2014 Membership - Update from Smed

Discussion in 'Official News and Announcements' started by Luperza, Jan 6, 2014.

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  1. Casyl

    Thank you!!
  2. Stevil

    Well that's not on!

    Come on lads and lasses... If we shout loud enough we can get Piestro in on those meetings! Oh and we can keep Luperza in purple hair dye for the forseeable future!!

    There's nothing we can't all achieve together :)

    I will be cancelling my subscription until Piestro gets to go to a meeting. Who's with me?
    • Up x 1
  3. Wych

    Thank you for your response, it is appreciated.

    I do have an Active old EQ2 trial from many moons ago. I had no intention of discussing ProSieben. My question was a direct one regarding this new deal, your response is a welcome one.

    However what I will ask of you is this, if you could pass it up. I have noticed on a daily basis that there are enough Europeans with an SOE account who are not willing to give them up, please look after us as best you can while we still exist!
    • Up x 1
  4. Piestro Community Relations

    You are most certainly in the "need to be accounted for" category in any decision making.
    • Up x 4
  5. Veron

    First off thanks for the dynamic feedback from the company and keep up the good work.

    I have the following 2 questions.

    Will the 3 month, 6th Month and 1 year memberships still be offered at their discounted rates respectively?

    Would it be possible to adjust the discount for items?
    Example: Item that is worth 700 SC with a non-membership, however with a Premium Membership. the Item would cost 500 SC
    (Not to include the player studio)
    This way it would still preserve some of the previous idea, allowing for people to at least purchase 1 item Per month. (Most Items)
    And this will also increase the likely hood of a player buying an item every month. (having to claim it is still a good idea on top of that)
  6. LaRoaZ

    Look, i love planetside 2 and have been on board the entire time. I happen to be good with money and can manage it such that i always have disposable income to throw at thigns i want to throw it at. I dont really prefer free to play at all. I have been crafty enough to be able to buy most of the things in planetside that i want to have at vastly discounted rates via the double station cash days (do you still have those?) and sales and whatnot. Even with that the amount of money i have spent so far is a bit worrysome. if i were to do a rough mental estimate i'd place it around 800-1000 dollars since launch day.

    Now, i can afford that and it really isnt a huge deal. I'd rather not have to fork out that much but i'll live. My friends, on the other hand, dont have as much money, time, patience, and whatnot to invest in planetside. when i do successfully coax them into trying or retrying the game they almost always react with disgust at the prices of things and how slowly they earn certification points and how unfair it is for them, especially when they play with their friend who has every vehicle weapon except one and like half the other weapons and a good 30 or 40 camo patterns. So far out of maybe 15 attempts only one of them has actually decided to take the plunge and play with me and invest some moneys. And i agree with them.

    The prices on things, at least on the surface, are kind of really high for something that is only a sidegrade, or even worse for a functionally entirely different but more effective weapon (for instance lock on rocket launchers or getting the ppa for the scythe so you can mow down 10 infantry in a few seconds. Even after i explain how to get them for much cheaper they just dont want to invest time and effort into a game that is 'pay to win'.

    Personally, i would prefer either pay once and get everything, or subscribe and get everything until the sub ends, over free to play. The cat is out of the bag, people have already invested in free to play and it would be very very tricky to undo that and change your mind now.

    But i think by far the best model i've ever seen is the way path of exile does free to play.

    The entire game is free. You can play it. You are physically incapable of buying anything that isnt purely cosmetic. It is actually free to play and you cannot in any way accuse it of being pay to win. Convincing my friends to play that is easy. They just happen to not be huge fans of arpgs.

    I played PoE for a good month solid and i invested around 60 bucks into some cosmetic items that you get back and can reassign to items willy nilly as many times as you want. I feel faaaar more satisfied with those purchases than i ever have with planetside. I always feel a bit guilty when i mow down a freshly created level 1 or 2 character as soon as he pod drops into battle for the first time in his life. I paid money for boosts to increase my power and the weapon i used to murder him. His first experience in the game is losing to someone who paid to win.

    I dont think youre money grubbing at all, but i can certainly understand why everyone and their dog thinks you are money grubbing.

    The cat is out of the bag for planetside, but i hope to god landmark has a bit more enlightened of a payment model. I bought one of those founders packs and am eagerly awaiting my chance to excersize my creative brain instead of my other brain parts in a type of game i have lusted for since i first played terraria and minecraft several years ago. I would hate for landmark to be poisoned with that same resentment planetside has faced for quite a long while. Especially since landmark is essentially a cooperative building game. Dont restrict peoples ability to build things or claim sections of the world with a paywall. Or at least make it a paper thin paywall. Player studio and cosmetic upgrades are a fantastic way to make money and i will happily buy a couple hundred dollars of those lickety split.

    thanks for reading.
    • Up x 1
  7. DigitalHype

    Glad to see you've listened. Particularly regarding #3. I think it makes sense to renew my sub now.
  8. Pokebreaker


    I usually hate giving short responses to well thought out/written posts. However, the topic doesn't quite apply to me. I just appreciate the quality of your post.
  9. DigitalHype

    My fear is that this "one membership" will increase the price. So we end up being forced to buy something, we don't need. Newer, and/or more popular games end up subsidizing other, less popular ones.
  10. Piestro Community Relations

    Someday, maybe. Over the last 15 years we've raised prices a couple of times (I think the last time was around 2003). There is absolutely no discussion of this internally however, and it wouldn't really make sense for us to do this.

