Sorry this is rather drawn out but it's more of a list of things IMO thats just continuing a trend of the "quick cash in"
ya know at first I didn't mind this, just marketing to get new players. Which is fine, the mount reward at the end fine cause as people have mentioned the leveling curve changes drastically the closer get to 60. What did rubs me the wrong was the 35 strong box keys, and 4 PAIRS of sunglasses.
As a founder I get a while 1100 EMP which is barely enough to buy ONE pair of glasses, why do F2P players get 4 pairs, 2 mounts and 35 strong box keys. Whats stopping form any other player F2p, founder or elite from makeing throwaway email addresses, making a bunch of account getting to 30-40 then flooding the market place with keys and sunglasses or the smart players waiting for the rush of people who did this trying to sell all their crap and then selling theirs...the no gold sink problem just gets worse with this. Oh but what if the glasses and keys are account bound? Why would they give an account that can have..at most...3 character slots 4 pairs of account bound glasses?
Still this wasn't too bad, just gave me that "iiick" feeling...then I added to everything else since F2P.
- Vday "event" which not only wasn't an event at all compared to last Vday mostly cause all the rewards pretty much were now on the cash shop. After the first day instead of saying "we had to change the event due to a bug where some players were receiving more keys than intended while some were receiving none at all" they gave 2 conflicting responses then claimed "typo" and changed it from 5 keys (4 lover letters + postmaster) per account to 5 per character.
Kind of like this "event" it does nothing but cater to f2p players who would at most have 2 characters by default while those who would benefit most out of this elite founders and founders who would have at most 8 would be effected most by this change.
Even than not bad just the whole "typo" excuse was just..again that "iiick" feeling. Who knew typos in announcements were like some death note thing where what ever they put in the announcement was actually programmed to happen in the game?
Then there's the RNG aspect of the event that made it so obvious this was more of a "look what you can get from lock boxes now buy more keys" than an actual in game event.
- Costumes. If I do want say an older swim suit or lady in red or killBAM (naming it as a reference a movie used the outfit to pay homage to Game of death instead of the bruce lee movie is odd) or what ever, why do I have to buy the over priced package to get the perm version. I just want ONE not ONE of each recolor for each race. OR in the case of Black Magic and Kill Bam I have to play whats could be compared to an EMP lotto scratch off ticket. How did that sound like a good idea? why not just sell these costumes without the game of chance or package?
Most people won't keep pouring irl money into games of chance when they can just buy it on the Broker for fake money.
ALSO I'm not one to spend money for something sight unseen, as most people should. It's rather underhanded to expect people to purchase something just based off an icon. Nothing on the website that shows all costumes on all races only the snow suit, kill bam and half of black magic. On top of that you can't even preview them in game.
More of that "iiick" feeling.
- Then there's this event, while I'm not one to just expect something this doesn't seem like something they wouldn't know wouldn't go over well with founders and elite players. Especially after founders had to BEG for their free EMP and Elite subs are having issues with CD items, subscriptions and canceling. This keeps up where NEW F2P players get free [filtered] all this game will become is a revolving door of new players till eventually closing. People who stick with it will find it harder and harder to find other players and new players will not buy anything from the cash shop when they get it for free. I mean SERIOUSLY they release a new mount then give it away? do they want to make money? I know companies like this see blizzard make money hand over fist anytime a new mount or pet but they don't give the mount away with a new account.
It's just another company that wants WoW numbers and only pays attention to when Blizzard gets a spike in income but no attention is paid to see what they've done wrong in the past and try not to repeat it or what they're doing right to emulate that. Just "WE WANT MONEY NAO! SELL MOUNTS!" which never ends well. Sadly this has become a trend in MMOs and why the genre is pretty much FPS's when WWII games were all the rage...about to die off.
more of that "iiiick" feeling
- Communication. outside of "buy my book!" (critic reference btw) nothing. Hell, EA is even doing bad press damage control with the SimCity cluster [filtered], which is so fun to watch them twist in the wind. EME, nothing...you're actually better off going to the EU forums or a kTera fansite for actual info on the game and that shouldn't be. Not helping this, I had a simple yes or no ticket wait time 5 days...it's rounding on 2 weeks.
again "iiiick"
- Then there's the Nexus, It was a lag fest before F2P now at times the game is unplayable. You literally can't move at times. Yes they're fixing it but one has to wonder on top of all of the above are they just going for the "DOA wow killer" quick cash in then let the game die a slow painful death. Did no one at EME go to BH and say "going F2P we WANT to get as many new players as possible and try to keep them. We've combined servers and now the population we have is more condensed. The Nexus has always been a problem, if new players or returning players have these issues it'll drive them away. We should push out the fix for the nexus BEFORE going f2p" and if they did, did BH respond with "Hell with that just give new players free stuff if we need to market this we'll say how many accounts there are regardless of if they're active or not or from the same IP"
This is less of an iiick feeling but more of a "quick cash in before the end, lets not even try" feeling.
Add all that up and this won't end well. Sure I'll play as much as the game interests me but there's nothing keeping me or others around past that. With more events like this and more stuff that's pretty much shoving those who supported the game when it was p2p and those who continue to support it through elite to the side eventually even the most stalwart player will feel slighted and move on.