Remove the referral system

Hell if anything give the paying members a chance at buying the items. Aside from the recruiting decals.

It was smart to set up an affiliate program that pays you in virtual currency.

Really I just want a cool hat for my Infil. None of the current ones interest me at all.

Though I would definitely pony up some of my hard earned station cash for the recon (or as I will call it, like the rest of the world does, Recce) Camo and MAX Lumifiber.

I'm sure they will open it up to more people soon enough.

I've been waiting for black camo, but i won't mind NOT seeing everybody running around pretending to be sam fisher

They have invented a fantastic system of spamming the servers with dummy accounts. This will have the result of making your logins take longer, any purchases in the Depot take longer, and add NO NEW PLAYERS. I'd fire the marketing moron that came up with this scheme. They teased us for months with these new items, just so we find that the carrot is a orange painted lump of bull****

Logins won't take longer. Dummy accounts aren't used.... that's why they are dummy accounts.

Why would it make logins take longer?...same for depot purchases...

I mean, feel free to get mad, get super mad...Network style. But at least get mad for something that isn't made up.

I doubt creating 25 dummy accounts you will never use again is going to bog down the server

Posting this here, as my origional thread got locked. (not complaining!, i know how cluster-$#@ed forums can get when 800 people all start their own thread on a hot issue =) )

Now... I'll admit in my original topic, i typed the 'mistaken' idea that only the refereed person got the items.. i blame it on me seeing this news announcement at 11pm when i was half asleep. But, even if all 25 people all 'unlock' all of the items in the maximum reward limit.... there' still one issue.

NONE of the items will ever be available in the Store for the usual way of buying things. (The helmets, lumi-fiber, tank barrels). Going by what that reply in twitter stated, None of the 'rewards' will EVER show up on the store. Meaning that the 1 and only way to get them is threw the referral program.

Items that were talked about, and showed off just like every other 'new toy' has been talked about, and showing off, got a lot of attention... then, rather than letting us have access to them like we do everything else that has been showed off, someone got the bright idea to make the items we showed a lot of interest in.. a referral ONLY reward, as a way to try to force us into doing the referral program to get the items it was 'inferred' would be able to be acquired the usual way.

Seeing pictures of the new tank barrels, and the 'closed' versions of the open face helmets during a dev post one day (along with a few other things such as lumi-fiber for heavy assaults and maxes), got me to start hoarding my SC in preparation to get them. Now, suddenly, out of the blue, at least 1/2 of the items i had been saving up to get.. are now 'referral program ONLY' items.

It really just felt like a kick to the gut. First you show us all the new toys your working on in a "hey lookie what were cooking up" thread. Then, a month later we get the "oh, remember those things we were cooking up?.. well now they require a total of $250, spread thru 25 people each paying 10$ during the first 60 days of their account activation, all of which have to be 'referred' to us by you."

Its not so much the referral system im upset with. I dont mind referral systems, and i dont mind people being rewarded for having a social life large enough to actually 'do' them. (while i do have a life outside of games... 25 people is almost impossible for me as i can legally hunt from my back porch.... there isnt 25 people within 30 miles of me that even play video/computer games.)

Its the fact that these items, going by the Tweet reply.. will NEVER be up on the normal SC store that has me upset. The closed version of the helmets being the one thing i had been waiting for. I'd be even more upset if the Heavy assault Lumi-Fiber wound up as a 'referral only' bonus as well. Im sure people who were hoping to get the MAX lumi-fiber are just as upset as it is now a 'referral only' item.

tbh I would take a short tweet with a grain of salt. It may be a mistake or misunderstanding of the question. If it were me, I might have interpreted it as a simultaneous sale. As opposed to an option in the future.

I have to disagree. The incentive is getting a bundle of gear without having to pay a large sum of money for them. Those are the people that will gravitate to such an offer.

They put those items in the store they will make money on both ends, and I guarantee they'll make more money on the depot end. I've spent over 300 now i'm sure, and I know 2/3 of that is depot expenses.

They have taken 39 items, that could be making them money in the store right now, and withheld them from their player base for this recruitment thing. A self defeating plan if you ask me, if you are looking to maximize your dollar intake.

it would be easier to recruit players and RETAIN them if:

a) every two weeks or so a patch/update doesnt break something completely unrelated to what is being patched
b) updates actually do what the patch notes say without requiring hotfixes afterwards
c) obviously overpowered abilities/weapons arent left in game for weeks or months before tuning
d) more emphasis were placed on enhancing game performance than say... a recruiting program
e) updates were pushed in their finality to the test server rather than an internal build before hitting live servers

ive been playing since december. the guy who recruited me started in november and stopped playing a couple months ago. i was talking to him today and while he seemed interested in some of the things in the pipe, the above four issues are keeping him from getting back in. seriously a) and b) though. if my job performance were comparable to the way these updates are implemented i would be out of work.

They we just release something else to sell later. Right now they want to gore the player base.

They can just reskin something they sell that when they want money

Its a joke.

The amount of people a person has to find is already beyond anything resonable. Especially for a game in the decline, its bleeding players, how on earth does SOE expect us to recruit anyone in these times?

That a side, the fact that every person has to shell out 10 dollars each. And maybe by the off chance that heaven and earth are in alignment, and you actually succeed in scraping 250 dollars together, you get... cosmetics! If i recruited 25 friends and got them all to spend money, id want 6 months 100% XP boost or a chance to sit on Higbys lap.

In the real world, there are databases. When you add entries to that database, it gets bigger. Bigger database = longer search. Even iof the dummy accounts aren't used, they still make the DB bigger.

Let's look at worst case. Everyone decides they want the new items. They each create 25 dummy accounts because they aren't the few youtube celebrities that can get 25 new people to sign up and spend money. Suddenly the login DB and item DB and class DB (you see where this is going) gets 25 times bigger. It doesn't matter if the accounts aren't used, they still add to the size of the DB which must be searched every time it's interacted with. Want to change your loadout? Make a sandwich, all those dummy accounts are the reason it takes a while to resupply.

Woops, it';s worse than I thought. Each new account adds 3-6 character slots. each character slot adds 3-9 loadout slots per class+vehicle. Worst case, each new dummy account adds 6x9x14 entries just in the loadout database.

That's not how databases work. Even the ****tiest of servers running the simplest database query engines can cache and index at the same speeds regardless if there's 100 entries or 10,000,000 entries or at least capable of doing so in such a discrete manner that user experience is not impacted. Linear searches are almost completely unheard of.

The database can handle it don't worry about it

and all of that can be 100% negated by the simple fact that i highly, HIGHLY, doubt, that they use 1 massive database 100% of the time.

In all likelihood, they have one 'master' database for all of the accounts, then, as you log in, your account info is copied over to a temporary "active" database which is used by the game engine. And this is the one in which your loadouts/info/whatnot, is accessed by queries while playing, once you log out, your info is removed for the 'active' database and the 'main' one is updated with new info such as total certs/skills/stats.

So... even if the main database had 9-billion dummy accounts.. the 'active' one wouldn't give a crap, and would still run optimally (unless all those 9-billion accounts logged in at the same time.)

And thats just a 'guess' at how i would have things set up.. its not even getting into how advanced, and time-saving different types of searches can be, from binary, to simple-random, and such.

But.. this is getting off topic.. if ya wanna debate database issues and the people possibly spending 250$ for items by making 25 accounts... start a new thread on that

I maintain the servers used by every bank in the world that issues a Visa card. When the table used by the respawn/resupply process increases 20250 times, it's going to have an impact.

Let's assume I believe you, but you're not going to have anywhere near that kind of volume in this situation.