Remove the referral system

Sigh...there goes my hope for Crimson Batallion...no Grenadiers...no Red Streak Airmen...just more running around getting sniped. :/

She has a point, it's not like we're being forced to do that. We can just simply ignore it. But if you're hungry for SC and you don't have friends, bad luck, try next time.
Why this doesn't affect me is that I already have the things I need because I spent my SC on weapons, camos and a set of composite armor and helmet for my engineer since it's the only class I play.

1-let us pay money directly for the promo items rather than forcing players to create dummy accounts. The fact that the overall majority of the response to the refer-a-friend program has been players saying they want to pay SOE for these awesome vanity items rather than get them for free from refferals should be an indicator. In fact that was the first question higby was asked on his twitter.

also, the number of referrals in this program are really high. I can't think of anyone except twitch streamers or bloggers with large audiences who could possible pull off 10-25 referrals, let alone referrals that result in a 10 dollar purchase.

2-exclusive items are too good for the program. These items shouldn't be exclusive at all. that is the core of the problem. Yes its great that players can get them for free, but really, it will cost the majority of players a lot of money to make fake accounts, and that is going to be our only way to get them.

3- the referral program should exactly as it does now, but the items shouldn't be exclusive. They should be free with the referrals. That is the rewards. Making them exclusive will primarily make the items rewards for people who will spend 100-250 dollars and make dummy accounts.

I feels very strange to say this to a major game developing company, but here is my honest advice to make the players happy: make it easier for us to give you money

THanks for your reply in this Topic.

You are forced to take part if you want the Items in it.

And this is the Dealbreaker for many posting here: The Rewards are much too good.
Noone would be raging if it was only boosts, premium time, SC.

But as it is now you are offering lots of stuff that many, many of your loyal, longtime players would love to get. But THEY can´t. THEY allready gave you all the friends they had. And they did it for free.

Now i am getting screwed for it, as i was waiting for the closed aurora for MONTH now.
Also the other new Helmet is really, really nice looking, as is some of the other "bling" stuff.

And this is why you get the negative responses. This offer, at this time in the game just screws over your most loyal Fans.
They allready refered everyone they know.
You can´t just "work" on this and get new friends to refer.

Just put this stuff in the shop and i´ll say that the referal programm offered is great.

Don´t do it and i will feel screwed and hate the program. Simple as that.

The rewards have to be really good or else their is no point to the system. The weapons are statistically the same and they have similar camos on the PTS. SOE's done nothing wrong here.

However I really wish I could my recruitment retroactively activated, I've been a big supporter of planetside and have gotten several people into the game (including my dad lol) and it would be nice to have that recognized.

1) Honestly, there should have had a referral system a long time ago, before PS2. SOE isn't a spring chicken and they have a long history of games. Other games had had referral systems. I can't really see any excuse for not having a referral system in place for SOE's games, unless some games like EQ have that; admittedly I've never played any of those other games you offer so I wouldn't know. If I'm wrong, throw some AI mines at me or something.

2) I don't have answers to these questions but I can say that showing us these items and getting us hyped, then pulling them away left a very bad taste in my mouth. I already knew the tank cannons would be part of this since their filenames had "referral" in them, but the camos didn't from what I remember. I don't care about the black/gold/platinum weapons since those are simple reskins, but the unique camos... oh god the unique camos. I want them, but everyone I know with a computer that can play PS2 is already playing it, and I'm not going to spend two hundred dollars for some nice camo by gaming the system.

I forgot to add that making the closed versions of those open-faced helmets is probably worse than making unique camos and infantry lumifiber (haha) exclusive. I shouldn't have to explain why.

there is nothing at all like the MBT HEAT vanity cannons available without this exclusive deal thing.



