SOE Punishing High Pay, but Non Members

The fun part was that it only applies to members, not the increase itself.

Even SOE own game DCUO works this way..
If you spent $5 you are midgrade member for life with perks over F2P..

What SOE needs to do is find some proper balance.

1. The game absolutely needs the FTP drop in player to keep the population "epic".

2. SOE needs the game to fund itself.

As it right now, the devs are desperate to fund the game as I'm sure SOE's focus has gone elsewhere for at least the last year and a half.

The problem is that devs, in order to get more people to become members, are slowly eroding any benefit to the drop-in players. There is no focus on new players at all.

They are literally relying on the FRUSTRATION of new players to become members.

I for one think that this is a horrible way to keep the game going.

Instead of drawing the prospective member in with a solid game experience with nice depth and a build up of incentives to lure them in, the devs resort to the hammer method.

Those few certs gained offline are important to new players. The game is frustrating enough and I'm afraid taking everything away without adding some kind of content for new folks is a really bad sign.

Surely, something better can be devised?

It's funny, really, the amount of contradictions...

1) It's not a good enough incentive. This has been noted in the community as well. BUT instead of improving upon that foundation you decide to remove the incentives altogether? That hardly strikes me as the idea of a genius, no disrespect intended.

2) Adds to the value of membership? Let's be clear here; You didn't add anything to the membership. You took away from the non-members. It may seem like a thin line, but I believe it to be a very important one. And you went over the grey area into the dark side, whether you realised it yourselves or not.

There's also the ever raging discussion on Planetside moving towards P2W, which I've commented on a great few times. SOE seems to often be taking small steps to the wrong direction. This certainly doesn't serve to make me more confident about the company, the game or it's future.

I'm just hoping we'll be able to steer clear before hitting the rocks.

Based on what? They were never important at all to me when I was a non-member. I would never log in just to get my daily certs, partly because I didn't know exactly how the system worked and partly because the amount per day was so little. The certs that I did earn during gameplay far surpassed the little I gained passively, and losing those passive certs would have had no noticeable effect on anything.

SOE's logic on this change is sound, IMO. "Offline cert earning is not communicated effectively as a general login incentive and does not achieve its goals."

So, how is Sony doing financially? It's obvious that you folks still don't understand that your own ignorance is killing you.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Twisting people's fingers in an attempt to force them to spend money is not a winning strategy. What you guys keep doing is giving non-members a reason to not play your game and when they don't play your game there is a 0% chance that they will give you money.

Stop trying to force people to spend money and start providing a quality experience that makes people want to spend money.

What's so contradictory about getting rid of an incentive that doesn't work? I think the game itself should be incentive enough to log on. Focusing on improving gameplay, QOL issues, bugfixes, balance, XP system etc. is the right way to improve incentives for non-members.

Let's not be overly dramatic about this.

Taking away a non-member benefit is definitely increasing the value of membership. It's all relative. They did not say they added benefits to membership, they said only they increased the value of membership, these are two different things.

P2W has to do with getting better gear... but since weapons in PS2 are either sidegrades or specialized options with benefits in some situations and drawbacks in others, higher cert gain only improves the rate at which you can customize and specialize your character. If some weapons are objectively better on the whole than others by more than a few percent, then it is the job of SOE to balance those.

By far the biggest component to success in PS2 is player experience and skill level, gear is almost irrelevant in comparison. New players, paying or not, will lose to experienced players, paying or not.

You're seeing it thusly because of your experience in this game. If you were starting right now you'd just see that getting those certs even when doing exactly what you advocate is super slow when a forward grip/laser sights costs you 100 certs, when all those shiny weapons cost up to 1k certs without any attachment, when you as an engineer don't have access to the AV turret by default (1k certs), when you keep dying because whether you're "supporting" or not, you don't know how the "flow" of the game works.

Continuing on that AV turret example, though it kinda sucks in the end, as a new player you don't have a clue: it's just something that you can't afford and VR can't tell you how easily you're going to be dealt with in most situations. I didn't even know about VR before i was 3 or 4 weeks into the game and a member already.
You're also going to make mistakes in your purchases (scope for a CQC gun, HVA on those guns that get no benefit from it, things like that), to experiment so what little certs you have may end up being spent in not so profitable ways.

The nuance between the cert perception i have right now and the one i had as a beginner is about the same as the perception i'd have of a bill of 100€ if i were a teenager (no euro back then) and the one i have as a working adult.

I started playing the game before the log-in certs where created. I wanted to play PS2 because of the big battles, the action and the option to help the team as an support-player (because i´m bad with weapons). I decided to stay with PS2 because i have some fun playing it.

