2014 Membership - Update from Smed

Okay I was actually right about to buy my first premium membership tonight so I could get the 2000 SC item February 7 but I will not be after seeing this post. Why would I take 500 sc when I could get something worth up to 2000 sc? I would have to save up 4 months of membership sc to hit 2000 sc and by then I could have got 8000 sc worth of stuff on the other plan. SOE Please! Please! PLEASE! listen to everyone who says we should be able to choose between picking an something worth up to 2000 sc or taking the 500 sc that can roll over. This would be a great comprise between both parties. Don't over-react to the outspoken individuals. There is a silent majority who thinks differently

If you really like the "2000SC item voucher thing", why not give the player a choice - two worth 250 or one worth 2000.

Or something along those lines~~

The reason they want the change is because they don't want to give 500sc that can roll over, so this would not be a compromise.

"silent majority" *snicker*

Exactly the same thing with me.

I am not sure what your talking about. OP says they're going to let them "hoard" their 500sc. I don't see whats the big deal with letting us choose between the 2000 sc item or the straight 500 sc. If I want to blow my 2000 sc voucher on an item worth 700 sc then that's fine its my choice.

Thanks for listening. I appreciate it.

Thank you for listening smedly!

So there will be no more individual game subscriptions? I currently pay $30 for 3 months(comes to $10 a month) of PS2 access and get 500 SC each month. So now I'm going to be forced into a $15 a month and an all access account where I only play PS2? So I'll have to pay $5 more a month for stuff I don't want? From the responses to the original post this is what I'm understanding.

After considering purchasing a membership for a few months now and almost saying no and flipping the switch when you guys released the "new membership" deal, I am very thankful that you decided to keep the old/current membership system and not continue with the newly proposed system. I had been weighing the pros and cons of membership, and thoroughly debating on whether or not it was worth my money, but after this entire ordeal, I feel that membership is very worth it to me now.

Thanks to listening to the vast majority of your player base, you will soon have a new member in me, and I assume in many more Planetside 2 players who may have been on the fence or just interested in buying into the members of this great game. I applaud your finesse and wish you the best of luck as this new year takes off.

I guess the other ost was closed because this one was openned, so i'll say my thoughts here.

Number one: BLAH~!!! See? I had no idea there was a problem with the consol titles and making deals or the sony cash being used by them. i'm a PC gamer. there are a lot of times we players are clueless aboutthese things, so i am very glad you guys told us abou that. It was good to see you guys coming clean on motivations sure but letting us know about an honest problem we were out ofthe loop on is something people sometimes seem to forget to do, for some odd reason. If you havea problem with your partners, i certainly don't feel the need to blame you for it, i'm sure you'd give consols the same deals if you could.

number two. Yeah, I can see a bit of fear on the accountants part when, suddenly, tons of Sc unspent vanish and items from the player marketplace soak up this unspent revenue and turn a phantom gain into a phantom loss. but that's accounting for you. Bean counters are like politicans, you have to keep an eye on them, or they sometimes, shall we say, "do their job too good". The money was already spent in good faith, true, and they got their SC which is potential sitting aroun unused.Unused potential can be turned into profit by absorbing it. But you should remeber that in the players mind, it's not yours, it's theirs, even though it's in station cash and you sort of own that period. They have a right to spend it within your structure as they see fit, where allowed. Since you have to pay out money to people who will be making and selling on the market place, I can see the accountants sweatting this bigtime. A possibly way to make a sort of double profit gets yanked from them. (Not that they are all thinking this way, I'd be willing to bet. I can see how huge srockup's of cash unspent might just worry some people. Game markets and economies can be as fickle as real ones.) is making it so that people must claim their 500 sc a month going to help anyone, really? It's like a manufacturer giving a rebate, gambling some people will forget to mail it in, giving them an extra profit off a few people. I think this will screw one or two people now and then, or maybe say, someone who is sick in the hospital and has membership but can't access their account. it won't be the vast majority of players, so, addmittedly, it is not a huge deal (except in the case of emergency as I said, natural disaster or health issues.) So the question becomes, is this really helping SOE either?

In all honesty, I'm really not trying to be an addhole here (censored by typo, ha). If SOE were to get screwed, I lose my games, so please understand that is not my intent and I am thinking both of us players and the company, or at least trying to. Originally we didn't know about giving ALL subscribers an all access pas, and with EQN coming, i was worried you were hamstringing some of the potential for us that want to play more than one SOE title, and by hamstringing OUR options, you were cutting yourself on the backswing without realizing it.