My personal feelings separate from how i'm trying to respond to these posts is: Should i spend 200 dollars and make 20 dummy accounts to get the MBT cannon, or should I just stop paying for things all together in planetside 2. That's just my personal reaction though. Its sorta like in heroes of nerwerth, where i actually paid for a couple cool hero skins and gave the company around 80 bucks. For DOTA 2 though, their cosmetic system is incredibly complex, incredibly expensive, and created an entire economy around vanity items that barely make the heroes look any different. I haven't given dota 2 a dime as a result. My point is, if a game company makes it too hard for me to buy things in game, and even if i decided to jump through all the hoops those items are significantly overpriced.... well i probably going to just flip the "don't care" switch and stop investing money into the game all together. As for PS2, why am i going to buy a vanity item, when i know the item that i really want, is not accessible?
If i went to a store to buy an amazing item that i've been waiting to have released, and the store tells me "sorry, thats only for people that refer paying customers to us", i'm not going to turn around and buy some sub par item i wasn't interested in. I'm going to go to another store and get the game i item want.

I have fewer friends, but those friends have more money to spend. Instead of needing 25 friends to spend $10, let me get the highest rank by having 10 friends spend $25, or 5 friends spend $50...

The only change they should make is that it should be an overall pool of money earned through your recruiting efforts. 25 people/250$. Not 10$ a person.

If the goal is to difficult they will adjust it anyway, no problem with them setting a high standard at first.

I'm actually fine with some of the items being exclusive, like the platinum NS weapons, and the heroic boost is a great reward for top level. I just wish that some of the new camos were purchasable, and I'm sure many would like the max lumifiber or the new helmets. Special skinned weapons like those are great to give out, along with things like the gold esf fins, etc. But we were shown things like the skin and the helmets long ago, I'm sure many of us were expecting to be able to buy them. Exclusive reskins of already available items are great, especially considering you get the whole item for free, but many of us where hoping to be able to purchase the actual new content.

yea for me its the mbt cannons. Nothing like that in the depot currently.

I honestly think peoples main objection is that desirable items, some of which have no purchasable equivalent, are being added that will be impossible to get for many people. If anything some of the exclusives are too good when the SC shop is rather empty by comparison. Having a "Recruit a friend" program is a good idea but when these items have seemingly been "teased" on PTS and in promotional videos (battle islands) it's not hard to understand why some people are frustrated now they can't get them.

As for what I would suggest would be to crack the whip on the art team and get some equivalent but different stuff out on the SC store.

Here is how I would make it more attainable, at least for me:
Make the referral system cross platform between the PC and PS4. Most of my friends are console gamers. I have referred all of them to the game, but none of their PCs could handle the game. All of them plan on getting a PS4 though. Allow me to refer my console gaming friends to PS2 when the PS4 version of PS2 comes out. I certainly don't know 25 people who have good enough PCs to run this game, or at least to run this game with high enough FPS that they would spend money on it. I do have over 25 console gaming friends who would be willing to though. This would make it much more attainable, at least for people like me.

Also, as stew mentioned in his thread, the only reason i can think of to renew my 6 month subscription once it has run out is the resource bonus because vehicles and maxes cost so many resources right now. Perhaps making these also avaiable to paying, subscribed members of the community in the members depot store would make sense?

i only know 6 people who would even consider for a second the idea of downloading and playing planetside 2 to begin with. 2 of those tried the game out already at my request. Most of my co-workers would be very confused or just laugh.

Make those a recruiting rewards or customer loyalty rewards.

As in, you can recruit people for the rewards or if you spend X amount of money to unlock those rewards for yourself.

I do not have more than a handful of friends and they already tried and dumped this game.

Give people like me, who will dump a lot of money in this game a chance to obtain these items by spending 200 or 300 dollars on this game.

• The changes to make the goals more attainable is make the payment method optional and instant recruit. When you recruit someone they need to play at least let's say a minimal of 5-10 hours, but buying SC is instant.
• Yeah i feel they are too good to be only for the program. At least give PAYING MEMBERS an option to buy them. (We get the short end of the stick when it comes to "Exclusive content")
• For the third one refer back to number one.

