Remove the referral system

Friendship may be magic but magic isn't a cool helmet, camo or tank barrel. Take that magic **** back to a fantasy MMO.

I have no problem with people earning promo items for free for referring people or for anything else for that matter but for those of us who have no one to refer people or miss the special promotion event for *insert item here* we should be able to buy it in store, even if it costs 3x the price of an equivilent non-promo item.

Want Alpha Squad Camo? 1500 sc
Circuit Board? Same deal, 1500 sc
How about a Zypher PX or one of the MBT Reskins? A whooping 3000 sc
And so on for any armor / helmet / decal / whatever.

There will people who will pay those prices for promo items, hell I know I would. But if we aren't given the choice of buying them, you simply won't see a cent. That's the issue with promo exclusives, they reward a few privlaged enough people and screw the rest who are too busy or not popular enough or not extremely rich or don't live in a certain area.

But buying them even at much higher prices atleast gives the rest of us a chance. So yeah if you happen to be one of the lucky few who happens to get the promo item from the actual promotion, congrats you saved yourself alot of cash, if not, well atleast you have the -=OPTION=- of being able to nab it at a premium.

The issue is Imo is that they shouldn't be exclusive ..

The referral program should be a way for people to get items that are available to ALL free of charge, or you could do what many games do and that's give the player X % of any station cash bought by the people the referred .. Ie: For every 1000 SC the people I refer buy I receive 100 SC ..

Ofc you also have the opposite side of " exclusive " items .. Then when 6 months down the line they haven't had the desired effect ... They suddenly become available to all to generate revenue .. Pissing off the people who did go out their way to earn them while exclusive.

What id like is:

• You choose an item per referral (decals for first 3)(cosmetics after 4-10)(weapons/trims 10+)(they all unlock after 20).
• All available on the members only store apart from gold, SE helmets and decal status
• New friend reward is great, keep that.
• Referral is given for buying 500 SC or one month sub

I think this is fair, ill go hunting for friends with good pc's now xD

This is really frustrating. I play since release and spent over 100€ and recruited 5 Friends. Two of them also spent between 50-100€ and now you come with this.

I am not sure if i will stay with this game when there are items that are only for recruiters.

Here's what I would do if I were SOE; Have a side system where current players can sort of ask others to verify they have been referred by them. In that case, run a check on both sides of such a petition and if it's legitimate then open up the appropriate Reward Items for the person who brought the other person in. It's that simple. You have Join Dates, you have Stats, you have all the information you could possibly need. And that's ALL you need to do for all of us to be OK with this mess.

I've bought and spent about 30K Station Cash by now, I've played 300Hrs ever since my Join Date and I've got FOUR people playing, 2 of which SUBSCRIBED and one is thinking of buying 10K Station Cash. If I did any better at supporting PS2 you'd have to hire me for PR or at least that's how I feel, and just now telling me that I missed the Referrals like that, that's a slap. Am I greedy? No, I had no idea we had Referral Rewards but I got those people to play didn't I? If you're going to have Rewards, might as well let me(And others like me who might have even fared better) call dibs on those Rewards.

If you want an alternative you can introduce Veteran Rewards who, in fact, should be just as good if not a lot better. Dedication tramples hype especially in MMOs, that's if you know your stuff. I suspect you do.

First of all...

How to make the Goals more attainable? Well, first of all, NOBODY has 25 friends, any normal person has 2-5 real friends and a bunch of people behind that, that qualify as "People I know", but still nowhere near 25, and certainly not 25 that are able to run this game on their computers.
The only people that will be able to do this are popular streamers and youtubers who has already refered them to Planetside 2.

Exclusive rewards... Now there is the problem with this ****** design of a program.
This is a Free to Play game... NOTHING should be exclusive, EVER.
Everything should be avalible via ingame means.
Just by the amount of people saying they would buy these items NOW, would make you A LOT more money than holding them for exclusive.
Yes, other games has exclusive items for recruiting people, but that does not mean you have to be ******** like them and keep stuff from your customers. It just ends up hurting you.

If I were working at SOE and were to make the program? I wouldn't, SOE is hardly known for being the best game developers(Something you were hoping to correct with Planetside 2 as I recall), so pulling this out of my *** would not help in the slighest, sorry, but that is the truth.

In the end, you are pissing a lot of people off by holding back the popular items for the Referal program, and pissed off customers means you are not doing your jobs right.

