Changes to free trials

[UnSub]

The following changes to CoH/V free trials:

Trial Accounts

Added a message specific to trial accounts explaining why they can't send emails.
Trial Account restrictions implemented:
Trial Accounts cannot email other players
Trial Accounts may not level past 13
Trial Accounts can only have 50k influence
Trial Accounts can only speak in
/local
/help
/team
Trial Accounts cannot invite players to team
Trial Accounts may join teams, but not invite other players
Trial Accounts may not join SuperGroups.

FYI.

Much too draconian imo, but a group on the official forums just loves the change because it will obviously stop external RMT spam in its tracks.

EDIT - included someone else's comments in above quote.

[Trippy]

That level 13 limit is annoying -- not being able to experience a real travel power means you are missing out a big feature of the game, IMO. Yes you can get the temp Safeguard/Mayhem powers but they are not quite the same (plus you are missing Super Speed and Teleport too).

[Signe]

Why are games doing this?  Cut the trial to a week or something but let people play the real game.  It just seems stupid to me.

[Hutch]

Much too draconian imo, but a group on the official forums just loves the change because it will obviously stop external RMT spam in its tracks.

It looks to me like they cribbed most of that list of restrictions from WoW.

If trial accounts can't send email, that by itself would eliminate nearly 100% of the RMT spam that I've encountered in the past year of playing CoX.

Sending email and being able to talk in the Broadcast channel aren't necessary to give genuine game players a feel for the game, which is what a Trial account is supposed to be used for. Spammers, on the other hand, can lick my left one.

The level 13 restriction is confusing, I agree.

[Koyasha]

Trial Accounts cannot email other players
Trial Accounts can only speak in
/local
/help
/team
Trial Accounts cannot invite players to team
Trial Accounts may join teams, but not invite other players

I consider all those things particularly good, and I have noticed a significant decrease in the spam I've gotten.  It is exceedingly rare at this point for me to see much of any tell or email spam.  I do occasionally get one or two, but nowhere near as many as I did before these changes.

The other changes are somewhat odd and I think that limiting people from leveling past 13 does have the potential of making trial players not want to play - especially with how irritating the low levels in CoH often are, where you're limited to just a couple abilities, don't have a sustainable attack chain, and accuracy issues are huge due to the lack of DO's or SO's, or level 25+ IO's.

Curiously I am somewhat surprised that the Help channel is not constantly being spammed.  I don't understand why not, especially considering it's a global channel that hits both factions.

[Signe]

I don't care about those things, really.  But level 13?  Stupid.

[Sky]

I don't care about those things, really.  But level 13?  Stupid.

Uh, if you like it at level 13....buy the game. Srsly.

[Trippy]

The free trial lasts 14 days. Unless you are playing less than a hour a day you'll get to 13 well before your trial runs out. In fact if you are playing "full time" (like over a weekend) you can get to 13 in a couple of days, easy.

[Sky]

Ah, I see.

Then you're forced to endure the character creation process again 

[UnSub]

Ah, I see.

Then you're forced to endure the character creation process again 

It's not that bad.

I'm currently playing my account as though it had trial restrictions. Playing a new character is very lonely without being able to use /broadcast.

[Koyasha]

Thing is, if I was random guy that got a free trial and had never played before, and hadn't heard much about CoX in general, I don't think the 1-13 experience would really encourage me to play more.  Just getting to 14 for travel powers would be considerably more likely to make me want to play.  Course the real problem with the low levels to me is the lack of enough powers to set up a decent chain of attacks before 18 or so.

It'd be interesting to see an MMOG set up some kind of free-trial zone where free trial people can create a character in the upper-mid levels to max-level, and try out the game as characters with the majority of the powers they're going to have.  Completely disconnected from the rest of the world, of course, and specifically designed to give the players a decent idea of the upper level experience.

[Sky]

Character creation and the combat we now take for granted? That's what sells the game. Of course travel powers make it a heck of a lot better...that's why you pay for them.

I'm still not sure where the outrage is here. The game is like $10, ffs, with one of the lowest monthly subs.

