Spell Research Instant Upgrade crosses the line of Pay to Win.

Owning a few shares here and there, they tend to send me reports on a regular basis.

Did you have a specific example I should be looking at?

They did NOT cure curses, at least not the ones in library of erudin, SoH, WoE, EM Halls or EM Kraytoc's. But yeah, they were OP.

You've been able to buy masters this way since late TSO, you're a little late with this thread. Though sticking the button on the knowledge window was a bit much I agree.

If it could cover the development in 2004, now in 2013 when servers are significantly cheaper and the team is at the very least 1/4 of the size it was in 04, I think the $15 a month is covering the bills just fine. In fact I would go as far to say that it's covering the bills, and the development of (multiple?) brand new game just fine..

Aah, then keeping it in the house we're talking in... you should have noticed that SoE has one of the better balance sheets within the Sony umbrella. That other departments are doing much worse.

You seem to have done more than I did with them, curse could have expiredI bought 3 used the first with 2 detriments, then next with a curse and a detriment.
It could have been a lot of factors outside of it simply expiring, but we are at least in agreement that they were OP.
As for my third I still have it and it will be there until the forcibly remove it from the game, which I couldn't care less so long as I get the SC refunded, it is what I call evidence lol.
I'm pretty sure they will be on the marketplace soon though, they can say it all they wan't that item didn't get 'inadvertently' flagged, it was a test they've just had to let the playerbase become more adjusted to having items on the marketplace, then they will float that balloon again with a few more assorted goodies.
I just hope that they don't use that tired old 'inadvertently flagged' excuse the next time.

If the game population were falling, you'd think the whiners would be the first to go...

I think you'll find that most of us were in fact against it back in TSO and were in fact against Khrono and were in fact against research potions. Let's stop pretending like our outrage in regard to pay-to-win is new. It isn't.

Gila keeps arguing using real money conversions. I'm going to try for the sake of everyone else to explain this in a manner such that it doesn't need reiterated.

Effort within game = reward in game. That's a fairly simple equation. Credit card =/= effort in game. Therefore we can further conclude credit card should not (=/=) equal reward in game. There is the primary difference. As you've said, Gila, Khrono is also a version of pay-to-win. I think you'd be hardpressed to find anyone against the master button that isn't also against Khrono. Khrono shouldn't exist anymore than purchasing a master with a credit card. Neither one is a reward for effort put into the game which is problematic.

We bastardize the game to such a degree that paying will eventually become a necessity. The consumer has 100% control over this. It becomes frustrating to me to read individuals typing out that tired tripe "well this is just how the industry is going." The consumer has bastardized it. I could create a line of clothing cured in human feces today. The only way that line of clothing would be successful and sustainable is if mindless consuming humans bought the damn things. People are what make the industry move in this direction. Research has shown these companies that people will pay ridiculous amounts of money for no effort. That's fine in the games created from the ground up with this nonsense in mind. The reason that's fine, is I didn't choose to play those terrible games. I did choose to play this one. When I began playing it, it didn't have any such system and along the years SOE has tried to get their foot in the door a little more with this nonsense so they can monetize things that should already be within the gaming world to obtain through ingame effort. I picked this game as a spiritual successor to EQ1 because I loved that game. It required effort, knowledge, and skill to obtain nearly everything within it. Here is what we've become today. The Give-It-To-Me-Faster crowd. The consumer is at fault here. SOE is a business (and often a terrible one at that), but there's a point when you have to step back and realize that a company's only purpose is to make money. They're simply following a trend that the public sets in order to maximize that profit.

I think the op doesn't understand the current condition of the game. You can already buy upgrades without this feature with real money. Sell an SC card or Krono for plat then buy the master or what not on the broker and you have bought the upgrade with real money without using this system.
I don't use this system personally, but I could if I decided to buy an SC card with plat then get the upgrades with or without a promotion going. Or I could buy an SC card with real money and reap the benefits that way.
It sounds like a sour point from someone who has had a bad experience.
There are people that use the feature and people that don't. I think it's good for casual players that don't have the time to play the game for long periods of time, but still want to group and socialize with people.

You could say that rich people have it easier with regards to this system. You could also say that people who are working that don't have as much time to apply to the game as someone such as a student, unemployed person, part time worker, or other such person with more time to play the game is at a disadvantage due to the amount of time that they can apply to the game itself. Just as the Vitality helps casuals vs hard core, this feature can also be seen as a mitigating factor.

However, I would not like to see this logic applied to equipment as that should be the mainstay of enjoyment of the game.

The difference between Krono and SC purchase of goods in game is that an SC purchase distorts the in game economy. The Krono method does too, but to a lesser extent. Further, Krono being available in the game pretty much kills the professional plat farmers, which are a pox on the game, since they don't have customers any longer due to a safer alternative.

At the end of the day, there is no such a thing as a pristine game. There will be exchanges of in game currency for real life currency. The objective of game companies should be to minimize the impact of these transactions on the game. Taking the incentive for real life income out of the equation is a very big step in the right direction for the in game economy. SOE profiting from $$ transactions in the game also is a step in the right direction to minimize the need for more revenue steams in the game. Direct selling doesn't produce any benefits that Krono don't, but does create an artificial, potentially unlimited supply source that can easily destroy the existing markets, such as they are.

I am quite surprised that nobody went into more details here.
Honestly I am pretty sure that they reduced the amount of masters being dropped in CoE. It is not a feeling I have personally, but I just need to check the broker on my server and see that I can't even buy all of my of Warden masters. Compared to other expansions the availability of masters on the broker is way lower than in other expansions. I don't want to talk about personal experience here, since the RNG can always be your enemy.

Additionally - and I am not sure about that one - I don't even know if in the Solo-Instances there is a possibility of a master drop. I haven't seen any so far, so I really don't know. If not, it shows that people rather tend to do solo instances instead of group instances, which is not a pretty good sign of an MMO. It they drop there, it actually proves my previous point of masters being pretty rare in this expansion.

And now you could start to think that they are now intentionally pretty rare, because SoE expects more and more people using SC to upgrade their spells...

There aren't master spells on everfrost broker neither for illusionist nor for fury for lvl 93-95, only experts that are pretty cheap, some of them only few plat. whatever was dropped now all gone. I don't want to spend RL$ on upgrades so i do it traditionally, wait or/and run solo hoping i get research reduction potions. Is not it ironic that instead of fables or ethereals i am rather looking for time red potions?

As our guild & raid leader, I can tell you that while raiding DoV/SS, our bank was overflowing with Masters, and people were always taking them. Since CoE, it is almost empty, and very, very rarely get any to replace them.

So it would not surprise me at all, if they made master spell drops much more rare in CoE.

Maybe. However, we'd also need to take into account that masters can be transmuted, and that the transmuted products may be worth more on the broker (or guild or raid) than the master itself is.

Numbers: T10 masters appear to average about 100p on my server; admittedly a very spiky average. T10 fabled transmute into infusion of ice (10p each) and frozen mana (80p each). Here, it is more profitable to transmute the cheaper masters than it is to sell the master itself.

I think part of that was due to how in DoV raids, I think every raid named chest dropped at least 1 master. So by no longer doing that it definitely makes the rate of masters coming into game much slower. However I don't think it's significantly slower then it was prior to DoV, in some cases with the random masters coming off of raid trash to a degree I'd say it's actually potentially faster when compared to pre DoV drop rates.

I think some of that is due to the classes you're looking at, not so sure about Fury. The masters for utility classes seem to be the most painful to acquire.

No, DoV raids did not have a guaranteed master in every chest.