Some notes on today's cert grants

In the grand scheme of things, I don't really see this overly problematic. The people who got granted 100k certs can be counted on one hand and at the end of the day it won't make them unstoppable killing machines (save for a couple of weapon systems that should've been nerfed since day 1 - but we've been there already)

The only issue here is that certs aren't really ment to be bought from a balance standpoint, but that is what these people effectively did. Maybe these people should've been compensated with equal value helmets & camouflages instead. Everybody loves hats helmets.

http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/...pool-item-more-than-once-u-get-nuttin.107187/

yes because insulting my intelligence makes your argument so much stronger

1. there IS no morality argument as far as the people who recieved these certs is concerned. they can't give them back. what should these people do? delete their account and start from scratch?

2. This is a no win from SOE's perspective. if this was EA, their answer would have been deal with it, and players who had bought items on multiple accounts would have been hosed. and we would have yelled at them regardless

instead they chose to compensate players for changing the purchase rules midstream. and we yelled at them.
again there is no way you can blame the players for a windfall caused by an SOE decision. that's like blaming a homeowner because a meteor fell on their house. you can't assign blame to a person who had nothing to do with the cause.

and no, supporting the game with a SC purchase isn't enough to say they deserve this. there are plenty of valid reasons for a player who was here at game start to buy the same item on multiple toons. like say, numerous posts form SOE employees stating that "if you want the same item on multiple characters, you need to buy it multiple times"

3. so we now have a small percentage of players that are true generalists. they are STILL only capable of filling a single role at any given time. from the perspective of any player other than themselves, they appear as a player who has specialized into a given role, only that they don't have the hours of experience associated with playing that role. Yes, a fully certed SAW is a beast, but at the end of the day if you don't know how to use it, it's still crap.
in fact, the only affect on the game as a whole is that there are now a few more people who can fill any given role. the comparitive value of specialization has been decreased, but not to the game destroying levels that are being claimed here.

4. any forum, and any thread is going to have screaming belligerent man children claiming doom and gloom. and this phenomenon is not limited to this issue alone. how long have people ben screaming about scat maxes, magriders, the death of air power due to bursters, new AA options, etc. heck i can point to more than a few threads in the infiltrators section that fill your criteria. while this may encourage a few to spend their certs frivolously, it is not going to have a material impact on their behavior. people will still buy new guns with SC. people will still save their certs for those same guns, and the impact of a massive reserve of certs in this whole phenomenon is going to be nothing more than a bucket of water in the giant tsunami that is modern culture and society. no matter how you slice it, this isn't that big in the overall scale of things. as higby said .03%

Bingo, thanks

Np. Had it open already, lol.

No. This doesn't make me feel better. In fact it makes me feel worse. Now i know you didn't even realize how stupid an idea this was, and have no intention of rectifying your mistake.

You can pretend like .03% is small, but that number is much larger in reality since most of your accounts are not active and essentially dead accounts.

this is absolutely disgusting.

People weren't expecting any kind of refund for their double purchases.
They choose volutarily to buy the same weapon/camo/accessory/wathever on multiple characters. Deliberately, not because of misinformation.
SOE feels the need to look good in front of the (paying) consumers and comes up with a refund plan in what I assume was the coffee break.
Then they implement it poorly, so that bundels weren't calculated properly, people that didn't even got any double purchase made got refunded something they didn't spend in the first place and in general because of the proportion of SC:certs people got literally tens of thousands of certs if they spent enough money.
Money that they spent voluntarily in the first place, not because of some scam, not because of SOE promising a refund in the future, but simply because they had money to throw away.

What about all the people that bought with SC weapons that got nerfed or changed so that their original appeal was totally lost? Those are the people that really got screwed by SOE, they bought something that worked in one way, then it got changed to something else!
People that bought 2-3 times the same item weren't screwed, they got exactly what they were willing to pay for.
Why are THEY the ones getting refunds?!
This doesn't make any sense.

This is the situation we have right now. This is why people are pissed off.
And, in my opinion, this is why apologies wont' cut it this time.

I don't get how

1SC = 2Certs * #charcacters

Where some things cost 1000 certs and 750SC, others cost 250 certs and 750SC (etc.)

I don't get the decision to go by that equation.

Instead of giving back certs or SC they should have implemented a mechanism whereby people have X number of free weapon unlocks, corresponding to the number of duplicate purchases. That way SOE wouldn't have to refund SC and it also would have avoided the cert debacle.

