As 12/12/12 12:12 hit (though an hour early, as they were going on Norway time) a bombshell hit. The Secret World, inspired no doubt by the success of Guild Wars 2, is going subscription free. Like GW2 you still need to buy the game, but beyond that, you can play without further costs if you so choose. But is it safe?
Of course it’s perfectly safe. No one’s entirely sure how it works.
I don’t like to contradict anyone in a hat as splendid as the Stationmaster’s, but we do have a fair idea of how it’ll work. It’s a pretty generous deal by the looks of things. You get the full game without limitations, with none of the punitive nonsense you get in some F2P games (Looking at YOU, SWTOR). Going forward, we’ll be paying for content DLC, or what we used to call “game updates”, though some of those will still be core to the game and free to all users.
You can still sub if you want to, of course:
New Membership Available
For those who want to get the most out of their Secret World experience we have an optional Membership available. Being a monthly subscriber, for the same cost as before, now gives great benefits. For being a member you get the following:
Time Accelerator (Clickable item which increases experience gain for defeating monsters by 100% for 1 hour, 16 hour cool-down – only usable by Members and Grand Masters)
$10 worth of Bonus Points (given out every month)
Item-of-the-month gift (given out every month)
10% discount to everything in the in-game store
The Grandmaster pack includes all these benefits and gets an additional 10% discount to everything in the in-game store, for a total bonus of 20%. So being a Grandmaster is better than ever!
Through the month of December we have a special offer where we give 30% off on the first purchase on the 3, 6 and 12 month Membership plans.
Not everyone will have the choice of course. Some people paid $250 for a lifetime Grandmaster membership. It turns out that all they really got for that was the opportunity to lose the choice of whether to play for free or not.
I’ve said it many times, and I’ll say it again. In these times where games go F2P or subless within a year of launch, Lifetime subs are a terrible idea. We shouldn’t buy them, and companies should not even be offering them. Lifetime subs are a gamble, and the odds on it paying off are getting longer every year.
Anyhows, for everyone who didn’t buy a life account, this change is a 100% positive no-grumbles thing. At least it is so long as it attracts enough new players to compensate for all of the folks, myself included, who will now cancel our subscriptions, and simply buy the updates when they come along. That sounds like that’ll work out a lot cheaper, and will free my limited gaming funds for keeping an eye on an extra MMO.
Updatefrom Twitter, where we’ve been having quite a discussion on the topic of lifetime accounts. This is a rough paraphrase of what I’ve been saying there:
For me, the decision to get a lifetime sub is based on whether or not I think that’ll get me most value for money. So it’s always bizarre, when an MMO suddenly goes F2P, to hear all the folks saying they go lifetimer as a form of charity, so they don’t mind. I only wish I could afford to be so charitable. My buying decisions have to be based on personal economics. And it’s becoming increasingly obvious that lifetimes are a bad deal. If you care about getting a bad deal. You might not, it seems.
Yes, lifers now get $10 of shop credit a month, but shop items are not what lifers thought they were buying when they signed up. If some lifetimers like what the bait has been switched for, that’s great, but that does not mean that all lifers are obliged to be happy about it, or that we shouldn’t point out what is a fairly shady move.
I suspect it’s partially due to a peculiar psychological affect. Humans tend to value money less once they’ve spent it. You shrug your shoulders and move on, and that is certainly very healthy for the temper, but it is not a good way of encouraging companies to play fair with us. For me, it’s very clear. I have $150 more than I would have done if I’d gotten a lifetime account, which I can use for other goods and services.
At the very least, customers deserve to be told, at the time of purchase, what their lifetime subscription would be turned into in the event of the game becoming subscriptionless. Surely we can agree on that?
By Q!! It’s been a while since I made a gaming video, but I suddenly got the urge today. Star Trek Online’s Christmas event is well underway, and Q is welcoming all comers to his Winter Wonderland. Therein, you can if you’re feeling energetic, decide that you will undertake to win a footrace on his icetrack on no less than 25 separate days during the holiday season. If you do, you’ll earn a rather lovely Breen Chel Grett Cruiser.
Let’s join Arkturos Reh, as he takes his daily trip around the icetrack! If your bandwidth can handle it, I recommend using the little button at the bottom to whack it up to HD.
Edit: Turns out I’d totally forgotten how to edit videos, and forgot to switch the output to widescreen, leaving ugly black bars and wasted space everywhere. After an overnight re-upload, the situation is rectified!! Huzzah!!
I heard within the whisp’rings of a bee:
a city proud and free that strove for good.
A Paragon that showed us what could be,
Yet now dark void remains where it once stood.
In hero sleep, and villainous slumbers,
As rogues dream undecided in their turn.
Not forgotten in their countless numbers,
I’ll miss you, Bee, and one day you’ll return.
Edit: Folks keep asking me what this is all about! Briefly, NCSoft shut down the still profitable City of Heroes MMO this week, shattering a thriving community for reasons that remain indecipherable. It was a damned shame. Spelling Bee was my favourite hero in Paragon City, famous for his battlecry “It’s Time For Plan Bee!!!!”, and many other bee-related puns which gave me literally endless glee. I really will miss the little chap. Until another Superhero MMO comes along in which he can be reborn.
My friends at “It’s a Trap!”, here in Norwich, made a rather jolly steampunk film a couple of years ago, involving steam-powered weaponry, and a terribly menacing Bolt-filled exosuit.