[Signe]

I haven't seen any outrage, but then, I don't read the official forums or anything anymore.  I'm not what sort of populations are on the servers these days.  Are they losing subs or gaining them?  I always solo when I play so I don't notice people much.  I do know that there used to be tons of people doing all sorts stuff, like costume contests and hide and seek, and things like that.  The last time I played often for a couple of months or so, I didn 't see that happening.  Although character creation is a ton of fun, the travel really is one of the things that clinches a sub, in my opinion.  They'd be smart to let people level to 14.

[Glazius]

I haven't seen any outrage, but then, I don't read the official forums or anything anymore.  I'm not what sort of populations are on the servers these days.  Are they losing subs or gaining them?  I always solo when I play so I don't notice people much.  I do know that there used to be tons of people doing all sorts stuff, like costume contests and hide and seek, and things like that.  The last time I played often for a couple of months or so, I didn 't see that happening.  Although character creation is a ton of fun, the travel really is one of the things that clinches a sub, in my opinion.  They'd be smart to let people level to 14.

Well, you can get 4 hours of travel by level 13, if you know where to look.

Which, yeah, trials might not. So humm.

[tazelbain]

Exactly, there should be a obvious storyline around 5 that gives you one of the 4 temp travel powers of your choice. Or at least put a mayhem mission in Atlus/Galaxy/Mercy that gives superspeed.

[Morat20]

Exactly, there should be a obvious storyline around 5 that gives you one of the 4 temp travel powers of your choice. Or at least put a mayhem mission in Atlus/Galaxy/Mercy that gives superspeed.

You get a raptor pack and a jump pack in early CoV missions.

[Der Helm]

Exactly, there should be a obvious storyline around 5 that gives you one of the 4 temp travel powers of your choice. Or at least put a mayhem mission in Atlus/Galaxy/Mercy that gives superspeed.

You get a raptor pack and a jump pack in early CoV missions.

IF you leave Mercy Island AND know about mayhem missions.

[UnSub]

Are they losing subs or gaining them? 

It's a slow bleed out. Latest sub numbers were 134k, which is down despite I11 being a (imo) pretty good issue. I don't think I12 had enough to bring a lot of players in.

There was a minor outcry on the forums - the majority position was that RMT spam should be stopped at all costs and that the changes were inherently good. The opposing position (of which I was on) said the changes to trials were too draconian and would see the conversion rates of trialists to paid subs drop off significantly. Even going to lvl 14 isn't good enough, because to get a travel power you'd need optimal powerset choices - setting it to lvl 20 would probably have been a better idea of an honest portrayal of CoH/V. And that not being able to reply to /ts or use broadcast makes it very hard for trial player to make themselves known.

[Trippy]

Chart time!



I actually think the NA numbers are holding steady or even gaining a little but the Euro numbers are steadily dropping. Unfortunately NCsoft only reports the combined total so there's no way to know for sure.

[UnSub]

Hmm, I hadn't thought that perhaps EU was behind the dropping numbers. Maybe so.

Regardles, I don't think that (barring a miracle I13 that draws tens of thousands of new players) now is the time to tighten up on trial players. At least not in the way that was done, anyway.

[UnSub]

I'm copying a post by InfamousBrad, since I'm sure that the thread it is in (which I started) has a good chance of being scrubbed under current mod behaviour:

I almost don't even want to get into this. Because I know I'm going to lose. But since a redname replied to this thread, I'm going to make my case one more time. I guess I get partial credit for at least forcibly limiting myself to arguing this no more often than once a month? Hopefully?

Breaking /tell, when more people use /broadcast and /tell to build teams than use /search, really does hurt trial players a lot. If it were necessary, I wouldn't complain, but it's not necessary! And I'll tell you why:

It is my firm and unshaken opinion, as a former fraud control analyst specializing in online fraud, that NCsoft is going at this all wrong. They are going after the wrong link in the RMT chain. For these purposes, let's break it down into steps:

1) Assuming that they're not using a hack or a duping exploit to get the inf, farmers play the game in 8 hour shifts, 3 shifts a day, 7 days a week every week, in highly predictable ways, to maximize their inf collection.

