Is cert gain driving away new players?

If cert gain remains as it is, it will eventually be SOE complaining

Take care not to follow the Diablo 3 philosophy

You should get a dog instead

Yes it drives away a certain portion of new players.

please elaborate.

i dont know what the diablo 3 philosophy is other than to take a great game and make it so simple a cave man could do it

I posted a suggestion on reddit to make the medals provide discounts (applied retroactively) on upgrades instead of merely providing certs. A gold medal is worth a measly 66 certs! That's enough to buy two scopes and that's it. Make it a 25% discount and after you've bought a scope and three upgrades it's much more useful. Then you hit the Auraxium medal and it's even better.

The prices of the weapons are quite hilarious, and there is no equivalent of weapons for example, dalton cost 700 sc/1000 cert and zepher cost 700sc/700 cert, see the equivalent? weapons are just like ''Oh let's put it 1000 cert so make people buy them by realmoney'' prices are totally insane by now. And the worts thing is to bring up new players with the stock weapons and showing those outrageous prices. Prices need to be equivalent with SC because all new weapons are going 1000 certs/700 sc or ****.

I worked up 500 certs to get a carbine, I doubt I will ever do such grinding again, i'm not pulling another world of tanks grind fest on myself. Along with the low populations on the times I do play the game, I might hang up the game for a while.

If I play this game for fun, even with the 50% bonus from 6 months of premium, I get less than 20 certs an hour.

If I want to farm I can easily earn 1 cert a minute, more if I want to sit in a liberator bombarding people (BORING).

This game does not cater to fun and can not stand on it's game play alone. It has basically turned into a grind so it can retain players.

I find myself getting more and more tired of grinding for upgrades and constantly being worried about gaining certs versus the older games where I just played for fun because the game was well developed and had fun goals.

Sounds similar to me. PS2 was fun for a bit, but it takes far too long for me (XP boost or otherwise) to upgrade weapons/abilities. I'm not complaining about not being able to compete with other players - I'm complaining about the lack of variety for me. I've bought weapons with SC, but I just do not at all have the time to explore any ability paths or to even upgrade the weapons I bought. I have very little time to play. I would rather play an older FPS (you know, back before unlocks were a thing) and be able to play any number of playstyles from the start.

I fully understand the people who say that faster XP earning could turn the game into TOR, but you have to understand that not everyone has dozens of hours to play the game each week. Besides, even if I had the time, I get bored playing the same playstyles. Even just unlocking enough C4 to actually destroy something would take me weeks. There simply has to be a better way to balance the game for those of us who have little time to play (or who play little because of the repetitiveness of the game) so that we can enjoy the game with more than stock classes/vehicles and a few un-upgraded SC-bought weapons. Whether it's giving out a much higher XP/cert amount when you join the game for the first time that day (right now it's 12...); or maybe giving a 100% (at least) XP boost for the first hour or two of playing; or even just letting people buy certs (or buy XP boosts which actually do anything, or buy upgrades). There has to be a way.

When they had double xp, I felt like the rate was fair. I still remark on how unbelievably slow cert gain is after every play session.

I am trying to get a friend into the game. After our sessions, I usually wind up with 2 or 3 times the amount of certs he has. We stick together the whole time. He's not fantastic (neither am I really), but he is definitely feeling how **** slow it is. He feels like he is completely unable to unlock ANYTHING interesting. For now he's just getting very basic stuff like level 2 or so of different tools/abilities. He has 18 hours into the game and still hasn't got a new weapon. He seems to get about 20 certs an hour.

Waiting and waiting for the next triple SC event (the ONLY time it's worth getting SC imo). I would've gotten more last time, but I was afraid the game was dying.

To answer the question plain and simple yes it is likely going to turn of some players away. Im gonna elaborate a bit on it: i dont pay alot of attention to how many certs im making but i believe depending on what im doing i get around 15 to 50 certs per hour so lets make a small experiment here.

1-We gonna assume a player is making 50 certs per hour at all times, which is quite a bit for an average player (For those "pro" players that can make 500 certs per hour or whatever refrain from comming here to brag we taking the average player as model and if you can make that much you aint one of them)

2- Lets assume he plays 4h every single day, which is alot more than the average player would really play mind you.