I think the problem most people have, is we can't even buy those items if we wanted to.
I know myself and the majority of planetside players, already got their friends to play the game, before there was a referral system.

Many paying customers are just upset that we can't just buy these items, if I really wanted these I have 3 options right now, going out and buying/convincing my remaining friends to get decent gaming computers and send them referrals, spam referral links to random people, or make a bunch of trash accounts and spend 10 bucks on each one.

It would be nice if I could buy these from the store, and then if you refer people you can get these items for free.

This is great news, but it doesn't benefit current or later buyers, because the game's already established in the market. You've introduced it too late.

We'll work towards them with resources that we've already depleted. Thanks for acknowledging our own individual loyalty by the way. We'll just sit, wanting instead of buying, because you think that's a pretty sound marketing strategy.

- Make cosmetics (cannons included) available through alternative methods. Exclusivity might be a good incentive when the objectives are realistic, but we're talking about finding water in the oceans we've either poisoned or depleted. We've invited our friends and either kept them or revealed to them a game that they never plan on returning to, which makes meeting your requirements impossible for legitimate players that are currently playing, as well as a large portion of any that might join in the future.

- No. Something else is needed.

- I would probably make a system that functions off of current friends.

Luperza, please understand that I'm not trying to grill you out over this. I'm not ordinarily mean and my Girlfriend's got serious respect for you. I'm just a little irritated that we're expected to pull miracle stunts out of nowhere, to obtain something that would probably net more profit if you simply sold it in the marketplace. You could not begin to believe how much variation can net in profit...much more than the gamble of hoping that you'll get more investors to replace the ones you've run off with this marketing shenanigan.

People aren't angry because the recruit a friend exists.

People are angry because some of the rewards are things people have already been looking forward to aka closed faced aurora, predator, foreman, and recon camo. Players want these recruit a friend rewards but have no means to obtain them and it is simply a slap in the face to players that have already supported Planetside 2 and SOE.

In my opinion the whole system of RaF is flawed. It needs to be cut down to one person and a selectable reward from a group of 3-5 rewards. The rewards will eventually migrate to the Station Cash shop and 5 new items will be part of RaF.

The biggest issue with the system is simply that it has that 10$ price tag on someone being considered a real recruit to the game.

The commonly held belief is that the number of people who actually PAY in free to play games is relatively low. If this is false, then putting a price tag on people before they can count towards being recruits makes sense. Is there evidence to suggest that the percentage of people who will pay for the game is quite high?

If not, then simply put, any price tag is introducing too many variables into the system. You could conceivably have someone bring 45 people into the game, and not a single one of them pay for anything. To the company that is worthless and would count for nothing, but for the person that is a rather massive undertaking. That uncertainty is what is going to make this difficult for people to swallow. I mean I know 3 people right now who either stopped playing or are interested in trying to play... but they are all notoriously cheap and likely wouldn't pay a dime. Not to be callous, but what reason do I have then, to engage them to try and get them to join then? Defining someone as a recruit should have the option that they also be a reliable player... much like you have Cert or SC purchases, what about 10$ or 20 hours of gameplay? I mean at that point they aren't leaving, that is 3-5 game sessions right there, and that is something that people can more easily control, by means of engaging these people in groups and what have you.

How I would change the system:
Make a recruit someone who spends money up to 10$, or spends 10-20 hours IG (The range being at the discretion of the dev team)

The rewards are great (Hence why people are so upset, hint hint), but the system by which you earn the rewards has too much uncertainty. Making it play time as well, means that outfits can do this together. A tight knit group can keep someone in the game, which Increases their chances of paying money... and giving incentives for groups to remain tight knit, so their new recruited members will reach that 20 hour gameplay goal, will ultimately be a good thing.

It's a good idea, don't get me wrong... it just needs to be reasonable that people get credit for bringing people to the game, without necessarily trying to force people to spend money on it.