1681

I think Trion missed out on a huge opportunity to get a lot of people playing their game with the release of their expansion. The expansion has been getting A LOT of good buzz and they could have capitalized on this the same way Funcom has by offering up their base game content without a sub. It’s already free up to level 20, so it wouldn’t take much to raise it to 50.

And definitely agreed on the second point. Given a choice between Rift and TSW, TSW all the way.

1682

Leave it to Funcom to cock things up. I got an email that said the following:

Now you can enjoy everything The Secret World has to offer without ever having to pay a subscription. Your current subscription has automatically been transferred to the new Membership program which includes:

“The Time Accelerator” – a clickable item which doubles XP for one hour each day
A fixed 10% discount to every non-discounted item in the Item Store
1200 Bonus Points (10 dollars/euro value) for the Item Store. These points are valid for 6 months (received every month)
The Membership gift of the month (received every month).
Your account is credited with 1200 Bonus Points and both the Time Accelerator and your gift is available right now in-game!

Thank you for supporting The Secret World!

I have an active account. In fact it’s not due to expire until early January, so I paid $15 and still have three weeks left. You’d think from the email I got that I was getting the 1200 bonus points and gift and the XP doubler. Nope. I don’t get those until I pony up with another $15 in January.

I talked to a support GM and he was surprised too but said he couldn’t do anything, so he told me to email support. I’m waiting now for a reply.

I’m ok with the game going F2P even though it means I paid for three weeks of time that I could just get for free now. I understand that. Don’t send me an email telling me you’re giving me something and then not give it to me. That’s just stupid. Every player who paid for December should be getting something. That would be the appropriate way to handle the transition.

Bah. Forget about it, Jake. It’s Funcom.

1683

So if I had cancelled and Paid now, I’d get the goodies, but since I already had a running sub I wont get it until I pay again?

Good way to encourage me to cancel :)

1684

I have no idea at this point. The email seemed straightforward enough but nothing was credited to my account.

But yeah, it’s possible if you resub now you get the goodies. In fact I don’t know how they could not give you that stuff if you pay them $15 – what else would your money go towards now?

It’s silly. The right thing to do would be to reward the current subscribers in hopes they keep their subscription going. I paid for all of December. I should get something for those remaining days I paid for.

Oh well. I will cancel my sub now and I won’t buy any new content until I’m ready to play it. I won’t be spending any money on cosmetic items either. All Funcom has done is strengthened my resolve to not give them any additional money – unless my support email results in a happy ending.

1685

My caution is because there’s a 50-50 chance I will play it and uninstall it quicker than it takes to download it.

1686

Like I said earlier, they can and should offer a trial. But you’re risking the same with plenty of other games, and most of them aren’t just $30 six months after launch. (As the -non-sale price, at any rate.)

1687

If nothing else at least you can feel better about the fact that you actually can cancel, instead of the poor lifers who will probably never break even on the game, much less come out ahead. Besides, the F2P is so good that it makes keeping a subscription downright silly at this point.

1688

Yeah, I’d rather just buy the new content when I want to play it then accrue Funcom points every month. They expire after six months anyway. And most of the stuff I can buy with the points I don’t care about.

1689

As a lifer, I think our position has improved. We get all the expansions for free. In months where an expansion comes out, we may get fewer (or even no) FC points – but we get the expansions. Before this announcement, we would have had to pay for them, and we didn’t get free points for the store.

If you’re considering the lifetime sub’s value relative to the new, free model, then it does have less value. But that’s only because everyone else is now getting it for less. Lifetimers are still going to get more than they would have before.

1690

This is exciting stuff.

I never got into TSW, but I now plan to buy it as soon as there’s a deal on the client.

Even the subscription seems like a decent deal. You get $10 worth of item shop currency as well as a bunch of other perks.

Very impressed by Funcom here.

1691

u aren’t getting expansions for free, you are getting the (semi) monthly updates for free, which you were getting for free before this announcement. Sure you get tossed the free Barbie doll money, but you have to use some of it to buy the new Issues and it only lasts 6 months, which means you’ll have to spend most of it on junk.

As for relative value, you don’t have to look as far as the F2P, you can compare it to someone who just payed monthly up to this point. You spent $200, they spent $75(or less). Even if, which is doubtful, Funcom manages to keep releasing new Issues every month, that’s just $5 they will have to pay. It takes a whole lot of $5 to equal up to the $125 more you’ve already spent. And that’s assuming all of these DLC’s are even worth buying in the first place.

1692

That’s if all the DLC is $5 at a pop. I couldn’t even find anything saying the first DLC would be that much, let alone anything committing to that being the case indefinitely. And they’ve already said that there will continue to be ongoing free content updates.

1693

I know TSW includes lots of puzzles and non-traditional quests, but how much of my time is going to be spent hitting the same 5 keys on my hotbar to kill clones of the same monster? I love exploring MMOs, but generally can’t stand that sort of Everquest/WoW inspired gameplay.

