When free to play was announced I wrote:
The rewards are a nice mix of rewarding faithful subscribers along with trying to make sure people stay subscribed while they get the system ready. As I’ve subscribed for 6 months with a short break and one month free after 1.2 launched I will have 4-6 x 150 coins right now. This part is ingenious as my first thought is to unsub but I will get into the reasons why in a future post. The reason it is smart is I currently have 600 coins and I can’t spend them if I leave the game. It’s silly but it’s human nature and it is why F2P is a good method.
The other hooks like the in game gift (it looks weak to me but will entice some) 200 coins for subscribing from now to launch and 250 coins for being active at launch are big enticements. That leads me to believe that subscribers after F2P goes live will be getting around 100-150 coins per month and the cost per coin will be around a dime. That gives people a reason to subscribe even if they aren’t playing because another way of looking at it is pre-buying cartel coins. I expect EA/Bioware to make this obvious in the near future which will emphasize that playing now is like getting coins on sale.As you can see, I got over my first inclinations and would have subscribed if I thought I could trust them that the cartel coins were going to be worth anything. They never announced how much a coin would cost and I estimated it would be around $.10. The reason I wanted to know that is if I was going to continue to subsribe to a flawed game I wanted to know how many coins I'd get for continuing through launch and the true value. My thought is they'd reward loyal subscribers more than newer players.
The question I had in continuing my subscription was of my $15, what was the value in cartel coins. I estimated $.10 per coin but I thought they were going to release that information so people could see the 200 coins was a great deal and encourage people to subscribe. I didn't understand the depth of EAs disdain for their players.
At the same time they dropped the price of the game to under $10 that we paid $60, they hid the cartel coin price until just before the November launch. I quit as I expected my coins to be worthless and was proved correct. The value of a coin is a penny ($.01) or a tenth of what I expected. Instead of rewarding their long time subscribers they gave us a fraction of the value.
The $60 you paid from August to November was worth $8 of cartel coins. For a game that was tired I'm glad I didn't continue to invest in it in the hopes they were going to surprise me with improvements down the line.
I'm sure this view seems naive as businesses are there to make money but gamers are a fickle lot. I'm not even going to try the free to play version (it's too gimped anyway) and will only go back if they give us the game we deserve. In other words. I'm not going back.