In 5 days of playing the game that player would get 1000 certs which is enough to get 1 weapon for 1 class or vehicle, there is also the weapons upgrades that can cost from 100-500 certs for infantry to a couple thousands for vehicles. We also have a ton of certs to be spent in all the classes and vehicles perks not to mention the vanity items and cammos. Now a new player that aint spending money will fell overwhelmed because there is so many things to certify and it takes so long to gather it all. Of course if u are planning on only playing 1 class and ever using 1 vehicle it aint as hard but most players wanna play around with everything they have at hand and the current system discourages you to play unless you are willing to spend.

Additionally, run XP boost days on Esamir and Amerish to incentivize play on those continents, as well as get some more certs out there at the same time.

Mostly yeah.

yeah but certain weapons are a necessity
the best example is the infil class as an NC you start with a BA but the longshot is better so getting it is top priority for dedicated infiltrators

we understand that, what we don't understand is why we don't get more default weapons

Easy certing hurts the game. The idea is to specialize at first. Picking a class and leveling it up. Having cheap cert trees short-circuits that.

Also, if everything was cheap in cert points, then there would be no incentive to buy with station cash. This IS a business, and SOE needs to make money.

It is a bit better, but not a necessity. Even the TR and VS beginning Sniper rifles are usable, even though they are arguably not as good as the NC default one.

Dedicated long-range snipers may want to upgrade if they favour the "one-shot kill" and don't mind the increased delay between shots. Other snipers may prefer different weapons, for less extreme ranges. Dedicated infiltrators may prefer to get the SMGs for their playstyle.

If you want to play a dedicated ground-attack ESF, rocket pods are much better than the afterburner tanks. That is as close to an absolute necessity as I think they get, since they are better than the default nosecannon for ground targets, and escaping enemy fire and fighters may be less of a priority.

Sorry about that.

Well, this is a simplification of the truth.

Yes, SOE needs to make money, yes SC purchases should be incentivized, but no, that doesn't mean that prices need to be exorbitant to the point most new players see it as ONLY being accessible by paying cash (instead of certing).

It's a balance job really. Think of EvE. I was there (heh) when they released the ingame cash shop, with nothing but visual mods for your character model, nothing that people could complain about, right? Wrong. The prices were so exorbitant (70 dollars for a monocle was the top) people LITERALLY rioted. I know, cause I went to Jita too.

The price of transactions in game needs to be at such a level that people:
1 - don't feel like they're forced into spending money (i.e. cert prices can't be astronomical);
2 - when they do spend money, they can feel satisfied of not having to grind so much for an item (i.e. cert prices can't be too low);
3 - they can feel like they actually had a choice, and feel satisfied at the choice they actually made.

If your company fails to set prices correctly, things can quickly spiral out of control. We now have the data, and EvE lost more than 50 THOUSAND accounts from the whole Incarna debacle, and it took a major space content expansion to get those numbers back up. Your company's choices can and will make the game sink or swim.

Having visual upgrades as the only unlockables would certainly be interesting, and would raise less concerns about pay2win from uninformed people.

I'm not daft, that's the FIRST thing I did. I told them most starter weapons were actually some of the best weapons in the game, and it's even true in a roundabout fashion.

They don't have the need to unlock EVERYTHING. They wanted to play for an hour and, you know, maybe get ONE sight (out of the many types which you can't even preview, so you don't know if you're gonna like them or not) for their regular weapon.

Because they are starting out, they aren't efficient, so they can't reach the 30 cert/hour mark.

It's only after this realization that they look at the rest of the certs and get stunned by the number of things that cost 1000 certs, including most relevant vehicle weapons. And I can't flat out lie about the game like that, vehicles DO require major upgrades to be competitive, unlike infantry. And I mean MULTIPLE major upgrades.

You seem to be cohering "unlocking everything" with "The End of Fun". Most MMO's would tell you it's the other way around. The vast majority of them get MORE fun after you get max level, max power, whatever else they might call it, where you have all your abilities available to you and can compete on a more level playing field.

I was also lucky that none of my friends had to go through what I had to go through when I started (before the lock-on revolution), which was being farmed, over and over and over and over again by unassailable lolpodders in their fully upgraded ESFs that were basically fearless (since, you know, they had nothing to actually fear but other ESFs).

If any of my friends had suffered that, I'm pretty sure they would've quit faster.

In my experience it is. Half my clan which has been competing on various FPS (Quake, RTCW, CS, ET) since 2001 didn't want to play PS2 simply due to the gear grind. On the other hand, they did love PS1. So most are just playing random games while we want for another game to come out (soon)