2) RMT wholesale accounts collect the inf from the farmers and sell it to brokers.

3) RMT brokers advertise in game and on the web, and collect payments outside the game.

4) RMT brokers meet with purchasers to hand over the inf.

What can be done about step 1? NCNC tries to make missions less useful to farmers, but that's a losing game. What they're not doing is trying to spot and d/c the farmers themselves. With any kind of network access logging, any IP address or range of IP addresses that's being used to farm ought to show up in the logs like a magnesium flare. There may be a few gateway addresses that show up with the same pattern, so white-list them. The investigate all of the new ones that show up, and if you see a pattern of 168 hr/wk access from the same IP address, preemptively block it and verify that it's actual users, not farmers.

What can be done about step 2? Again, with proper logging and database reporting, RMT brokers should stand out like sore thumbs; nobody else moves as much inf back and forth over and over again. Identifying one of the characters that's used to transfer inf ought to lead you straight to a list of their contacts, which will hand-deliver to you a list of farming accounts and of players who buy inf. See #4, below.

What can be done about step 3? NCNC is already making it harder for them to advertise in-game; not impossible, just hard. The only thing they can do about out-of-game advertising is to run "sting" purchases; once in a while, spend the $10 or $20 or $30 to buy inf from a broker yourselves, and then bust whoever shows up, and work backward from their log entries. If they're advertising well enough that their customers can find them, then NCNC's fraud specialists ought to be able to find them, too.

What can be done about step 4? If you find a player who receives a big block of inf from an RMT broker, delete the inf. Do not let them profit from it under any circumstances. If they say that they got that inf for free as a gift, and deleting it left them unable to play because their inf dropped negative, tough; teach players to be suspicious of gifts that are too good to be true. Especially since they're almost certainly lying; RMT sellers are businesses, not charities. For second or third offense of receiving inf from a known inf seller, ban and IP block the account.

People will complain if you do something about step 4, but it is the ONLY thing that will actually WORK. As long as there are people willing to pay $$ for inf, there will be somebody farming (or hacking, or exploiting) for it and selling it to them. NCsoft is just plain not doing enough to interrupt the business at the manufacturing end, or at the demand end; fiddling around with half-measures in the advertising side of the business, when anybody can find the RMT sellers in 10 seconds via Google, is pointless.

But it's not terribly surprising. Because I'm still pretty sure that NCsoft does not have even one dedicated employee assigned to fraud control and prevention. And for a multi million dollar a year online business, that's inexcusable.

[Trippy]

I really should write a checklist along the lines of the spam one about why his proposal won't work.

[Jimbo]

The only thing I would say though, is that I give millions of influence away to random people sometimes.  After you level a character up to level 35 influnce earning is pretty easy.  I don't do a lot of the rare stuff inventions, so i have like 6 million at level 38 on one character, even after giving a bunch away.  Before the inventions went in, level 50's used to hold contest (costume, hide and seek, dance stuff) and give inf away, heck I remember when I first made Boom Bugg, I won a contest and got 3 million inf at level 5.  This was all player driven by the way.

As far as the accounts?  Email block would be better along with a no level limit.  They have fixed the level suckage, as one of my friends from work said, "holy cow, I made level 11 in one night of play!"  So more people will be hitting the level 13 level on the trial account really quick. 

[Sky]

The level suckage is not level 11.

[Jimbo]

50 hours to make level 50 if you want to got that fast...

Your choice, get in 8 person teams and do newspaper/police scanner missions with mayhem thrown in, and you will hit it that quick.  Of course you won't have any of the story arc's, badges, inventions, special costumes, whatever, but you will have maxed it up.

[Lantyssa]

Your choice, get in 8 person teams and do newspaper/police scanner missions with mayhem thrown in, and you will hit it that quick.  Of course you won't have any of the story arc's, badges, inventions, special costumes, whatever, but you will have maxed it up.

One can get those through flashbacks now.  I doubt someone inclined to hit 50 that quickly cares about doing all the content they skipped in the process of getting there though.