC. Dressing it up as some added benefit is probably what is angering most of us more than anything.

I just signed up for a year last month, BTW. Seeing as you lot will be in breach of our contract as soon as you change the SC thing, I'll expect an opportunity to claim a refund for the remaining months.

I'm not a gold member anymore and I actually got ripped off the 500 SC that I did have (I never spent it, but it disappeared).. but I can see how bad of a deal this is for players.

The next thing is that everything interesting is going to start costing just OVER 2000 SC to force people to have to spend out of pocket funds on it.

It looks like sugar coated poop to me.

I am kind of like you on this, however, I (and i am guessing many others) have hit the point where i am utterly fed up with the quality of the product we are receiving from SOE. I was grateful that they have continued to support EQ, but now EQ is starting to feel like an old punch-drunk boxer that should have retired years before but keeps on taking bad fights to milk out those last few dollars.

We keep getting less and less for the same amount of money. I consider a subscription the cost of doing business and am and have been willing to continue to pay it, but what we get charged for these expansions is ridiculous. We get vague promises and assertions of things to come, but we have no idea what we are paying for. If things are that bad at SOE and this is the best you can do, level with us, don't continue to act like you are providing ground breaking content. The only ground breaking you seem to be doing is digging a 6 foot deep hole.

I am curious about the rationale of this change. On its surface, this change provides nothing additive to the community (many posts have reiterated this, but there are very few items that are worth 2000SC that someone would buy in a given month, and many more items at a much lower price point).

If the concern is that people are banking their SC and using them on the big sales (certainly not an exploit or anything, I am sure you are more concerned about the opportunity lost for people to buy SC for those items), then I think you have some options:

Option 1:

Create two types of SC: SC purchased and SC given (I don't care what you call them). Purchased SC can be used for anything any time, much like SC today. Given SC (gold status) can be used to purchase things at the full price on the site. This protects your revenue stream and demand for purchased SC for things like sales, while still allowing the community to save up SC for their "chase items".

Option 2:

Allow the owner of the account to spend up to 2000 SC per month (so it can be multiple items), but allow no SC to "roll over" to the following month. The only "roll over" SC would be the purchased ones. This allows a bit more flexibility in purchasing items up to the 2000SC limit, and still provides a revenue stream for SOE for purchased SC.

Add me to the list of people who think this is a really rotten change. This stinks of FAIL!

i will never understand why people will complain about stuff they are getting for "free"

Very Very bad idea for people who, like me, are occasional players. In effect my subscription is worth practically nothing now. Well Done marketteers. What precisely do we get now for $120 per year? This colours my decision making whether to sign up to the new game.

I looked at my subscription renewal,, I am paid till October,,, hope they give me the option to quit and get my cash back. Between the server crashes, "Antonious Bayle Server" and losing suspended and non suspended pets every time I lose internet or the server goes down, the game is really gotten frustrating. Now they force this on us and call it "more value". This blows, most everyone here seems to see it too, so if they really do force this on us after all the bad feedback, what then is the point of us
being able to discuss it? If our feedback goes unanswered, if they do go thru with this, then there really is no point to this feedback thread. Closely monitored? If they keep this change, then all the feedback falls on deaf ears. Sony,, don't do this.

It's not entirely "free", it's listed as part of our recurring gold subscription. If it was free and everyone (non-recurring members, silver and bronze members) was getting it equally, then you would be correct.

While i don't really care too much about this particular change, i am upset when i look at the totality of EQ today. All these little things add up and eventually they make people throw in the towel.

I pay a monthly subscription and a yearly expansion purchase. Over the 14 years that adds up to significantly more than £1000 (no idea what this is in dollars). If that is your idea of free, my friend, I have lots of 'free' stuff for you.

But actually, it is about contracts. If you sign up for a deal and the deal is changed within the period of the contract, someone is in breach. That is worth complaining about.

As so0n as my membership is up I will not be renewing and I definetaly will not be going to the new game. You people need to stop pushing us the paying players to far...You forget there are other games out there that are close enough to everquest for us to go to where we can play for free. If this dose go threw and if I can't buy things that would actually benefit my characters, I will be leaving for one of these other games and I can assure you my entire guild of 678 people will be coming with me we've already discussed this. Please reconcider. I have been with everquest since beta but this is the last straw

Elder Scrolls Online 4-14-2014 for PC. Looking better and better.
Almost fifteen years of playing this game.
Man, this isn't looking very nice for those like myself that still like this game.

Not impressed with the change, I tend to purchase a lot of the smaller items and would lose a lot of the free 500 we have now, so of the 2000 I would lose more than 3/4 of it.

Mountain out of a molehill...

you pay to play the game at gold level i thought, ive been playing EQ as long, probably longer than you have, never has the point of paying for this game was to collect 500 sc per month

I don't understand... I play EQ, EQ2, and DCUO as an all access subscriber. If I get one 2000SC Item per game - cool. One Item for one game per month... no thanks. More clarification on this would be better. I am not one to grab my pitchfork at the first sign of change, but who really thought this was the answer to the diminishing value of the Gold Membership?

i for one am going to change my mind about adding gold to my second acct through monthly sub now, was going to start it tonight after midnight for my box acct. now i am planning to use one of my krono to activate my second acct, and as soon as pp permits do same on my main acct. only reason i even went with a monthly sub, was so i could build up sc monthly and buy some of the larger items and bundles, like the large wr bag bundles. this move from soe screws that all up now, so may as well just go krono after buying with pp, and to hell with doing a monthly sub on 2 accts, of course this will only make soe even happier, as 2 krono a month, bought buy me with pp nets them more $ from person that sold me krono, as krono is 3 dollars more each than a sub is smh

This is one out of two posts in this whole thing that sounds reasonable. The rest just sounds like spoiled children who didn't get their ice cream after dinner.

1) Before gold membership, there was no Station Cash bonus to play. In fact, there was no bonus AT ALL. You either paid or you didn't play. Period.

2) The Station Cash bonus is FREE. You're not paying for that. It has cost $14.99 for a subscription long before Gold membership ever existed. If you're paying $14.99 a month for $5 worth of Station Cash, then you need to re-evaluate your spending.

3) If you actually buy Krono with real money from SOE and not with platinum from a vendor in game for the sole purpose of paying for a gold subscription, you also need to re-evaluate your spending. A krono costs $17.99 while a monthly recurring subscription costs $14.99. You don't deserve bonus Station Cash in any event because you could potentially receive in-game money from this which is more valuable than Station Cash.

All SOE is doing is try to make things more cost efficient for themselves while keeping prices low. Instead of this, they could have said, "Gold membership fees are now $19.99 a month. All other bonuses remain unchanged." They would receive more backlash for this than what they are doing now, not to mention the reduction of revenue from people leaving because they don't want to pay that much every month for a game.

With all that being said though, I'm with that other guy who said he's allergic to sugarcoating. I would have better appreciated something like, "Hey letting y'all accumulate all the free Station Cash we've been giving you to buy really expensive stuff is hurting our cost efficiency. So rather than raise YOUR cost, we're gonna give you different free stuff with limitations that better helps us keep our costs low." Keep it real, SOE, your customer base will better appreciate you for it.

I do not care how SoE massages the words to put a positive spin on this, it results in a negative to my recurring gold subscription x3.
My choice of how, when, or if I spend SC has been removed, I am against this change.

wow, hey devs, maybe you should hire Eandolf! they took your crappy idea for sc, and made it somewhat more palpable than the turd sammich you guys are trying to shove down our throats!