You PlanetSide suckers just got conned :o

Expecting free new content? Vehicles? Weapons? Balances? Here’s the classic Verant response:

PLANETSIDE™ GOES UNDERGROUND THIS OCTOBER WITH PLANETSIDE: CORE COMBAT™, ITS FIRST EXPANSION

-Alien Technology, New Vehicles and Weapons, and A Subterranean Battleground Are Coming For Sony Online Entertainment s Massively Multiplayer Online First Person Action Game -

SAN DIEGO, CA - August 18, 2003 - Sony Online Entertainment Inc. (SOE), a worldwide leader in massively multiplayer online gaming, today announced PlanetSide: Core Combat, the first expansion for its popular massively multiplayer online first-person action game, PlanetSide™. PlanetSide launched on May 19, 2003 and has already attracted more than 60,000 subscribers. The expansion will focus on alien technology discovered deep in underground caverns, adding more vehicles, weapons and battlegrounds under the planet Auraxis. PlanetSide: Core Combat will be available this October at retail and as a secure digital download from SOE.

Translation: Fuck you, pay me money. No! Not the money you already pay me, but more money!

Considering I like it right now and don’t mind payin, how did I get conned?

I invoke the Ghost of wumpus :). But yeah, I’m not renewing my subscription after the first month.

You’re gonna pay more if you want the expansion goodies.

I never understood that, really. Paying for expansions that cost less than 2 months subscription in the first place… MMOs really suck. =/

I think he means that the developers chatted up the idea that PS would be refreshed with a continuous stream of new content as part of the normal subscription fee. Now it looks like they’re charging for the new content.

I have to wonder if an expansion is a good idea at this point. Some players will buy it; some won’t. Some players will be playing in the new zones; the others won’t. Sounds like it could splinter a community that by some reports is already getting smaller.

EDIT: I typed all of this before seeing DaveC had posted. Very surprising that he would be OK with paying for content that was previously offered as free.

Deja Vu. Timeline to follow:

-Witch’s Wake. Just the beginning of a series of free, professionally created content for use with Neverwinter Nights.

-We regret to inform you that due to other pressing matters we will have to “put on hold” (ed. indefinitely) the Witch’s Wake series.

-[size=4]Coming Soon[/size] NWN expansion: Skidmarks in Underwear

Now there is another one which is featured in CGMs phat D&D layout. Whordes of Kraduraak or something. I just read it and am completely at a loss as to the actual name.

a) Float the balloon of free content to attract them.
b) Find out people will actually pay to play your game after all.
c) Yoink!
d) Ta-da! Free content becomes expansion packs with which to leech off early adopting fans who put you in the position of having a profitable franchise to start with.

I was under the impression that BioWare had little to do with SoU, but had to devote time to HoU.

Many problems with your comparison. One, NWN is not a monthly fee game. Two, WW was not promised before NWN was out it was being done on the side afterwards. Three, there is a ton of good free content for NWN out there whereas with PS you have only one source.

– Xaroc

Four: Shadows of Undrentide did not offer (at a cost) exactly what Witch’s Wake had promised for free.

Nice try, Ty.

OK. OK. If you guys are going to be such sticklers for actual details, the Planetside bombshell is not the same. Dammit, this forum needs more confrontation and less My Faves: Platinum edition threads. I guess I was over-eager to jumpstart this one.

Here’s the thing – the new content that they’re promising in the expansion…

  1. New High Tech Weapons - more info 8.15
  2. New Vehicles - more info 8.28
  3. New Base Enhancements - more info 9.11
  4. Underground Battlefields - more info 9.25
  5. Urban Style Combat - more info 10.9
  6. Gallery - more info coming soon

… does not appear to be the same list of content that’s been promised for the rest of the game. (Lodestar, platoons, outfit base ownerships…). So I’m not quite ready to call them evil. Right now, they’re just slow in getting the content they promised out to us.