It would have been better to have the information in all of these past three announcments at once (well the things you'd already had planned or were in effect at least.) I know people hate big announcements (see several BIGGEST PATCH NOTES EVER jokes in forums from last major patch) but we can only form proper opinions on things we are aware of. Thank you for informing us of all these other factors though, and I think the all access pass for all subscribers is a great idea.

I was actually really looking forward to the change to the monthly SC. 500 SC is barely enough to buy anything so getting one item a month for free was a much better deal. Being able to add a nice cosmetic item every month instead of every couple months would have been awesome.

If I had known there was outrage about the change I would have looked for and weighed in on the arguments sooner, but it seemed pretty obvious the 2000SC free item was a better deal so I wasn't even on the lookout for threads about it. I mean for newer players looking to add high end thousand cert weapons quickly the new model was clearly more lucrative...as the system is now, the 500SC barely adds to the value of the subscription at all because you have to wait a couple months just to save enough to buy one 1000 cert item.

At least this is a company that listens rather than bulldozes changes in regardless of player sentiment. I applaud you all and respect that you cannot please all of the people all of the time

Re-posting (from EQ forums)

I am very pleased to see this kind of response. It's not official yet, and I'm sorry to say I already cancelled my sub. But when the currently outlined changes (or something close enough to them for my liking) take effect I will re-sub (again, given the type of scenario now being outlined).

Thank you VERY MUCH for taking such clearly drastic action from your initial position based on player feedback. one good on you, keep it up.

Personally I just want to say thank you to SOE for hosting this brilliant and really quite underrated game, and the care for the community is astonishing. I really just want to ask the community to not hate on SOE so much when I've honestly seen little but cautious decisions made with the community in mind from SOE, when so many games exist where the developers simply care little to not at all for their player base. I've seen plenty of complaining about the pricing of items and while I have never supported micro-transactions in any game, Planetside 2 has one of the best business models for them I've seen. Team Fortress 2, by comparison, charges up to £13 ($21) for some of the in game virtual items and I was one of the unfortunate people who purchased the game for £15 before they made it free to play. There is even a 'wedding ring' item that simply serves no purpose but to broadcast over the entire game that you are getting married to someone being sold for I believe $70. Even some mobile phone applications have micro-transactions that cost far, far more than (in my opinion) the good deals you get on Planetside 2 - I've heard the Angry Birds racing game supposedly has a car that costs $100.

In short, Planetside 2 has one of the fairest business models I've seen in ages and it's reminded me that there is such a thing as a real game that is free and sustains itself via mostly cosmetic micro-transactions. So many games nowadays are becoming simple pay-to-win exploitation games and it's an absolute joke, the only ones getting screwed are us, the consumers. Planetside 2 isn't like that in the slightest, so my thanks to SOE and whoever else works on Planetside 2.

I'll tell you what, SOE all access for $14.99 is probably the best deal in gaming history. I think there was quite a bit of initial negative feedback on the 500 SC a month being changed to pick a free item, but I think there was more people who would have seen the good value in that than would have disliked it, especially if it carried over to games like EQ1 and EQ2 that have really big cash shops with all kinds of great items.

Planetside 2 is currently the only SOE title I play... but... All Access and one item each every month in all the SOE games does sound like a better deal now, even if I don't immediately take full advantage.

You would claim your reward each month and then keep the SC until whenever you wanted to spend it.

As stated above, the 500SC would not expire. You just have to claim it each month.

I'll let them know that you were looking forward to the 2000SC item claim feature. Is there anything else you would like to see added to Premium Membership?

I'll let them know that that's something you'd like.

Correct.

Any applicable SOE game, yes.

Thanks for the suggestions. We'll definitely do our best to make sure that you are informed of your monthly 500SC.

In regards to the 10% off, we'll have more information regarding the restrictions in the future.

Very happy with this change. Thank you for listening SOE.

Something I would like to add to this for my own sake:

I like the idea of one free item per month OR 500 SC per month choice. Say one month, you want to just do the one free item. the next month you want to get that 500 SC and save/spend/ whatever with it. Go back and forth, ect. I think that would be a great idea to see if it can be implemented where you are given a choice to pick either one for that month. Also, if choosing the one free up to 2000sc value, include bundles and player studio, seeing how I feel that was perhaps the big hindrance to the idea in the first place, it would go over well with the customers here in whatever game they are in. Food for thought really.

There is a lot of potential, and clarity and certainty is needed so customers are understanding of what is going on. From reading some of these post, it seems even the most simple and direct thing is confusing as people are trying to read into what is said more than what is said. Trying to find the underlining scam/rip off/ loop hole that may be present when there isn't one. Blame it on years of other games and companies treating their customers like crap.

Hello,

I am a PS2 only subscriber and paid for 12 months already.

Will I now get "All Access" as well or will my subscription remain unchanged?