I'm Upset at the Daily Membership Cert Gain

Is there a particular reason you're defending what most people would consider poor business practice? Just curious what your motive is, I suppose trolling would be the most logical, but I'd like to you you some benefit of the doubt here.

Chargebacks are a last resort, and are the weapon of scummy people.

I will give SOE every opportunity to right this wrong before i do so.

I run my own online business, and i lose $20 of my own money (on top of the chargeback) from every chargeback a client makes.

Chargebacks are generally against the terms of services of most retailers, and you will be permanently banned/barred/etc from their services if you do so.

It's not simple. It's exactly through that thinking that people get slammed with lawsuits for details which they consider irrelevant and put on their ZOMGWTFBBQ face. Details matter. That humans tend to simply things to make better sense of the world doesn't mean the world will conform. It's the other way around. So to respond to your points:

1. Membership only specifies that you get an x% increase in the rate of passive cert gain. Nowhere does it say that membership changes the way they are gained. Those who aren't subscribers are still subject to the same limits on passive cert gain. What people are crying over and over is that they would _like_ to have no cap on cert gain for subscribers. Alas, that's not what the advertisement states.

2. It does. Logging in is required to reset the cap. You just assumed that the accumulation is forever. Never assume. A rate does not equal capacity. If I tell you that a faucet lets out water at a rate of 10 liters/minute, it can fill a 500mL water bottle in seconds. But increasing the faucet's rate would not change the bottle's capacity.

I have the membership. That 20 some certs per day are useless. You have to play the game to get your money's worth out of the membership. It makes sense that you have to play the game. If you don't want to play, don't. Don't complain that you don't have certs when you don't do anything to earn them, either.

Limits on passive certs has a very good cause, as has been mentioned repeatedly by other posters. It is to prevent people from accumulating hundreds of certs without playing the game. What you consider a bad business practice, I consider good. There are pros and cons to either side, it just happens that the current cap lines up with my interests more than with yours.

Why do people bother arguing for SOE in this regard? Nowhere does it say you need to login to get the passive certs. They aren't shy flashing the specials about the new exciting passive cert gains. Yet they don't tell you, not even in tiny prints, that you need to login to get them.

I've been a 6 month subscriber since launch, so I've paid my dues, not to mention the $100 I dropped on station cash. I'm among the small 10% paying customers that this game has. I have every right to complain and be a tad ticked off about not knowing I had to login every day to receive my passive certs. Now that I know, I still can't figure out why they would make it this way.

You know the system can handle real passive cert gains. It's just one of those things where companies subtly do it hoping nobody would notice or complain. The less certs people gain, the more people likely spend on sc. I have such a love/hate relationship with SOE it's not even funny. I've played SOE games since EQ1 launched in 1999, and SOE has always done stupid things like this that just tick off customers for no good reason.

These people who don't agree have clearly lost their mind, or they just like to argue. Possibly both?

From what I'm hearing, it sounds like people would be ok if their bank would only credit their savings account interest based on the number of days they logged into their online account that month.

And they would also be ok with paying for 25mbps internet speeds, and if they weren't fully utilizing it, they would be ok with their ISP throttling them down to 10mbps and still charging them for the 25mbps plan?

Would those be ok situations? Why should the bank give you interest if you're not checking your account daily? Why should your ISP allocate the bandwidth you're paying for if you aren't using it?

The real question is, why should it matter? You're PAYING them for a service and you should be entitled to that service, whether you use it daily or not. Whether the service is $5 a month or $500. You paid for it, you are entitled. I know those examples seem extreme, but they do well in illustrating a point.

The whole thing about the definition of passive in regards to this game. Without an explicit definition, it's opened to interpretation. While I agree that it's up to the buyer to find out what that means, it doesn't make it a bad business practice to obscure the true requirement(s).

Imagine you buy a cable tv package that includes "Every Premium Movie Channel" but when you turn on your TV for the first time, turns out you don't get HBO.