Tonight I’ll plug in my new video card (Duck-proof with heat-sensor and onboard speaker), fire up Planetside, and see how the LLU works. I think I’ll also go and select the Poodle logo.

Like I said in the other thread, this has got to be a record for the quickest expansion pack release.

w00t! Killer Poodles! BTW, I’ve got more outfit points now :)

Again, the problem if anywith the PS expansion is not that it’s an expansion, or that it costs money, or even that it’s coming five months after release (game went live in May, expansion due in October). It’s that the monthly fee is so high relative to what many PS gamers feel they are getting that the announcement of the expansion at this time, when there are many bugs unfixed and much of the promised “normal” new stuff is AWOl, simply burns folks.

Me, I like the game enough that I’ll probably keep playing. I like the LLU, despite some of the bitching from the anti-CTF crowd. It’s fun, it adds tension, and some of the mofo big battles recently that revolve around stopping the ball carrier are great. Last night we came within less than one minute of stopping an NC hack, with a bitter fight in the NC base around the LLU, until they finally limped it in for the win.

No one in their right mind ever really believed that we’d get new continents/areas for free. That’s almost never done. It’s new weapons/vehicles here and there, some tweaks, maintenance, new gameplay modes–that’s the stuff, plus fixes, we should expect for the montly fee (and that is why the $13/month is problematic, because what we can expect for the fee is not that stupendous).

Stay away from the Poodles!!! That’s so gay dude.

I’ll probably be on tonight. I’ve grown to love the thresher. So quick, so nimble.

Oh, and Ty, we said goodbye to confrontation when wumpy got banned. sniff I miss him.

If the new expansion pack was free and made up entirely of bug fixes, then I might be interested. But forget it. When I heard that they announced the expansion pack, I immediately cancelled my account. So this is what they’ve been doing for the last few months…

I sold my copy with two and a half weeks left on the free month for nearly what I paid for it in the first place. I could just smell this shit coming, since the game as it stood almost two weeks after release felt like a shell of a game. Thanks for making me feel 10x better about that decision. I will never touch another SoE game again. I have learned my lesson.

I’m waiting for the next stage where Sony decides that, due to the fact that they obviously own the market, people not playing their MM games is a form of piracy and sue everyone for not playing.

I could just smell this shit coming, since the game as it stood almost two weeks after release felt like a shell of a game.

You’re kidding right? PS during beta was 1000 times better than WW2OL was a year after launch. The bugs in PS are minimal in comparison to the majority of MMO launches. Every time I fire up PS I have a great time. How the farmers and shopkeepers and auto-attackers can continue to mail in checks to the EQ clones is a complete mystery to me. PS is a terrific game. You’re whining and bitching because they’re supporting the game? That’s ludicrous.

SOE is an evil, greedy corporation, but they have backed their shit up with a terrific game in Planetside. Everyone who bases their opinion of it based on beta or ‘2 weeks’ after release can go back to Galaxies and herd mobile units.

Knee jerk much?

Jesus Christ. For the record I haven’t played an MMORPG since the first couple months of UO. I am looking at this from a completely neutral, non-MMO-fanboy perspective. So just stop assuming I am some EQ/SWG freak attacking the game because it isn’t a clone of the aforementioned.

I think we are starting to differentiate between MMO and “game” a little too much. As far as “games” go Planetside was a dog. The entire ordeal was a Massively Multiplayer Exercise In Futility with the whole incentive of actually holding territory meaningless out of the box.

…by “game” standards, PS sucked and was incomplete out the door. I do not subscribe to these lower than the Earth’s core standards that have been normalized by the MMO genre. If you are selling a game in March then it should be at least 80% complete out of the box in March or you earn my ire. PS felt more like 40-50% complete.

That’s a curious statement, Mr. Module. Care to elaborate? What did you feel was missing?

Planetside certainly had some problems, but as far as being stable and feature complete, I thought it was a fantastic launch. I don’t see how it was “a dog” and “a shell of a game” by any standards.

 -Tom