Some accounts (including mine) are approaching 15 years account time. That sounds like a super-fabulous event that warrants a cool new vet reward.
Seeing the direction of the game, its probably going to be a 50% exp gain for .5 hrs and a voucher for an additional 5% off their "Already Fantastic!" marketplace deals... Or it will be a big something of nothing..this company doesn't believe in Santa Glug..you know it, I know it. LOL
They've basically discontinued Veteran rewards. The reasoning is they don't generally reward people who remain active, just those who opened an account a long time ago. If I played for 1 month in 2004, and then came back today would I deserve all 15 years worth of rewards? Or would it make more sense to reward someone who has been playing every day for past 5 years. It would be nice to see some new items added to the Loyalty Merchants for 15 years though... Something worth spending some tokens on.
There has been no new vet rewards in 2 years. Supposedly the items from Heroes Festival have taken the place of the vet rewards.
Well if there is any type of veteran reward coming (and I doubt it) make sure you use it right away. As they have been nerfing stuff they have been giving us, such as the mount they nerfed, and recently all those XP potions you got as rewards that USED to be 110%, are all now 100%. 10% don't seem like a lot but that adds up when you are trying to level a toon. I have checked all my potions especially those on characters I have not opened up the rewards yet, and whether they were opened or still remain packed, they have been nerfed. Same for everyone in my guild. NOT to mention, it was give as a REWARD years ago, why take it away from us now? Hey, I am sorry, but that reward you got where we gave you a Landrover 3 years ago for being the best employee, we are taking it now and giving you a VW Mini bus....
Vet rewards were originally created to reward players who paid for subscriptions. Until the game went F2P, you had to pay a sub or you couldn't play EQ2 at all. The game has been F2P for years now; they don't owe rewards to silvers and bronzes just for showing up. I guess the perks they give for players with gold subs are the "nowadays" vet rewards in that case.
They should just let an account pick one item from the LoN stuff once per year. Keep some players happy, not much fuss for the devs, and probably little to no overhead for the company to set it up.
Vet rewards were initially instituted as an incentive for people to continue subscribing. When the game required a subscription to play that was a good model to keep people playing the game. When the game became F2P, the incentive model had to change. Now we have daily objectives that reward loyalty point tokens. That creates an incentive to log in every day, reinforcing the habit through positive reward. As long as F2P is an options, this is a much better model for keeping people in the game.
Dude I agree with what you said, but a much better model would be to make a better game and stop taking things away from players such as mounts and nerfing past rewards. Lets see, I have 1800+ loyalty tokens and don't see a thing worthwhile to spend them on..so to me its a bad model. I love the dev team, but I question the direction they have taken this game and have very little faith in seeing improvements that don't involve a money grab.
I'm not going to pretend to love the devs at this point, but one thing I would remind people of is that the people working on the game day to day probably have a lot less to do with the overall running of the business than most people might think. For instance, the devs are probably being told what to create to fit with the cash shop monetization schemes the company has for the game rather than coming up with and implementing this stuff on their own. It's easy to forget that they're just employees following orders for the most part. It's one thing to hold them accountable for what we can clearly see them do or say, it's another to blame everything on the employees when it's their bosses making a lot of the decisions.
This does worry me... I noticed it too. My 110% potions were only giving 100%. 10%, while not a huge amount initially can add up to a LOT of time in the long run. Why the change? With so many things that need fixing, it seems THIS was one change that could have been skipped?
