It is disheartening that we live in a world where people are so quick to try playing the victim/discrimination card, the moment they do not get everything they want. As others have said, it is a disgusting practice that detracts from real victims, and real issues.
Back-seat drivers at worst, educated guessers at best. Your example for "best evidence" implies that everything DBG does is logical and is the best-case decision for the bottom line. My counterpoint is that this is not always the case (see any number of other decisions for examples, not to mention, everyone makes mistakes). I am saying that their decision to ham-fistedly apply the queue to F2P players because "first-time" logins taxed server resources was a poor choice for their October business. To reiterate my earlier question, should it not have been the case that once a F2P account was logged-in for the first-time, why would it need to wait in the queue ever again? According to Holly's justification for the queue, the queue should only have applied to 1st time logins. My wager would be that FTP probably accounts for 30-40% of the "active" players ("active" meaning people logged in), maybe more, maybe less. It's hard to say since we have no real numbers around it. Nonetheless, having been a F2P player from 2012-2014, I can assure you, that anyone actively playing the game on F2P is still spending some amount in micro-transactions. Many F2P accounts are the alt-accounts of All Access subscribers, who have no qualms about enabling mercenaries, adding character slots, and making other micro-transactions, not to mention pre-ordering expansions, etc. People actively playing the game on F2P-only would also need to be buying Broker tokens, and trust me, once the Daybreak Cash is loaded into your Wallet you find yourself suddenly "needing" all sorts of other Marketplace items. Given those examples, I would find it surprising if F2P accounts are less than 10% of the monthly revenue. So, in essence, the decision to implement a poorly-designed queue, that only counts up instead of down, and apply it to 10% of the company's revenue during all peak hours, was an unwise one, and in my mind illustrates a lack of foresight to its impact on perhaps 30-40% of the community's players. Furthermore, the attrition of F2P players that might have given up on this game after experiencing 10+ hour queues 2 weekends in a row is a further impact to both the revenue and overall player population. I would have found it reasonable to see 30-60 minute queues the first few days, with 10-30 minute queues after a week had gone by. But since the queue was just capping population, instead of throttling first-time logins, it created a horse manure situation where a F2P account was simply unable to login on evenings and weekends. Do you not see the detriment from ostracizing 30-40% of your server population? Since I think my 10% revenue is conservative, how many -10% decisions can a company make and still survive??
Every single character that is logged into EQ2, requires a certain amount of server resources. A single grain of sand is light, but when you fill a bag, it gets heavy. The first time login of any character contributes a greater load, and they want to ensure that when paid users attempt to log a character for the first time, it does not compromise server performance as seen on Day1 of Maj'Dul. As far as Maj'Dul was concerned, they were in a bind, with server instability being a significant problem. They had to ham-fist some kind of fix in, or it would have been a real issue. I would be very surprised if DBG did not pay attention to this, and given that they had no qualms doing the HoF merger and implementing the queue on it, I would be very surprised if it was as economically disastrous as some people imply. We could both assume how many of the active accounts are FTP, but it counts for naught unless we have some kind of support to back it. You also referenced many FTP accounts being side-accounts of an all-access member. I touched on this in an earlier post, where I mentioned that the whole game going FTP had very little effect on server population after a couple of months, beside giving existing subscribers a stable of FTP accounts. And for the FTP accounts on the side held by All Access subscribers : Enabling mercs is a one time purchase. Adding a character slot is a one time purchase. Pre-ordering expansions is a one time purchase. They don't need broker, mail or global chat access as they all have the main account. Sure, there is some money in it, but I don't believe it is as much as you do. I would be curious to find out what the expected profit margin per account is, for DBG, but that is not likely to happen any time soon. On a side note, I have 40,000 DayBreak Cash ready to use. I am not suddenly finding myself "needing" all sorts of other Marketplace items. While not overly desirable, the alternative could have cost them a lot more unless it was implemented flawlessly. You view it as ostracizing an assumed 30-40% of the population. I view it as quality of service assurance for the primary source of income. Would have it been nice if they had more time to implement a more refined system? Obviously, but they did not have time for the Maj'Dul fix, and they must not have seen any compelling reason to adjust it for Halls of Fate. Bigger fish to fry, and a short term loss of a handful of FTP accounts, are what they are.
There is NO discrimination against F2P players. At all. Queue priority is a PERK of PAYING for the game. This happens in ALL the F2P games. If you don't want to wait in the queue, freaking pay the sub. The way I see it, you F2P guys are lucky Smokejumper was brought in here to institute the F2P transition so you can sit here and play the game and ***** about not getting the same things that the paying players get. If this game never went F2P, what would you have done? This game is the least restrictive F2P MMO I've played, and I play quite a few of them. The queue's are temporary. If you're not willing to pay for the game, deal with it. So stop whining, and enjoy the damn game. Definition of discrimination: the unjust or prejudicial treatment There is nothing unjust or prejudicial about having these queues.
