Across multiple SOE game communities a lot of people including myself are not happy about the way in which this is being done. Here is what is wrong with the current state of the program, specifically in relation to Planetside 2 and what you can do to fix it. For anyone who hasn't seen this info can be found here and here. 1. The program came too late. Systems like this should be implemented at a games launch because that's when the people who have been around since the beginning were telling their friends about it. Because of this the veterans who have recruited people early on feel like they are being ripped off. This problem is tricky since its really impossible to know for sure how many people were recruited by who. A solution to this is to give veterans some of the recruitment rewards as gifts for being loyal players and as an apology present to compensate for whatever they may have missed out on. This is defiantly the hardest problem to solve and unfortunately there may not be a perfect solution to it at this point. 2. The bar for someone counting as a recruit is set WAY too high. Its hard enough to get players to play a game, and even harder to get them to spend money on it. In order to get 25 players to spend $10 ($250 total) you would need to get 150 - 200+ players into the game due to the fact that many will simply lose interest. Unless you are a Youtube star with a huge following this is downright impossible and discourages players from even attempting to tell others about the game. Two things need to change here, first off the highest recruit level should be dropped to ten. If a single player can get ten people heavily invested in a game, that is amazing, because remember, those ten people will tell their friends as well. But the biggest change that needs to happen here is that this system should place value on player time investment, not just money invested. Make it so players count as recruits when they reach a certain (not unreasonable) level. This is a fantastic mechanic because it encourages players to spend time leveling up, going through the game with their recruits. This is ultimately something that will lead to a much higher rate of players sticking with the game (and one day spending money) because they will enter the game world with a friend who has incentive to show him the ropes. It turns recruiters into trainers as well. I love showing new people around game worlds which I have made my home, and if I could get rewarded for doing so, that would be fantastic. "Welcome to Amerish, home of abandoned bases and stuck sundes." 3. The exclusive items that players wanted are being offered as recruit rewards, making them impossible for many to ever obtain. This is what is causing the most rage among SOE game playing communities. There are several items exclusive to the recruitment system that people really wanted to get their hands on such as the long awaited crystallize black camo and the foreman helmet. There are a lot of ugly camos and cosmetic upgrades in the game that no one cares about but for some reason some of the items people were most eager to get their hands on were chosen to be locked away within this recruitment system. This should not be the case. I understand the need to award players with exclusive items but it cannot be done in this way. The exclusive decals were a good idea, no one is going to get upset about those. For exclusive items maybe have a alternate version of something else such as the gold pistol that was given to players who did the Facebook app or a new type of flare gun, that type of thing. Currently this is a major annoyance to players because they feel they are being forced into doing something they can't even do in order to get what they want. Put the reward items in the shop, they will sell and your fans will be happy. Although this system has some serious flaws at the moment I am still very happy to see its implementation. With some revision this could be a wonderful thing for the players of these games, new and old. Also why isn’t there an official thread for this on the Planetside forums? SOE said they are looking for feedback and have created threads for discussing this on other game’s forums such as everquest II. If you care about this issue I recommend you post about it on the forums of other SOE games as well, this isn’t Planetside 2’s system, its SOE’s, and posting on other game’s forums will have a big impact. Here is a good place to start for anyone who is serious about fixing this. Below is a link to an official thread with the purpose of discussing this on the Everquest 2 forums with very few replies. https://forums.station.sony.com/eq2...official-feedback-thread.537518/#post-5945059 Lets fix this ****.
Be adviced this is me putting myself in SOE shoes: 1. Deal with it, you allready spent money and time and are bound to get bored soon by our calculations. You are a spent resource node. 2. If a player plays it costs us money, when the player pays we get the cash. We dont want cheap f2p customers. We want young money cash money players. 3. We want accounts, new shining accounts. New player numbers have been declining allready at this point after the launch and we must bolster the numbers before next quarter report. Even better is the "New paying player accounts have risen XX%.
The rewards aren't impossible to obtain. You can recruit people to any SOE game that uses station cash, And there isn't a time limit so you can take as long as you need to recruit enough people to get what you want. All you need is for them to use your link and spend $10 within the first two months after being invited. Put your recruit link on facebook, Twitter, Steam account etc. and mention that using the link provides them with a resource boost and a free gun. Hell you can put it on your blog or make a youtube video or paste in a comment on video about PS2. There are many ways to get it out there. And I know a lot of people just want the rewards to be added to the cash shop, But that defeats the point. If they put really cool items on the cash shop and more mundane items on the rewards program then no one would have any interest in taking part. They don't just want you to spend a few bucks because you want a camo, They want you advertising their games and growing the player base which is worth a lot more than the few bucks you tossed down for a camo. There's nothing wrong with that, This is an elective program you choose to take part in and if you aren't willing to do the work to get what you want then you don't deserve it. As an apology...Are effing serious?! There's nothing to apologize for, They made the choice to recruit people knowing that there wasn't anything in it for them at the time with no expectation of a reward at all. So they can hardly complain because SOE came out with a recruiting program later. People remark from time to time about gamer entitlement and I didn't think it was that big of a deal, But now I see their point.
The OP is pretty close to accurate. When I first started playing in November I told any friends or family that owned a PC to try the game out. For a while I played with a group of over a dozen people. Three of them still play, only one of them regularly. I don't make videos, and I don't have any vast following on social media. I literally have no one left to recruit. All these items are completely barred to me. The only way I'm going to get cosmetic items is if they're done through SC. I think many veteran players are in the same boat.
Not impossible to obtain if you are Totalbiscuit, the late BCP, or any other Internet Celebrity / Clan Leaderwho has hundreds of drones Who will do their bidding just because he tells them to.
this reward system is a smack in the mouth to 99% of the player base. it only rewards established youtubers and streamers. it encourages the kind of bull **** elitism that i loathe in the video game industry and in life in general. Did you folks honestly plan for lumifibre pants? or dud you just steal it from me in epidode 29 and then arrange it so i could never get them?