If i don´t like the game, you can throw hundreds of log-in certs to me and i dont care. I don´t like it, i stop playing it.
12 log in-certs are not an argument to say i like the game or not.

Any fraud on any card is 100% the "fault" of the lender, NOT the customer, and they are leagally abliged to refund any money taken from you as part of a fraud.

You are correct though, if you are bothered by the 10 minutes it takes to sort this out IF you do get done then dont leave your card open.

Game has evolved and been developed to a point where being able to play for free is something in and of itself.
There is A LOT going on in this game.
It offers enough for free.
For game to continue along development process it's at the point where it should cut back on internal freebies and be a little more "you want more, pay more".

Can play for free in itself s/b enough incentive to get people to check it out.
As far as retention, well, as previously stated there's a lot going on in this game...
If that and playin' for free doesn't keep ya playin' and only more free stuff will... (???)

And,
I think with all the additional avenues for earning and racking up XP that the lack of getting those "free" certs peeps of the past got are very easily more than offset by actually playing the free game.

Yeah, my bank calls me with an automated survey on purchases to verify that I made this purchases when something out of my usual area or out of the ordinary shows up. It's a basic security feature banks have been using for quite some time now. I'm sure there are still some banks that do not do this, as one of the two I use does not, but the one is an older account and may just need it authorized.

It even does it to me every time I make a Steam purchase. It thinks Steam is an arcade somewhere on the other side of the country and calls me to verify that I did indeed make those charges.

I understand the impetus behind the change, but as a member, I have to say that I rather dislike it. I have two friends that log in daily for passive certs (non members) ... They only really have time to play once ever few weeks. Without non-member passive cert gain, they will no longer be playing. Their incentive to play is (in part) derived from the piles of certs they spend when they do have the chance to log in and play beyond running around the VR in circles for a few minutes. This incentive no longer exists.

I was surprised when I read the change to passive certs.

I'd say it's based on many new players. When I started this game, 12 certs were 12 certs. I did log in every day for the passive certs. And I still am today for the 48 certs with my recently acquired membership. When you have people that don't play as much as others, 12+12+12+12+... is a lot. When I started, I could only play two to three times a week and only one or so hour (so barely 50 certs) so the 48 certs I had as a bonus for logging on the other day in a week was really important, especially when most of the stuff you unlock at first cost between 30 and 250 certs.

It's not the amount of certs necessarily, it's the fact that there is a perceived "investment" in new players however intangible. This was SOE's ONLY investment and the game relies on new players.

They admit in their statement that the login incentive does not achieve its goals and yet substitute nothing in its place.

As it is, the game is drop-in sink or swim grind and spam.

The game should absolutely cater to new folks to get them invested so they are willing to spend the cash to extend their gaming experience.

Making the game frustrating does not do this.

The game should have depth to keep the veterans in the game as well, but that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish.

Since none of this exists, one can only wonder what SOE thinks about the future of PS2 for the PC.

I'm a member and I find this a very strange move, as others have stated the ones that this is going to hurt the most is the ones you most want to get in, the new players, veterans who are none subs probably aren't going to care much.

If nothing else maybe you should reward a new account (hopefully a new player) with 500 bonus certs (or whatever amount) to start off with, something to help kit out whichever first class they start to play with.

They already did that with the new character quiz, free shotgun, free burster arm etc. And now Sunderer AMS is free too, one less thing to spend certs on.

The problems of new players are the new players. Sound strange right?

To decide, is the game good or bad you need to spend some time in PS2. Before you have checked all classes, vehicles and battles, maybe an hour or more is gone. The problem is todays players dont have the patience for that. They jump in the game, playing it for 15 Minutes, getting killed 10 or more times and quit because they think the game is bad.

If people are already brainwashed with an attitude of COD or BF, its hard to hold them here. New players who dont have much experience in multiplayer-games are more open to give it a chance.

I think this just became a pay to win game now. I think by getting rid of the free certs is a super bad idea. It hurts the people that play for free and it really hurts the newer players. I think that members are going to have to much of an edge over everybody else. Not only do they get xp weekends but now a cap increase and free certs. I don't mind the double x and cap increase but not the free certs. I feel this to be a high school thing, "hey lets take away non members free certs just because some people only login to get them". This system has been in for at least a year and didn't cause any problems for anybody. I think this is foolish to spend time on being discussed when there are many more important things that needs looking at that are causing people to drop memberships and making people leave the game. This isn't one of them. I hope the devs will realize this and reverse there dissection and listen to the community on what we want not what they want.