    Edit: Imagine the reaction if we did. We can predict pretty well how ya'll would react.
    • Up x 4
  11. Ravenwolf Foxtrack

    Not too hard to imagine. Taking the current reaction to what everyone had with the initial announcement, announcing a price increase would make the recent thing seem like a fire cracker being compared to the explosion Fat man made in Japan.
    • Up x 1
  12. Mormomboy

    Did they mention wanting to be in those meetings? LOL funny thought though.:)
    Not gonna lie, I might get a little annoyed if I had to attend those meetings because the forum I watch over thought it was a good idea.
    Good effort though. Gave me a few good laughs while I thought about it.
  13. Liewec123


    while we appreciate the words, we're not seeing a lot ofthe action that we should,
    take the anniversary bundle for example:

    early on you were selling it with a picture of a 50% xp 50% resource booster,
    everyone was receiving 50% xp boosters for every character they had,
    then you stealth changed the picture but continued to offer the boosters for each character,
    then you drastically nerfed the bundle to only grant a single booster for a single character (without any warning)

    alot of people continued buying the bundle (me included) only to realize that we weren't getting what everyone else had.
    then some of those people started receiving different things
    (some received xp boosters on every char, and some even received xp+resource boosters on every char.)
    forum posts flooded in, none were answered by the devs (that i read, and i read through many).

    as one of the few who only received a single xp-only booster for a single character i feel extremely shafted by SoE,
    i paid the same amount of real money as everyone else, and received a tiny fraction of what everyone else did.
    the forum posts remain unanswered, as though ignoring us for long enough will make us forget and solve the problem.

    this is why i personally began to see SoE in the "money grabbing" way.

    (side note: i know its not you personally who does any of this, and you shouldn't deserve any flak, its just unfortunate that as the community face for SoE you are the shield that those responsible for mishaps and mistakes remain behind!
    • Up x 1
  14. Iosif

    If you don't mine me giving you a bit of advice but anytime you make a policy change to improve your profit margin at the expense of the players, it will always end badly. Like you I work for one of the most successful video game developers in the world and I cannot imagine doing anything else in the world.

    The problem isn't that we think that SoE is full of "Money Grubbing Jerks" but SoE has a pretty terrible track record for the better part of 2 decades that I have been playing SoE games. I have myself, co-workers and many of my friends have seen the business model shift from the early 90's of "Make it and they will come" to something that appears less noble. Players know that you must make a profit to keep making games and player have no problem supporting game and developers that go that extra mile for the play to make them feel like they value the player.

    Really to make a successful game and make you money there are only a few rules.

    Make the game you want to play, most of the developers i have had the pleasure of working with are some of the funnest and most imaginative gamers and have some of the greatest Ideas and I love playing all of their demos and games.

    Release it when it is ready not before, when the business gets in the way of development the business will always lose. If your not going to make a release date because the product isn't ready then you move the release date and apologize to your fans. The players/fans are your friends they will forgive you when they get the final product and are blow away at how perfect it is.
  15. Reaper

    It took me 2 hours to find this forum. After receiving a poor responce from a soe rep in a support ticket I scoured the forums on my phone. After posting what happened on the forums and getting upset over the lame answer I was given I did my research and found this Forum. The SOE customer service rep had no idea about this and could have saved me hours of grief by just pointing me here. Extremely disappointed in how Sony continues to handle situations. I have lost all of my friends who used to play with me due to this BS and am really irritated
    Add: on the flipside I will be happy to play EQ and the original ps again
  16. Stevil

    Thanks man.

    I hoped it might get a few laughs :)
  17. Jin Shepard

    Not to sound like completely inpatient but, when will the 500 sc be deposited on the account when people like me didn't use the last 2.000 cert one time per month thing?
  18. Jalek

    When All Access launched it was $29.99, so the numbers being tossed around now are half what it was then. I'm not sure when the price fell, 2011 I think, after the F2P changes.

    I just think /pizza needs to come back.
  19. ncDieseL

    Question

    Under these proposed changes, what would the monthly cost of subscription be? Are you saying that sub is now going to be $14.99 a month? That's more than the current 1 month sub fee...
  20. Piestro Community Relations

    The previous change was never implemented. We'll get out some messaging before we make any changes, the timeline will have to change some.

    The current 1 month sub fee is $14.99 as detailed here.
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