Good thought. My enchanter is great as a free account at level 96. Not so sure about the others yet as they are mid range.
Without the spell unlocker (which you can no longer purchase) if you drop to F2P any spells cast will be rank I regardless if they were rank II or III when scribed.
this is true ? Ive never noticed and i buff my toons with rank 2-3 spells when they drop back to un-subed
For Daybreak it isn't as simply as player retention though they have to make profits too. So they balance out player retention versus profits. And ultimately what is good for the game is that Daybreak gets the profit margins they feel they need to keep the game going. That isn't always going to be what we as the players want. Daybreak makes more money keeping people using all access accounts then it would from giving the access to Rk2 spells I think. While a lot run with bots some run all their accounts as all access. Keeping a small number of access accounts going makes them more money then one time spell unlocks. Daybreak is also limited in the money they can make or are actually making in the marketplace or the Player Studio program would still be going. The less they are pushing the marketplace then less free to play accounts. If Daybreak ever things they can make far more money pushing Free to Play accounts they will make those accounts accounts more attractive. But atm they are balancing off what they get from subscriptions versus free to play versus sustainable player populations. And for those who don't want to play FTP but don't want to pay for a subscription the only answer is don't play. It is actually Daybreak's intention that FTP will feel lacking and not enough so that people will subscribe. I suspect that works enough for that model to be the one they prefer. And I will admit I have subs for multiple accounts and if they added too much to FTP I would stop paying those subs too and go FTP. Good for me bad for Daybreak profits. Now that all being said there is nothing wrong at all for pushing for more FTP stuff or for getting back FTP stuff taken away like the rk2 unlocks. I think it is fair to want as much as you can get for as cheaply as possible. But for the reasons above and others I probably haven't thought of I don't see it happening.
Oh pish-tosh. If Allakhazam has a database of every item in game including what era it came from, I am sure it would take a decent DBA about 10 minutes to write a query and update the game databases accordingly. I am quite certain that they deliberately choose not to. The thing is, if you got like a raid-geared level 90, you are not returning to 'try' the game. You know the game, you played it to the hilt while paying for it, and now you want to get the same value for free? Well, I can tell you first hand that someone coming in at 0, making a lvl 1 char in Gloomingdeep and actually *trying* the game is not likely to feel the F2P restriction at all for quite some time - and that is the sort of player F2P is aimed at.
http://everquest.fanra.info/wiki/Free_to_play#Membership_matrix I believe the matrix linked above is correct. Once you go F2P or Silver, your spells all cast as Rank I, unless you bought an unlocker.
One thing that would help FTP and non-FTP players alike would be if the mercenaries auto-adjusted to your highest unlocked rank. Needless annoyance to swap them around. I would also prefer if prestige gear was usable by anyone who has it, but could not be LOOTED unless you were subscribed (or you purchased some sort of consumable loot token). One of the best ways to chase off a returning player is to make their old hard-earned gear even more useless than it already is. But the biggest nuisance IMO is the # of characters per account gets reduced if you go silver... this is 100% bogus. Especially considering I already paid post-subscription costs for extra character slots. Would really like an option to unlock these for FTP.
Not sure how the chat thing you describe is confusing. That is howthe Autojoin General Channels option works, It puts you in the appropriate chat channels automatically. What I was saying is that I have seen Free accounts (not Silver) who could chat in NewPlayer, general, class, and region chat channels but could not /join channels. They cast as Rank 1. Have done numerous tests. No, because not everyone always wants the most expensive one all the time. I hate the idea of people killing named and not being able to loot any of the drops. Prestige armor should be lootable by all but only wearable by All Access account holders. The number of chacter slots on an account is the best thing to lock behind this kind of upgrade. If you make that many alts that you need more than 5-7 character slots either buy more or upgrade to All Access.
I try to give people the benefit of the doubt and phrase my answers in a way they won't feel bad for asking something many of us have answered countless times before. So that was my bad in assuming people would find the whole chat thing confusing. Guess they don't. Next time I will just link to the FAQ on main page so they can see: "Without a membership, players can't use any of the "broadcast" channels, such as /auction, /level, /shout, or any other chat option that broadcasts to a large amount of other players."
This does not work. /join general fails with the expected error message. "You must be a silver member...." [join servername.general fails with the same error message. Opting in via Options to join general channels does nothing. Opting out via Options does nothing. /autojoin general is accepted without an error message but does nothing. /chat invite does nothing.
I'm sure you've been in plenty of situations where you are chasing a named but you get the wrong drop many times in a row I have no issue paying for additional slots, the problem is when a sub expires and you lose access to already-existing characters. You'll see a trend here: Paywall to access to something you didn't/couldn't get? No problem. Losing access to something you ALREADY had? Not cool.
You can buy extra slots for free/silver accounts ( I bought 2 more thru loyalty vendor) but I think he means he bought them while on all access as extra slots and you loose them when you revert to free/silver. So for example if he had 8 and bought 2 while on all access then he had 10 but when he reverts to silver he goes down to 4 unless he again buys more. And I agree that is not fair.
No, he is complaining about losing the All Access character slots, not the either marketplace ones or the loyalty vendor ones. When you buy either marketplace or loyalty slots, those ALWAYS stay with the account. So an All Access account with 3 marketplace and 3 loyalty slots will have 14 (8+3+3)...if it drops to Silver, it will have 10 (4+3+3)...or if it drops to Free, it will have 8 (2+3+3). You never think about the extra slots if you always subscribe, but they are part of the service. Have used a krono on both Silver and Free accounts (will full slot purchases) to bump to all access for a month, and the accounts always revert to the same slots before All Access. It would be nice if there was a 4 (or 6) character slot purchase available for an account that goes from All Access to Silver/Free to access the characters that were created before the loss of status...but that would seem to go directly against making DBG money since they'd rather have you subscribe. I can understand how it would be disappointing (cause I think it just lists the toons by alphabetical order and cuts off the ones at the end) especially if your main was Zzyzz. But there is a simple solution in game. Actually two solutions...you could always transfer characters from one account to another until you were at the limit. But that's expensive. All that said, about the only thing I'd purchase with real money in the marketplace is more character slots since I'm at minimum level 62+ on some accounts. I'd love it if they raised the slots to at least 16 per account (with purchase) so I could have one of every class on an account...cause I would just want to.
EQ2 does have a problem with FTP players. They have eased restrictions but it has not paid off. They have many fewer servers than EQ and a much smaller player base. And the players who do play find fewer and fewer reasons to keep paying. EQ has developed a gold mine with these progression servers and the $30 bags they sell to players. EQ2 should follow that model.