Logging in is not playing, just saying. If people want to make that distinction then why don't we just make everybody spend at least 10 minutes of playtime or kill at least 10 people before they can get their passive certs? If playing is what people are really worried about.

Whether or not there is a cap on certifications passively gained is not the "bad business practice" part. Its the part where there is no mention of, or reference to, a cap on passively gained certs; daily or otherwise. This thread was not created to argue what the feature SHOULD BE, but what the feature IS compared to how the feature is advertised and documented.

Again, if a player was in a position to never have experienced a cap on passive certifications, because he logged in every 23 hours and 59 minutes, how would that player know there is a cap? Where would the player go to find out that information? On a community forum? On a thread started by someone with no affiliation with the company, and responded to by someone with no affiliation to the company?

It is not the job of the customer to "discover" features of the product, and pass on those discoveries to other customers. The operation of those features should be disclosed by the agency asking for a persons money.

Please stop arguing about why the cap is in place. That isn't the point.

There is no problem with people acquiring this level of certs truly 'passively'.

That's the part that doesn't make sense. You think it's a problem, what a bigger problem are the people who farm for hours, or use hacks or exploits, THOSE are problems. The people who are able to spend 6-8 hours a day and have multiple people playing single accounts are not in danger of the few people who would like to earn a few certs while going on vacation for a week and don't want to babysit their account.

But for some reason, they're the problem. A guy who spends $75 a waits a month to unlock a new gun but didn't log in is the problem?

Really?

Really?!

Unfortunately companies do that all the time, they just get away with it because there's nothing that stops them from doing it. Just like cable companies advertising that you get over 500 channels, but what good are 500 channels when the same channels are repeated at least 5 times on different numbers? Bleh.

Correct, it was to illustrate my previous point that while technically there is something, somewhere to free them from the legality of that statement, it doesn't make it a good business decision from a consumer relationship standpoint.

I know, I was supporting your statement lol. Poor business practices, SOE is not shy of them. I know because I've gone through EQ1, EQ2, Vanguard, and now Planetside with SOE. Seen a lot of bait & switch, a lot of things that really just don't make any sense. Like in this case, it makes no sense to ruffle the feathers with the loyal PAYING subscribers.

Hey, we are paying good money to play this game, we are among the 10% of the total population that even bother to pay anything to play this game. Treat us with respect.

If I pay my bank $50 a year to get 50% better interest rate on my savings in the bank, then at the end of the year when I check on that account, it better ham-well have increased according to the +50% interest rate even though I didn't check the account every day.

I'm not against the rule that you have to log in to actually get the certs, thats the way it is.
But the way it was advertised does need to change. It was very misleading and I can see how it could cause problems.

I think the OP here is right. You're paying a monthly fee for those bonuses and the cert gain should be automatic. Not log in for 3 days - get those 3 days worth of certs when you do. After all you're paying for them if you're playing or not. PAYING CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT! (except in an SOE game then they're just ignored).

Playing FTP and not log in each day - your own darn fault. And yes, i'm in this category and I don't log in each day. Doesn't mean the OP isn't right.

Thats a completely different discussion, I have merely stated that the OP has not been cheated. SOE is selling a boost to the existing passive cert gains, which is exactly what he got.

But since you ask, I don't see how anybody is "punished". The casual player gets the same reward for an hour of commitment as the guy who plays 40 hours a week. Subscriptions and boost allows casual players (and anybody else who pays) to catch up a bit, I currently have around 100% bonus which means that I get 2 hours reward for 1 hour of game-play. Thats not bad.
On top of that I save lots of certs by buying weapon with SC instead of certs.

But no, stuff doesn't get unlocked if you don't play the game. I don't have a problem with that.

But they have an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau...

http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news/business&id=9024358

Oh...

I'm mostly F2P myself, have a boost and bought a few guns.

I'd like the consumer base to be happy though so they stick around and continue to support and play the game I enjoy, even if they're only able to log in once a year, their money goes to support my hobby, would be nice to keep them around I'd think.

wow.