How many grains of sand warrant a 10 hour queue? Even if every character that logged in got priority treatment for 60 seconds, meaning no one else could login for those 60 seconds, that means there would have to be 600 people waiting in this queue. I find it extremely hard to believe that 600 people would be staring at a queue window in this day and age of instant gratification. Especially a window that said 10 hours 1 minute, 10 hours 2 minutes, 10 hours 3 minutes as the time passed. The queue was a population cap. And I feel it was implemented both unrealistically (long wait times) and unfairly (F2P had no chance of ever getting online) Absolutely. You make a strong argument on many points, and every number I'm quoting is based on a 'reasonable best-guess'. I simply use these best-guesses to illustrate my main point that a 10 hour queue for F2P players was absurd. I like seeing people in this game, and to me decisions with outcomes like that will only reduce that enjoyment. Therein lies our major disagreement. I think 30-40% of the player-base is worth satisfying, while you would err on the side of the population that pays 90% of the bills. Any actuary in the world would agree with you, and I must admit I would concede to the financial logic in your argument. It just doesn't give me that same warm and fuzzy feeling that playing fair with the F2P community does. It also doesn't seem that much extra effort to design a queue based on "First Time Login = Yes/No" rather than "Server Population >2500" to mitigate what seems like an absurd player experience for anyone on Maj'Dul those first two weeks
The answer to that would require intimate knowledge of the problems DBG experienced after merging Maj'Dul, along with precise server load information (which is very different to the light/medium/full indicator). Kind of difficult to go forward with those unknown variables. I also like seeing people in the game, it is an MMO after all. To give an example, wind the clock back a few years, and you will see me among the minority that was critical of the impact Guild Halls, and also the overly convenient rapid transport. However, I have also been vocal about issues relating to server performance. A laggy game would not motivate FTP'ers to subscribe, and a laggy game is discouraging for subscribers. I strongly believe that server performance and stability should be of significant priority. The most reasonable critique I have seen of the queue implementation, was efficiency of communication to players that are affected by the queue. For example, Holly logging into Maj'Dul and making broadcast messages about upcoming patches they hope would fix the queue, was obviously with good intentions, but really missed the relevant audience. I may have missed a post or two, but I have seen very little from red names explaining the situation on these forums. Even if some red names did explain the situation better, people would still make emotional posts about it. For example, how often do you see angry posts when the servers are down for scheduled maintenance? But at least there would be a red name post that people could link/refer to, to help mitigate the extent of the frustration some people feel.
There still seems to be some confusion over FTP and paying customers, its actually subbing and non subbing, as a great many non subbers do actually pay in some way or another (sometimes they even sub for a while, shock/horror). Also its worth noting that so called one time purchases are a bit of a misnomer, EQ2 regularly brings out expansions, just purchasing one would not of course entitle you to all future expansions. The same is true of character slots, marketplace items and merc unlocks. The expansions are a particularly important thing to remember as considering their price they are worth several months subs on their own, which is also worth considering for people who own both subbed accounts and unsubbed accounts, seeing as the unsubbed account/s will almost certainly have had expansions bought for it (unless of course they didn't want level 100s on their unsubbed account/s). There's no way we as players could actually know how many accounts are unsubbed or how much they contribute percentage wise, and citing server merges as evidence that "ftp" hasn't worked is nonsense considering how many Mmo's have merged their servers, and ESO from the start merely decided to dodge that future headache by simply having 2 servers, Europe and North America. In short we'll never know whether the game would have generated more or less income if "ftp" had never been introduced, anyone who says they do can feel free to read my palm at any time, or perhaps gaze meaningfully into his/her crystal ball, I'm ok either way tbh. That being said I think its foolish to assume the majority of unsubbed accounts contribute as much revenue as a subbed account, (though someone who owns both subbed and unsubbed accounts almost certainly doe's, for what that's worth) and if there are substantial server breaking issues arising from a major procedure like a server merge, then it seems only common sense that they would seek to alleviate this primarily for the subbing accounts while they seek to fix those issues. My only real problem was the lack of communication from the getgo, this was foolish and shortsighted, they should have been all over this from the start, especially considering the proximity of the latest expansion and the Christmas period, this being the time they actually get the most money from unsubbed via expansions and perhaps even a few months of subs. This is incidentally one of the reasons I don't buy into the whole conspiracy theory about a sub recruitment drive, in my opinion they had more to lose than to gain by doing something like that unless they had to. I believe its more likely to be exactly what it looks like, ie. overworked Devs struggling to do several things at once in a limited time frame, they just need someone to communicate more on their own forums, hopefully we didn't lose too many unsubbed accounts and the income they bring because of this.
Agreed. We are both making our best guesses when it comes to F2P % of population and income. Glad to hear it! No question there. But if converting F2P players into subscribers is a desired goal, restricting them with a 10 hour queue on evenings and weekends amounts to nothing more than a paywall. Might as well eliminate F2P on merged servers instead of insulting them with ludicrous wait times. On this topic, we fully agree. It baffles me how communications are made via Twitter or worst yet, logging into various servers, but rarely ever on these "official" forums.
Somehow the words "temporary queue" keep getting missed here. Are you instead suggesting a "temporary elimination of F2P on merged servers"? I'm sure that would annoy people far more than the temporary queue.
Thank you for this enlightening thread. In Sweden we have something we call a "last minute flight" wich I'm sure other countries do to, I wouldn't know tho as I am not a travelled man. Basically it means that if there are any spots left on the plane before take off you can get the trip very cheap. Many people travel like this quite a lot actually. The problem is the risk of not getting a spot on the flight because the plane is full. You as a customer have a choice in this matter. Pay the full price and you'll be guaranteed to get a seat over the person who will not pay the full price, or don't and live with the risk. The flight company will not care whether your budget allows you to pay full price or not. This is what discrimination is?
seriously, I have 2 paid accounts and both of them frequently get $20-$40 a month added in DBC just for my decorating. Do you spend $35-$55 dollars a month on your "micro" purchases? You seem to think you are supporting DBG more than a member, I got news for you, members make micro purchases along with the STEADY payment of our monthly membership. Members are WAY more important financially than F2P. I hate to burst your bubble, but it's a financial fact. My personal theory on the reason for the que is an overload situation from everyone changing names of toons, guilds, having to update everyone's account info when you log in for the first time, these are all uncommon drains on the processes for the servers and I believe made Maj'dul crash several times the first couple of days. I am confident most of those problems will be over and done with by the time the expansion comes out next week.
I applaud your analogy. In our country that's not discrimination; spend money, get perks.... it's known as "business".
