Upgrade Now Button

I'd instantly start looking for a way to start the game without the launcher, which means I'd also skip all the news pieces in it.

The launcher itself already has a carousel, with various sales, deals etc. One of them is 'become a premium member', complete with an 'upgrade now!' message.

I find those messages useful. They remind me of sales, I only see them once, and can skip them whenever I want to. If you force me to watch them for 10 seconds, I will hate them.

A decal that would sell at least as much as , but without the supposed legal issues in its use!

A weird idea really, players showing they hate the marketing tactic.. and paying to do so.

edit: apologies for the multiple posts. 30 minute edit timer and lack of multi-quote are my excuse.

Game must he hurting to start pushing this so hard. Oh well its was sorta fun while it lasted.

Just played for the first time since the patch. That UPGRADE NOW is definitely designed to force misclicks. Rather douchebagery design I'd say. Wait can I say ********* on the forums?

Seriously can you guys cut paying customers some slack? I've bought lots of SC. You are getting money from me. Go pester the Free2Play freeloaders with your doody and leave the members/SC-junkies alone, eh?

The biggest, brightest button is the unwanted "Upgrade Now" button. It is an over-the-top annoyance as well as the frequent reoccurring pulsing notifications to Upgrade Now.

This could back-fire.

You may want to rethink your player base expansion plan.

you better give us more options to get membership for users without credit card, then trolling users

Wait, what?! You can pay towards this game? I didn't know that?

If you are in need of more subscribers, differentiate the two products better.

I feel like a lot of you are forgetting that SOE is a business, businesses need to make money. I'm not saying that consumer satisfaction isn't important, but sometimes things like this are a necessary evil.

From a business perspective, is it worth losing a few subscribers in order to push out product awareness? Absolutely.

Is the amount of money lost through people 'quitting' outweighed by the amount they've taken in from new subscribers since doing this? Yes.

Are those same 'quitters' going to come back the instant the ads are removed for members? Most probably.


Yes, it's a very underhanded tactic, but business isn't always pleasant, you can't please everyone. A couple of weeks from now, they can put up a post saying how they value your feedback and have decided to cut back/remove the ads, all is forgiven, everyone remembers the day they fought the man by quitting, SOE have more money in their pockets and the equilibrium is restored once again.

The big "upgrade now" button is terrible! Also, it is just on the spot, where the resupply button was. Oh, c'on, that is too cheap for companies like SOE! Such button may have its place in browser-based F2P MMO with 2D graphics, not here.

If I misclick it once, it won't make my buy anything, much more the opposite.

These are not the actions of a successful business and you guys have completely lost my confidence in your ability to deliver a quality product and in your ability to exist in the long run. Why are you always creating negative scenarios that are obviously going to spread discontent with your playerbase? Why are your methods so blunt? Your actions are closer to those of unsuccessful, struggling, poorly managed and greasy businesses than they are to successful thriving businesses.

Here's an example: Promotion and sale of alcohol is a tricky game because of its obvious mental and physical health effects in the short and long term......but watch these guys go, they're always at it on an unobtrusive level.
1) Why has my local liquor commission made it its goal to have a store within 15km of every resident? Accessibility...they aren't attacking me with advertising they're just making it a smooth process for me to get their product....I'm no more upset, I'm just spending more money.
2) Why are my local liquor stores mostly attached to grocery stores? Yup, lots of people for sure BUT there are more studies on this funded by them to look into deeper things...Ex. They know that it makes alcohol more socially accepted by doing this and they know that kids shopping with their parents will gently be prodded into seeing it as a normal feature. Once again they've made a seamless and unobtrusive move to not only succeed now but also to brighten their future.

So what could Sony do?
Involve the community! When you make a gaming community feel involved it will open up its wallets....the community wins because they get more of what they like and have positive feelings and you win because you get more money.
It doesn't have to be complicated
Here's 1 example
Tell the community a simple goal and then let them provide feedback?
Ex. We'd like to promote sales and the benefits of subscribing in game so we are looking for your input on how to do this in an unobtrusive/seamless way.

I want to give you guys my money....you're holding my favorite game hostage.....but the number of positive things you've rolled out that interest myself and most others is outnumbered by the number of negative things you've done....lazy things, greasy sales and marketing, poor game engine, terrible release. I've done my part, I brought 59 people to an outfit...a community of people from 2 other games and real life....not random invited people.....and there are 2 left. They are true gamers and we're still playing other games we started playing around the same time. I can say with certainty that you folks have failed. Hopefully you turn things around but until then me and the other 90% of gamers have better games to play.

Edit: And don't even say roadmap to me, you guys don't listen, it took pitchforks and torches just to get you to water the killcam down.

Base cap points need an upgrade now button on them, they can only be flipped by a member.
There's some value for membership.

I don't know about other languages but in French, the "Upgrade Now" became "Améliorer Maintenant" which is the litteral translation and is pretty good, but the thing is that this text is too big and actually displays like this :

AMÉLIORER

MAINTENAN

T

I'm not even kidding, the T is on a third line. Honestly, I know you can't really check every single language but this is just hilariously bad. I'm at work so I can't make a screencap.

When I play WarThunder the match recap of XP and credit earnings at the end tells me how much I would have got with premium AND it gives me the option to upgrade and if I upgrade I get all of the XP/Credits I would have got all day with premium as a bonus.

SoE is huge, surely you can do better than these little guys. You even have the death screen right there to copy them and I know how much you like to copy others!

I've key bound the 'deny request' button to my fourth mouse button. Of course, my cloak was also bound to mouse 4 and now I need to press F to cloak. Let's just make this clear, SOE. I am never buying a single thing from this game. I play games for fun, and I don't want to be a wallet warrior like so many others.

I've never been a member, but have already invested around $500 in this game - because i've been enjoying it so far. that said, the "upgrade now" buttons don't bother me at all

completely the opposite actually, i'd love to see SoE implement propaganda posters into the game, just like in this vid by vanulabs:

The giant "Upgrade Now!" button in nearly every menu is way too much. Would not one of the menus enough?

And as stated before marketing this aggressive is bad practice mostly done by small and greedy companys in browser games! I for my part am disappointed. PS2 and SOE didn't need those ads before and they are greatly reducing my readyness to buy more SC because I don't want to support such cheap companies.

"Free to play. Your way."

No. At the moment its more like: "Free to play? No way!"

What lack of multi-quote?

Can't quote from multiple posts (from different pages of the thread) without copypasting the things manually.

Essentially, you'd click a 'multi-quote' button and it marks that post. You click on as many posts as you want even among different threads and then you click 'reply' and all those quotes will be there.

Roadmap is even worse in that it doesn't allow quotes at all, which makes it really difficult to tackle replying to longer posts.. such as the original post in them by devs.

Copy pasting manually is easy. Open another page in new window, click reply, click text area, ctrl+a, ctrl+c, back to original window, ctrl+v. That the forum only supports multi-quote within the same page is no excuse for shameless double posting