New account models including Limited Lifetime Membership

There are different types of players with different habits, demands and wallet sizes. Not everyone is happy with the currently very limited account models. The customers can only choose between buying the whole menu or taking the crumbs of it for "free". But what if the customer does only want to buy a salad ? About 74% of the current customers have selected the AllAccess menu. 26% do eat the crumbs. And many thousands of possible cusomers did and do not want the whole menu nor the crumbs and are now playing WoW or something else. And they're gone! Just imagine going into a restaurant and you could only select between the XXL menu and a nibbled off burger that is lying around on a free table. This restaurant is called EverQuest and does give the motto "You are in our world now!" a very special taste. You might get the point.

New account models inbetween the current ones would attract more customers and would also mean more revenue for the providers. I am just creating a win-win scenario that would be good for everyone. While an "AllAccess Light" menu for the half price could work and is easy to install I have also something else in mind. A Limited Lifetime Membership. Not limited in time but in features. There are players that want everything and they want it now. There is AllAccess and Krono for them. For players that do not want to care about memberships and do not like to get bound to something there is the need for something else. Here a comparision between AllAccess and a fictional Limited Lifetime Membership which is colored in blue.

AllAccess does offer:

• Access to 1000's of Alternate Advancement Abilities - Limited to 10,000 AAs
• Additional 6 character slots ($60 Value)
• Full Access to all spell ranks - Limited to basic spells, songs and disciplines
• Maximum amount of Loyalty Rewards
• Full access to Mercenary Tiers - Limited access up to Journeyman Tier 3
• Full access to in-game broker
• All housing and guilds halls allowed
• Access to Progression Servers
• Unlimited Chat channel access
• Full Guild Functionality
• Preferred Status with Customer Service
• Increased cap of active Overseer Quests
• Access to EQ Perks: Merchant’s Perk, Challenger’s Perk, and Adventurer’s Perk**

Additionally a Limited Lifetime Membership account could also be temporary upgraded to AllAccess but for just the half price. How much would it cost: About $189.

So just looking at what is highlighted in blue which if I understand you want to pay $200 at least ONE TIME for:

Limited to 10,000 AAs - For $18 I can go All Access for one month and get all AA auto granted per whatever expansion it goes up to. I could do this 11 times with that $200. And its usually about 4000 AA per auto grant level

Full Access to all spell ranks - Limited to basic spells - To buy the rank II spell unlocker is $7.50/one time charge - although personally I don't find a huge difference between Rank I and II


Maximum amount of Loyalty Rewards - Limited like silver accounts - Silver accounts get the same as All Access do. Well 99% of them do but for some reason there are some that are broken.

Limited access up to Journeyman Tier 1 - The only good merc are J5 - this is useless

How temporary are you talking when you say:
Limited Lifetime Membership account could also be temporary upgraded to All Access for half price


Life time was only $299 last time. So to only get these items for $99 less than the full Monty is not very enticing. Nor is the fact it is a temporary upgrade -


Overall I think the suggestions are someone tunnel vision since many other players have no interest in those "upgrades" but they sure do in the Perks that are currently offered.

But bottom line this is what the Silver account program was all about years ago and it was only and additional $5 per month. But it bombed.

I believe they hit on the right model with the perk offerings and we will see many more of those in the future.

so... spend $200 to have a bazaar mule up indefinitely?

Lifetime memberships are a bad bsuiness model, they did them one time to raise enough capital for "something", possibly to fund a team to work on the Marvel MMO, and that did so much damage to the finances of EQ they seemed to need to patch the hole in their loss sheets by offering the perks scheme.

Asking for more Lifetime anything is likely to be met with a wall of silence or maybe a firm no because it erodes the profitability of the flagship product.

There could be another round of Lifetimes at some distant point years into the future but I would not hold your breath.

You have to see the whole package. Auto-grant does not grant a LIFETIME account and is also included in the Heroic Character package that does cost about $35. Its also about 4,000 AAs there but it is not the only package feature. Auto-grant does work differently: It does unlock a whole scrap load where many AA lines do not help the players at all and are just filling material from previous expansions. Sophisticated players want to choose and earn everything by themself. You have mentioned a tunnel vision, was it your own one ?

Ok, didn't knew this. Loyalty points do not matter much anyway.

Thank you for your honest feedback but J1 might be usefull to other players. On the silver account I use an A5 merc which should be a tier below J1 and it is pretty good. It is a huge difference to A1 and A2 which are the FTP mercs. J5 is OPed.

Just as temporary as every AllAccess. Like from FTP or silver to AllAccess. AllAccess is basically always temporary.