Interesting idea .. Based on Time spent in game ? Duration of Account ? or $ spent ?

Is a nice idea .. specially for those of us who have played since Beta ... and got a decal

It's a very legitimate question - What happens with those of us who have no people to refer... Because we've done so?

Most people would be lucky to get 2 friends to try this game much less 25. To me this screams, "make bogus accounts just to get the reward". SOE knows damn well no one would be able to recruit 25 legit players. The 3 friends I've already got to try the game didn't enjoy running at 3 FPS and quit before they really started. Besides SOE not advertising to attract players, the system optimization is probably the biggest game killer for most new people. Stop pawning advertising off on your players and do it yourself. Make the game playable for, "normal guy' and you wont have to resort to these cheesy ROF programs. Anyone that's played EQ knows exactly what this ROF programs does.

Wow ... ppl creating such a ****stom about such a non-issue.
It is normal that companies come up with new ideas to get more players or at least keep the number of players even.

Also you still can have all the rewards even with no friends at all. Create 25 accounts and spend 250$ ... some ppl WILL do this. I wonder how many rewards we'll see on day one.

It's not a new idea, SOE did this in EQ and it didn't do anything but make people make more boxed accounts. I could really care less what they do. I've just seen the result of this program and it does jack to raise the population. Its a cash grab...nothing more

A poorly designed cash grab at that.

If this was a "Subscriber reward program" based on the level of subscriber you are "Copper, Bronze, Silver etc" they might just get a few more subscribers.
But even then, all the rewards should be avalible via the ingame shop.

To make stewie happy: introduce retroreferal system for, where people could name, who invited them into the game, working for people, who came into the game a day/week after release.

There's no possible way I could recruit 25 people, I'm just not popular enough (plus those who would play PS2 have already heard of it and started playing). But if this stuff was available for SC, I'd quite likely buy it.

Additionally, "get your friends to spend money and we'll give you stuff!" is exploitative - it's the kind of thing crappy Facebook games do, and I will not spam for your game to my friends. Blacklight Retribution has a system where you can let them post to your Facebook wall and they'll give you a tiny amount of in-game money a day; I refuse to do that just on principle, and SOE trying the same thing BUT WITH REQUIRING MY FRIENDS TO PAY FOR IT is unacceptable.

Well most people don't have 25 friends let alone get 25 friends to play and pay for planetside, kinda unrealistic tbh. I'm sure in the future SOE will notice that they have made little money on the referral system and release these items on the SC shop.

Bit of a low blow tho.

I remember the referral system in City of Heroes, they gave you a free month if you referred enough people (I think it was 5), otherwise you just got free origins and inpsiration packs per person.

This is just a tad overboard. No one I know of would play PS2, ones that I know would already is.

1) Reduction of levels something like 1, 3, 5, 7, 10 seems more likely with the current playerbase. Especially considering that the game is well over 8 months old, so the amount of players won't grow so substantially even with this incentive.

2) The rewards are good if you look at the NS weapons as they are pretty much skins and equal to the cost of the £8 purchase, however the fact that SOE missed the opportunity to "double dip" with the program by releasing said items in the cash shop threw me for a loop. The helmets/logos I'm ok with as exclusive (As there are alternatives in the shop) but the cannons I am sure everyone wanted and looking at the amount of referrals only a few people will get. (Mostly illegitimately)

All in all the fact that you teased the designs and then screw the players over by making it referral only is a no go. You are going to tease stuff you have to say what it is for from the beginning or you just don't tease at all.

3) Looking at most other referral systems free and not free, the best ones are based on membership as the incentive to keep the new member is there to keep them playing to justify their payment for the membership.

The items can be moved to cover the different membership levels and based on one or more friends but the items can only be gained once.

• Recruit a friend = boosts (You can continuously give these out for singular recruits and I think that is what you had already)
• If the recruit gets a membership you give rewards based on the membership: Bronze = 3 items, Silver = 5 Items, Gold = 7 items, Auraxium = All items in the promotion
• The items given at each level will mirror what you are currently proposing so cannons at gold membership and so on

Who's saying you can't buy olympic medals? http://www.classicauctions.net/Default.aspx?tabid=263&auctionid=55&lotid=705 jk aside I do agree with you

This system is disgusting and just goes to show to what lows SOE goes to revive their dying game