Such was the response that they decided to push half a league, half a league, half a league onwards, and have been working on turning the concept into a web series. If this trailer is anything to go by, it should be quite a romp!
I wasn’t expecting it quite so soon, but an announcement just turned up in my mailbox. They were discussed at Fanfest, but Krono are already upon us, and with any luck will cause some gnashing of teeth in the illicit-RMT trade.
They work pretty much like PLEX in EVE Online, and the peculairly similarly named Chronoscrolls in TERA. Someone with real world money buys the Krono, and then can trade them for ingame money/goods/services to another player, who can then redeem the Krono for 30 days of subscription time. Technically, they could use the Krono themselves, but that would be a pretty daft thing to do, as Krono cost more than just subbing for a month, or the gamecards available in retail stores.
What they are is a way for cash-rich players to buy gold ingame, without filling the pockets of scammers. If you do it sensibly, making sure that the payment and Krono are both very much there in the trade-window, it should be quite secure and risk-free. SOE has been allowing people to trade gamecard codes for gold for some time, but that is fraught with dangers for the buyer, with little recourse should the code you buy “mysteriously” not work.
However, I do take issue with them costing more than gamecards. That feels as if SOE are placing a premium on security and safety for their players, which is something no company should ever do. It calls into question whether this is being done to protect players from scammers, or just to make more money. With no cut for the retailer, Krono would still be more profitable for SOE than gamecards, even if they cost the same.
Only EQ2 will be using Krono for the time-being. If the experiment proves to be a success, they’ll be rolled out to other SOE games. Eventually, I expect this method of game-time acquirement will spread widely throughout the MMOsphere.
It’s been a while since I last posted, but I have been jerked out of complacency by the stunning return of the equine menace known only as Horse-boy. When last we saw him, he was haunting Hardgate Street in Aberdeen, spreading fear and misery in his wake. As I’m sure you’ll remember, we uncovered the terrifying truth about Horse-boy. THAT HE DOES NOT HAVE A FACE.
Now, as Hurricane Sandy threatens the eastern coastal regions of the United States, he has returned.
Having turned the corner to be confronted by a camera crew, he took the quick decision to pose as a simple horse-headed jogger. But what is his real reason for being there?
(Updating WordPress and some plugins seems to have thoroughly discombobulated my site formatting. I’ll get on that.)
Kelloggs are trialling Froot Loops in the UK at the moment, in special limited edition boxes. I used to eat them, alongside any number of other colourful cereals, when I lived in the US, so I picked up a box. I don’t remember the US ones well enough to be able to compare the taste and crunch, but these ones taste pretty good to me.
Froot Loops come to the UK.
The UK version only has 3 colours of loop, and for good reason. Our version only used natural colours, so we have orange, coloured with carrot, purple, coloured with blackcurrant, and green, coloured with spinach and nettle. You can’t taste any carrot, spinach or nettle, by the way. Here are the British ingredients:
Cereal Flours (Oat, Wheat, Maize), Sugar, Glucose Syrup, Salt, Natural Citrus Flavouring with other Natural Flavourings, Plant Extracts (Nettle, Spinach), Fruit and Vegetable Extracts (Carrot, Blackcurrant), Colour (Papricka Extract)
And here are the US ingredients:
Sugar, whole grain corn flour, wheat flour, whole grain oat flour, oat fiber, soluble corn fiber, contains 2% or less of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (coconut, soybean and/or cottonseed), salt, red 40, natural flavor, blue 2, turmeric color, yellow 6, annatto color, blue 1, BHT for freshness.
There’s quite some difference there. Firstly, the US version has sugar as its number one ingredient. It also has partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, while the UK version seems to manage with no oil at all. Our primary cereal seems to be oats, while the US, unsurprisingly, has corn at the top, and then some soluble corn later. I’ve no idea if that really changes the taste much, but oats are quite a wondrous food. Oats have the highest protein levels of any cereal crop, which probably explains why UK Froot Loops have THREE TIMES the protein of their US counterparts.
Then you have Red 40, and a host of other artificial colours. BHT, or Butylated hydroxytoluene is a petroleum-based antioxidant used for freshness, but once again, the UK version manages to mysteriously not need it. It is possible that the natural colours (such as the carotene in the orange loops) are doing double duty, as they have strong antioxidant properties themselves.
The point of this post is this: There is no good reason why Kelloggs could not use the recipe they’re using in the UK in the US too. Even if you don’t care about the artifical chemicals (and you should), the British recipe is undeniably far better for you. The calorie amount is actually roughly the same, but the British version has about three times as much protein (great stuff, but also a slow-release calorie source), and about two thirds of the sugar. So neither are what you’d call healthy food, but the Glycemic Index of the US version would be much higher, as it releases its energy over a shorter period of time, meaning you get hungry again more quickly.
Essentially, UK Froot Loops are quite unhealthy on their own, but in moderation you could fit them in to a reasonably healthy diet. US Froot Loops are a comparative nutritional void, laced with a variety of suspect artificial substances with links to hyperactivity and cancer.
So, why not ask Kelloggs if they’d like to start treating American customers as well as they treat British ones? Currently, the deck is stacked against any American who wants to eat healthily, and the obesity epidemic can certainly be blamed in part on the choices companies make in formulating their products. As this post has shown, producers know how to make healthier products, but they feel they can get away with cutting corners when US consumers are concerned.
