I'm Upset at the Daily Membership Cert Gain

I suppose if you really did care enough about the passive certs you'd login daily. If life really is that busy, then PS2 certs probably aren't high on your priority list anyhow. However - I do agree that it should be changed for paid members, or at the very least they should clarify the daily login requirement in the member benefit details.

Has anyone contacted SOE about this yet?

Why is this a problem? They can only play one character at a time and as many people have said, logging on to a character is quite simple. Most of the people who intend to take advantage of multi-character cert gains.. already do.

So extend the timeframe or remove the logon restriction altogether. You won't get significantly more "exploiters" but will create a bunch of happy people. Even those who currently just log in every day without playing the game will be happy and the ones who can't, for whatever reason, log in every day will be extra happy.

If the amount of certs is too much in light of multiple characters, SOE can make new sales of membership have a lesser certgain. In the long run, more certs is just more choices on what roles to play and you'll still be limited to just one role at a time. Even if you use multiple characters, this remains true.

I can't think of more ways to say the same thing, but I'll write this paragraph anyway.

It probably wouldn't do much good. While their customer service folks are very responsive and polite, they usually aren't able to take action on reasonable requests (in my experience), or provide any information on future game changes/policies.

It would be nice to still gain certs while I am away on business & don't have access to my PC.

I agree - I'm not sure why some of the folks here have such an issue with that. Either they enjoy arguing for the sake of arguing, which I've found to be very possible in game forums these days, or their daily "to-do" list looks drastically different than the average working adult/parent.

TBH they shouldn't be letting you buy certs to start with. And that's what this is - buying certs. It's pretty darn close to buying power given how much more effective certs make you.

Regardless of what it is - it's something they offer as a paid service, and people are free to take advantage of it. If we're not paying customers, then we should have no say in the matter. We already get a fantastic game for free, folks who chose to support the game with their hard earned money should get some benefits in return.

Removing the timeframe for non-subscribers is a bad idea. People may quit for .... 1 year. Then when they come back, they will have thousands of certs. The result of this, is that they will be less likely to pay for anything.

Are you ******** over your college choice? Your own fault. That was a gamble, this should not be.

The, shall we say, scamification of society should be contained as much as possible

I really don't see the problem with making passive cert gain available to accounts being paid for. If I want to purchase an account and not log in for a year, then log in a have all those certs saved up, that's fine, I will still be nowhere near the level of active players, even F2P ones.

EVE online already does this, there are people who only use accounts to train certain skillsets and those train offline as long as the account is activly paid for, they don't seem to be hurting and it won't hurt planetside 2 either.

Sadly this is one of those occasions where it seems like a simple thing to implement, and would make a lot of people, paying customers happy. So you can expect SOE to ignore it.

There's a problem with your argument. Membership doesn't entitle you to passive cert gain; everyone gets passive cert gain. Membership simply increases the rate those certs are gained. So, you did get what you pay for.

Now, that you misunderstood what "passive" means is your problem. The cert gain is indeed passive: you do not have to actually play the game to get them. Logging in resets the daily cap (and hardly counts as playing the game). Nowhere in the description of the membership does it say that its benefit is cap removal. Legally speaking, SOE did deliver on their end, you simply failed to research your purchase beforehand.

LAWYERED!

On a serious note, knowing SOE customer service, you're likely to get a refund for this if you apply within a reasonably short time after purchasing the membership (usually it's 3 days for most contracts).

Seriously dude. Just contact them via the live chat session. They are really nice people. When game went live, I couldn't play for the first 2 days. Worked fine in beta, then BAM come release, no dice. Through multiple tickets and phone calls we finally figured out what the issues was. To make a long story short it was software that came with my video-card that I just had to disable. Granted it took 2 days and was frustrating, but overall it got resolved and the SOE people I talked to were very nice and tried to help as much as they could. This is how things get changed and "fixed." By people talking to SOE directly.

I just did

I was very polite, and explained the problem.
Then i required either;
- 48 Certs per day as advertised
- Refund on Membership

They said they could not do refunds, and they would forward my complaint on to a GM or someone, who would contact me back via email. Didn't sound very promising, or like they cared too much...

Money is power. What's wrong with pay to win in a free video game? A terrible player with better stuff will still suck. The leeches and moochers should appreciate that paying customers are supporting them.

They paid for a year of membership.

At least as I understood this thread, nobody even suggested automating the lower non-member certgain. That would absolutely be used to create and eventually sell accounts so I agree on that being a bad idea =)

I didn't know this - have you found this out by testing or have you seen a post somewhere? I went checking afterwards, and I can't see a mention anywhere about having to log in?

https://www.planetside2.com/shop?buy=membership
http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/planetside-2-memberships.47099/

I'm pretty sure a halfway decent F2P player who plays 1-2 hours daily will gain as much, if not more certs than someone who buys a membership and plays 2-4 hours a week.

Not to mention the skill level and game mechanics understanding of the more frequent player should be more than enough to to beat the guy who logged in for the first time this week and bought a flashlight barrel attachment with his additional passive certs prior to battle.

If the paying weekend warrior beats the F2P hardcore player, chances are they are just better anyhow.

Uhm. This is an idiotic statement considering the state of the game.

Paying for a membership does grant an advantage, the % increasement in cert gain is really no less of an advantage over f2p players than gaining certs passively without logging in would be. Not sure why you would even use this argument against passive cert gain, because it's pretty stupid.

Also, anyone that pays for a gun when it launches is going to have an advantage over someone that chooses to slowly gain the certs to cert that same gun. While the f2p player is building up certs, that buy-now person is exploiting an unbalanced weapon that will likely later be nerfed by the time the f2p player has the certs to purchase it.

The game is P2W. We need to own up to that at this point. As someone who no longer subs (and never will again) I would support the passive cert gain without the requirement to log in for paying customers. It's not going to make a significant difference on the already obvious advantages that paying brings over playing for free.

I'd like to add my voice towards support for an extended period of passive cert collection for members. If someone is paying for a subscription then they shouldn't have such strict requirements to log in: they can't exploit the system at all, so let them accrue certs for a longer period. Maybe make it a month so that busy people can go away on holiday with their family and come back to a nice surprise (the certs, not the inevitable visa statement )