1694

A lot. Most of the puzzles have at least a lieutenant to fight at the end if not a whole bunch of mobs in the puzzle area, and of course most of the quests are not puzzle quests to begin with. However, the combat quests are if not brilliant tend to at least vary from the dull kill-N or loot-N types, with a bit of story framework and a tendency to use devices, landscape features and active NPCs more than most such games.

There is a bit of freshness to the style and choice of which 5 keys to hit. It’s not earthshakingly new, but the weapon pairs and active and passive skill configuration sets are at least something; plus you don’t wind up with this enormous rack of hotkey bars because you can only keep a few skills configured at a time anyway.

In the end, for any given pair of weapons, you’ll probably fall back on some standard skill patterns as usual though, and you’ll wind up killing the usual ten thousand mobs before you’re done.

1695

Here you go. From Nusquam (Joel Bylos)…

You get points which will more than cover the DLC. The reason that we give you points rather than giving the DLC is because the DLC will cost less than the points you get.

Which means instead of getting nothing as a lifetimer except free content, you get the content and whatever you want to spend the points.

And this, from the billing director…

Yes, you will always get enough points in 6 months to more than cover the cost of the DLCs. As mentioned in the FAQ, the first content pack (that you all get for free!) is $5 of points. I’d imagine most will be in the $5-10 range

And more from Joel…

Yes absolutely. I don’t see any DLC costing more than [$5]

I think I need to define DLC a little bit here to try and give people a little more understanding of what it means.

DLC might be a “Mission pack” with 5 new missions. Pricing has not been set on anything but it might be $5, for example.
So a Lifetimer gets that plus $5 to spend in the shop on whatever they like (at a 20% discount).

I would encourage people to think of it as more like Borderlands 2 in execution, than Guild Wars 2. We will probably never offer some massive expansion, but we will add regular updates over a year of which some additional pieces might have a cost.

From the Live Producer…

Wow this is a long thread! I’ll try to answer as many questions as I can here:

  1. Any DLC mission packs you buy will be account wide. It will apply to all of your characters.

  2. The DLC mission packs will be very easy to purchase. You can go into the store and buy them or when you click on the NPC that starts the member it will take you to the store to buy it.

  3. The DLC mission packs will range from $5-$10 depending on the amount of content in them. If you are subscribed or a Grandmaster you will receive enough Bonus Points to pay for them.

  4. We will still be patching the game regularly with free updates, bug fixes, and features.

  5. New zones, dungeons, and raids would be considered part of a DLC content pack and you will be able to buy them with just the bonus points from a GM/Subsription.

  6. Bonus points are spent with a “First in First out” method. You will always spend the “oldest” points.

One of our main goals with this change is to make it so that GM/Subscribers get more than they used to without having to pay anything else. We also want to provide the option for people to play the game without paying for a subscription.

If you have any other questions let me know!

So, Lifetimers do get the expansion content free. This is a good deal for us, unless you’re freaked out that the price to others just got lower.

It’s all in this enormous thread:

http://forums.thesecretworld.com/showthread.php?t=62791

1696

TSW is an MMO with adventure game elements. You will spend a lot more time doing traditional MMO stuff (questing, combat, killing things and taking their stuff) than you will googling up Assyrian myths. If you aspire to the bleeding edge of geardom, at some point you’ll be grinding a great many mobs for signet drops, too. That’s entirely optional.

Happily, the quests are good, far better than any other MMO I have played. The writing and voice acting differentiate most of them from typical bear-ass collecting.

At least, I think so!

1697

I’m unreasonably tempted to blow $20 on this. I really shouldn’t since I bought Guild Wars 2 and then dropped it after only a few hours (What a waste that $40 was) but damned if I don’t want more games with a modern fantasy setting.

1698

Mark - I have an active subscription (7 days old) and I got 1200 points and the time accellerator instantly today - Have you checked that it isnt in your account already?

1699

Oghier, two things:

  1. I am perfectly happy with my lifetime sub - I think the only two ways they could truly make it a bad decision as far as I’m concerned are if they were to shut down the MMO before I get $200 worth of subscription time out of it (hopefully this will help keep that from happening) or if they decided to just ignore that I’d paid for a lifetime subscription and treated me like just another box-purchasing schlub. Which they’re not doing. I can’t say that I would have paid a subscription just for the largely cosmetic perks that are now involved, but I’ll certainly take them, and the lifetime sub should continue to provide my original goal of making sure I can enjoy Secret World as and when I please without having to worry about paying into it again on a regular basis.

  2. For me the key words are “Pricing has not been set on anything”. But they’ve been very clear that they expect one month’s bonus points to cover any of it, so I don’t say this as someone concerned that I will now have to pay for content even with my lifetime sub. I say this as someone who thinks blah!'s valuation of the lifetime sub benefits is an underestimate. (Incidentally, the FAQ absolutely -doesn’t- say that the first DLC will be $5, so if they intended that it would, they probably ought to fix that.)

1700

No kidding. And it’s a solid, fun game to boot.

Apparently, people are just weird.