As it is the only way of keeping paying members like me is to 1) 'reset' cert expenditures, 2) rollback the obscene cert credits, 3) reimburse dup purchases using the method above.

Once certs are reset each player has a giant pool of certs from which it should be easy to debit the erroneous cert grants. It also placates the community at large since we've all wanted cert resets for awhile. Finally granting 1 weapon unlock per dup purchase ensures those players are still reimbursed, but in a fair way that doesn't break the cert system.

This is possible SOE, do it.

Thanks Sony for not compensating those who deserved it. Appreciate it, after my 6 months are done i won't purchase anything else lol. Other people got 10,000 certs for not ever buying crap. That really through a balance in.

Giving us these .03% and 5% numbers seems pretty silly considering the game is f2p. I would think theres a huge portion of your "player population" that only actually played the game one or two times. Why not just give us the numbers for people that logon at least once a week. Is it just me or would that make a lot more sense? I would not be surprised if that 5% was more like 25% when only counting people who regularly play.

I feel dumb for not even realizing this fact. F2P certainly means there are a ridiculous amount of dead or "paused" accounts that people are not actually playing. Gotta /facepalm at myself this time

So sort the leaderboard by score (which has remained unaffected) if you want some indication of... whatever it is you're after.

If it's amount of time played multiplied by how much the person had boosted, then score is certainly a great indication.

As someone who is ostensibly in the top 30 of their server, it's quite meaningless. Boosts and subs are a hell of a drug.

Disclaimer: This is going to be one of "those" posts, so if you don't want to read it just skip over it.




Planetside 2 likes:
- Massive Battles
- Intense combat
- Rewards Teamwork
- Rewards Skill
- Its just plain FUN
- Not punished harshly for dying
- Good immersion
- In game power cannot be bought with money
- Lovely sound effects
- Good war simulation
- All weapons are just sidegrades to the default for the most part, or new classes of weapons that are really good at one role, but do poorly at others



Planetside 2 Dislikes:
- latency
- Random disconnects
- Population issues
- No in game story
- No in game tutorial
- Progression system has traps
- Bland interfaces
- Repetitive gameplay
- Difficult controls
- Only a low degree of character customization
- Repetitive voiceovers
- Progression is too slow
- New players are pitted against very deadly highly experienced players too soon
- Due to a technicality extremely large amounts of in game power can be bought with money




So we have some good & bad things just like any game. If you have read this far I'll go into why I'm making this post. I take pride in researching the games I play. Most gamers do that, and the games they play have to meet a set of core requirements. This dose vary, but I'll use myself as the example. I use the FFF system, the games I play have to be:

1.) FUN
2.) FREE
3.) FAIR




After looking over the road map & viewing some of the developer shows, fun was covered. After seeing that monthly memberships did not give anything overpowered, free was taken care of. It took the longest time of the 3 F's, but after Looking over the cash shop & sidegrades, along with getting some playtime in I felt fair was done well.
Now that I had all 3 F's I felt very safe putting money into the game & did. Then somthing I can only call a bait & switch happened. Since I'm posting in this thread theirs no need to go into what I'm referring too. To me due to a technicality Planetside 2 is no longer a fair game. It has "haves & have nots". Everytime I think about this issue the words "Only show favoritism if you want decision" come to mind.












　

What about the players who didn't purchase SC and still got bonus certs?

Just posting to say that this has made me quit/uninstall. I have spent ~$200 and actually still have about 8k SC. Was waiting for a rollback but since that is not happening, it is time to move on.

I think you're playing with statistics to misrepresent what's happened. When I look at the leaderboard I see many familiar names from regular play, it hasn't changed a lot except now they have tens of thousands of certs. There are something like 2000 active players on Briggs. 0.03% is 0.6 of a player statistically yet I see a dozen names of regular players.

Shenanigans. I bet you don't want granted certs to be on the leader-boards, would help disguise BS like this.

It also completely invalidates the boost and membership system so anyone who bought either of those feels like a turkey.

Its always the same with IT/game companies, you think things that would get you fired/run out of business in other industries can be airily waved away or the customers told to suck it up.

so if you bought a boost or a membership your position on the leaderboards is totally legit! Doesn't matter that other people who didn't buy boosts might've played/killed/whatever more than you did.

But people who got pushed up the leaderboard via cert grant? Heinous!

the leaderboard has never meant anything meaningful

Actually I don't think any paid/store stuff should count but it does shine a bit of a light on what's happened in this instance.