Gold Membership

Hello righteous players.

Calling all gold members to have a voice.

I know some of us already posted under the announcement. Just wanted to get it localized.

Please tell us/SoE what you think.


2. Membership changes

a. We are thrilled to announce that we are removing the item restrictions from both Free and Silver accounts. No more item-unlocking! We felt that the restrictions weren't in keeping with a positive experience so we removed it!

b. Gold Members are going to get permanent increases to Coin Loot (15% increase) and Mount Speed (10% increase) added to their membership benefits.

Holly Longdale
Sr. Producer
EverQuest II

The mount speed might have mattered back when it was below 100.

The 15% coin loot gain will be hardly noticed, especially under the current system. Unless I am mistaken, the game does not clearly define how much extra coin a player gets due to having the Gold Rush buff in effect?

If not, perhaps SOE could add some clarity to the process, and benefits, by clearly defining it. Make the game will state "You loot 5p from the chest of a <mobname>", with the next line being "You gain an extra 75g from membership status!".

So the difference between subs now is using the broker, 500 SC with a recurring sub, a handful of LoN cards and eventually a +15% coin increase?
I can't see why people are waiting so long to go for a gold membership.

(May have missed off a few things for gold)

Sending mail, Researching spells to master level or scribing a master with no unlock, 2 additional chances to score unattuners from the goblin games, no ad 5 minutes into a session and on exiting the game, being able to pick up plat from the loyalty vendor, 3 more character slots

The broker difference is being able to sell (or just use it as storage) and buy directly from sales crates to save some money.

Edit: forgot the AA slider

Hi all,

For providing an incentive to pay for a gold membership a (as mentioned in other posts) "gold stats buff" would be something that I'd definitely keep my gold sub for.

Something like 5-10% HP, power increase. I could bet that this would even increase gold memberships.

However, as this whole membership thing is currently planned it will probably hurt SOE twice (a) krono market collapse (b) gold sub reduction. Both = less revenue for SOE.

just my thoughts on this
Berg

An increase on Health/Power for gold only members wouldn't create a positive experience for FTP/Silver, which is why they removed the restrictions in the first place. I agree that there's a need of an incentive for gold only members, but we're likely going to get fluff.

This change really confused me tbh. I'd be interested to see how many people drop their accounts to Bronze/Silver, especially if they are people with multiple accounts.

Once you've reached 95/320, and have your masters, why keep paying $15 a month? Especially for the same price, you can buy 1k SC, and that'd buy you 5 Goblin tickets + 500 SC to spend how you'd like, with change left over.

As for the benefits to gold subs, I think they need to be upped slightly. Making 15% more coin on drops is nothing. Make it 15% on merchant sold items too and it 'might' add up a little better. Mount speed increase is pointless, especially as ground mounts are already capped with TS aa, and flying mounts I assume are capped too. Give Gold members a free heroic character every 3 months or something if they remain gold that whole time.

If they only allow legendary/mastercraft i will keep my gold sub. If they allow fabled/master
for silver I will cancel my sub and play with as a silver player.

I don't care about money, my account is a 4 digit one and i don't even try to make money, i give away stuuf for free and so on. I don;t care about more mount speed, i have lready ton of bonuses for that (tradeskill & traadeskill cloak).

I have to agree that the value of a sub has, in my opinion, definately dropped below the $15 dollar value at this point. As people have pointed out, the gold and movement speed boost are mostly worthless and, once you're capped the only real thing to miss is the ability to sell on the broker 'for free'.
I don't use the goblin tickets because 1) the games are, in my opinion, stupidly boring with a crazy low chance of winning anything useful.
The LoN cards are nice fluff, if I get lucky enough to get a loot card that I'll actually use. But the loot cards are rare and I wouldn't miss them much.
That leaves the 500 SC... that's not worth $15.

but will that be enough for folks to stay Gold? I"m having to seriously think about it now.

Make it 1500 SC for $15 no matter recurring or every month paying and it would be nice to consider to keep a gold subscription.
Add a gold buff to stats as someone already suggested and soe would keep subscribers.
Or/and give 50% discount on new expacs.

and there are those of us who do not use our credit cards and go the gamecard route we don't get the 500 SC a month unless we buy our cards from walmart.

Keep in mind that they're just giving us a better deal, heh. If Gold isn't worth it for you, then go Silver, and tell your friends what a great value it is. It's basically a win-win for players. We either get more benefits from Gold or don't have to pay for Gold. And either way, we get more people populating the world.

I do hope it works that way and gets SoE enough money to higher back some of the people they dropped

Short term, yes, but what about long term? Long term when all those lost subs hits SoE's bottom line in a big way? Remember all the recent layoffs? How is reducing their steady and reliable sub income stream going to help SoE pay enough employees to keep EQ2 alive?

There is simply no reason to get gold anymore unless you like to sell on the broker.

If you have multiple accounts, there is now ABSOLUTELY no reason to have more than one sub, since you can just trade everything to you your one 'broker' account.

This has got to be the most shortsited business decision I've seen by an MMO, anywhere at any time.

I said it in a different thread, but I will say it here as well. More free players is not necessarily a good thing. The game needs revenue to survive and free players are not a guaranteed source of revenue. If I am a free player I feel free to leave the game at any time and therefore am not going to waste money on fluff. If I have been paying a subscription all along, I am most likely more attached and see a $15 house as more of a good thing for my character. It is nice to have more people playing but at the end of the day if they aren't paying anything they aren't keeping the game going.

The biggest plus to gold membership is selling on the broker and sending mail.
I still would like a little more "bang" for my $15 bucks
The mount speed is really a poor choice to offer us.
The increased coin only works on chest we loot solo as far as I know. I never saw a larger split from group / raid chest with gold on over the summer But as other posters already indicated, those 2 choices, albeit nice to include, do not put the "icing on the cake" as far as enticing future gold membership or retaining current membership.
Good suggestions thus far, in my opinion of course, I am not asking for all I list below, just that you consider one or more to entice new gold memberships and retain current ones (the last 2 mentioned being what I'd like to see):

1. Discount on expansions, say $10 off a regular OR only $10 to upgrade to collectors.
2. Discount on all marketplace purchases (50% off all items 200 SC or less, all other items 100 SC discount) Excluding Player Studio items, don't want them to get less for their effort unless the discount came from Sony's "cut".
3. Special "gold member" bonus to loyalty coins OR gold member pricing on the loyalty merchant.
4. Additional personal status from writs, bosses and heritages (I am thinking 10% would be nice, if not more)
5. Always present 10% experience, alternate advancement and crafting bonus.

A 10% experience bonus is negligible. You would never notice it and most people would find it almost worthless, especially once they hit max AA and level. Not sure how many people would find that a real enticement to stay for very long.