It is NOT a temporary upgrade ! Lifetime does mean until the closure of the game. Lifetime might had been only $299 last time but the devs also said that it will be unlikely to return (under those conditions !). This is why I set new conditions that might be acceptable. Not only for a limited one-time offer, instead a solid offer that could stay for many years.

It is all about setting the right price. The average player does not play EQ until eternity and it is all about the average. Even when a few players do play on the lifetime accounts for 20 years it does not matter as there are also players that only play for one year only. I think that $200 are not bad for such an offer and will not hurt DBG at all. Also the last lifetime offer did not hurt them even in the long term but created very high revenue. So far two players that gave their feedback even think that $200 is overpriced. Well, maybe it is ! Not sure about Trevor tho as his coment was a bit cryptic. Some years ago I had played a browser game called AdventureQuest that offered a lifetime membership pretty much similar to AllAccess for just $14.99. This game does still exist and it was only this little game there back in the days. The producers have built a small game imperium based on it and today they do offer twelve games and even have mastered the decease of Adobe Flash which was the end of most browser games.

https://www.artix.com/games/

Loyalty and Tribute are not related.

But this is an example of what I meant by tunnel vision, your statement that tribute does not matter. Tribute is huge to a certain population in the game. High tribute items sell for 50k in the baz easily.

What matters to you is in your post, but those items may not matter to others and totally different things matter to them.

Keep an eye on the Perks offered next year and you may get some of what you wish.

Grats for finding another hair in the soup. It was just a typo and it got corrected.

Mirror mirror on the wall ?

Why would you want to play EQ like that? A gimped character, that can't do much? You would have a perma newbie character with a J1 merc? What are you going to do with that? If you enjoy the game, then play it properly. Just do silver accounts for box toons that don't need gold to be effective. For $200, you could pretty much get a 2yr membership. $10 a month is like lunch at Wendy's one day.

Mercs are overrated and silver accounts are no longer available since a long time. I have scotish ancestors and for $10 I can eat potatoes for a whole month.

One can still get Silver, just not the old fashioned way. Sounds like Sup Rog knows the secret too.

The dirtbay way ?

Menu

10,000 AAs is a drop in the ocean when current AA levels are 50,000+.

I'd prefer to see an option to just have access to EQ and not the other games under the all access umberella. More subscription options add 2 - 5 year plans etc.

J1 mercs are usless at high levels, even the J5 mercs struggle.

Your membership idea looks more suited to TLP servers, maybe they could add a TLP server 1 time payment which limites you to EQ and just that server until it catches up to live, usually around 2 - 3 years. So you could have a Mischief/Thornblade membership for example. All access of course allows you to play on all servers still .

No, just no. This is a terrible idea as so many have outlined above. Iven, please learn that most of the player base (as you pointed out) sees value & is willing to pay to support the gamesub..., in fact 75% vs 25% unsub. is impressive for a F2P hybrid model game. A few added points:

-The exodus to WoW ages ago was back when almost all MMO were subscription model & it occurred because SOE made a lot of mistake marketing/developing EQ II...

-The restaurant analogy doesn't even make sense. Are you saying you'd go into a car dealership and expect them to sell you a car that's just an engine, wheels, & steering wheel and they'll make tons more money? They'd more likely flop from bad consumer feedback.

-This idea would be the death of EQ as the progression servers are close to 50% of EQ's player base giving them a $200 unlimited access option would kill the game's revenue.

-I agree with other thats after stripping that out you're left with an enhanced version of Silver which isn't worth $200. I'd argue Silver isn't worth the $17.99 for a Krono you use to be able to glitch an older (almost grandfathered) account into Silver through. As Skuz pointed out it would just harm DBG revenue by creating a mid-tier substitute that would eat into AllAccess sales. Worse, people would probably realize it's worthless at the price point & fell ripped off.

What's more bizarre is on other threads you're arguing that new content costs should be bundled into AllAccess. This thread contradicts that earlier argument as you're arguing we need a cheaper option for AllAccess. (Unless you seriously expect the Devs to work for free.)

If you want premium features then accept the reality you need to pay for said premium features. The game is still alive compared to countless MMO that failed over its lifespan because SOE/DBG have a good monetization mix and know what they're doing in EQ's case. The Devs do sometimes listen to our feedback like rotating items we wanted back in/out of the Marketplace awhile back or offering retired expansions... but what you outlined above is just a terrible value proposition and ultimately loose/loose for players & DBG...

Of course it would eat into AllAccess but it wouldn't mean less revenue for DBG. Limited Lifetime Membership would mean difersify for DBG and diversity for the players because they could choose more exactly which menu does fit to them. Some already feel ripped off because they had to select the high priced XXL menu due to the lack of other offers but cannot eat everything (would be satisfied with less) which is overbuying.

You should not ignore that diversity would attract new players and some of the current ~26% players that use a FTP account. Theoretically AllAccess could go down by 10 percent points to 64%, Limited Lifetime Membership up to a 20% share and FTP down by 10 percent points to 16%. 74% vs 26% --> 64+20% vs 16% which would be phenomenal. A paying customer share increase by 14% (74 to 84% ) which is like going from A to AAA.

Lifetime membership is a prepaid selling model with a long time distance range similar to 2-year telephone fee contracts. Basically the seller is always in a better position than the buyer especially for long time deals as the buyer does also buy the full risk like that the trading partner could go bankruptcy and the seller has near zero risk if the calculations have been done right. As time does pass over the years the market prices for the product (EQ is an old game) do decrease just similar to telephone fees. However the buyer can also benefit from it because it can counter money inflation. There is a general lack of "investment" options on the global market for those that have saved up some cash.

It would just be splitted into AllAccess and Limited Lifetime Membership while also reduning the share of FTP accounts instead being bundled only to AllAccess. Additionally it will attract more players. These are some different type of shoes (marketing areas) and are not contradictions. Instead you should see them as parts of an overall concept.

What I would like to see would be a 'family' subscription.
You can link multiple accounts, they must be using the same payment method.
Once linked you may log in and play a number of characters equal to the number of linked accounts, even if they are on the same account.

e.g.
2 accounts linked - Log in 1 char from each account OR 2 chars from account 1, OR 2 chars from account 2.

3 accounts linked - log in 1 char from each account OR 2 chars from 1 account and 1 from another OR 3 chars from 1 account.

You get the idea.

No, you're just plain wrong and cherry picking/warping things into rosy assumptions. About half of our community is TLP, so by providing this deal you're killing more than half of EQ's AllAccess related revenue (given TLP players need to be AllAccess...) A LOT of FTP players are just silver memberships which already have the bulk of what you're outlining anyway, so this won't result in sales from that part of the 24%. So between those two points its very clear the whole "10%" sacrifice to catch the 24% just wrong and a critical fallacy of your assumptions.

This is a 20+ year old MMORPG, DBG has already stated in various developer interviews that EQ is "reacquisition focused", it's not realistic to think that younger players will flock to EQ in large groups if you make it cheaper, it doesn't fit that demographic to begin with...

You're entire statement of Lifetime memberships being better for the seller is just false in EQ's case given the published demographics say that most players play longer than the 3+ year breakeven point and its unlikely EQ will shutdown before the breakeven point of less than two years in the scenario you presented.

You just need to accept that you missed out Silver & you missed the [likely once ever] lifetime memberships sale, accept it, and just sub for a year to cut the cost like most people. As others have pointed out $10 a month is nothing compared to what other things like food or the frequent in-app purchases in newer freemium games theses days.

Even if it didn't give a discount that would be a nice quality of life feature. Doubtful we'll ever see it given how AllAccess is across multiple games and the rework would be a coding & database nightmare to manage. But that would be great if they could incorporate boxer functionality like that into any form of EQ follow up game.

Thanks so far everyone for your feedback. I have changed the mercenary from J1 to J3 for two reasons: (1.) Confidency and (2.) being to close to silver accounts who can use A5 with high confidency. More than J3 would be to close to J5. The confidency is a problem and does make lower merc tiers pretty useless. Not everyone does put his mercs on passive mode when pulling or does not know or forget about this.

I was also thinking about raising the AA limit but I think that 10k AAs is just the right cap for now even that the AAs do max out at around 45k for most classes. Silver accounts do have a cap of 1,000 AAs which is just 10% of 10k and for FTP it is 250 AAs. Limited Lifetime Membership should just fill the large gap between FTP/Silver and AllAccess. Fact is that not everyone does want to buy nor does need AllAccess. If a player would be unhappy with it he still could upgrade to AllAccess by an reduced rate which would be about $4.99 per month. This should be fair enough for both parties.

Price for Limited Lifetime Membership got reduced by 5% to ~$189.

New RPGs that might be more attractive get developed constantly and DBG has also an unknown game in development which could be a successor to EQ and EQ2. The EQ train will not run forever this is just how life is. It is a phenomenon that the train does run since more than 21 years so far.

If you think that I am just doing this for myself you are wrong. I have not missed anything. If I would be as selfish as most gamers and humans are I would not hang around in the forums wasting my precious time with toxic people.