Why can't I play my Silver characters while I have Gold status?

nevyn34 · March 2018

I bought a month of gold to play with my power colors and make a few respecs cheaper and I find that I can't log into either of my Silver characters.

Whats going on? Is that the way it's supposed to work?

morigosa · March 2018

As I understand it - and keep in mind I've never gone from gold back to silver so some of this is stuff I've heard, not stuff I've tested - the way it works is this:

A silver character can be freely converted to a gold character.
A gold character can be freely converted back to a silver character of the same AT.

So what you need to do is hit that 'convert' button, make sure you're converting them to gold of the same AT they're currently in, and then you'll be able to convert them back to silver (also for free) when your subscription lapses.

nevyn34 · March 2018

That makes absolutely no sense. I'm supposed to convert my Silver AT's to the same Silver AT just to play them while gold and then I have to convert them back to the same Silver AT again when my sub is up? Who designed that system? Wile E. Coyote?

xoez · March 2018

It's 1 button that costs you nothing to push. I'm not really seeing how this is an issue.

nevyn34 · March 2018

I didn't say it was an issue, just that it doesn't make sense. I'm going to pass on adding two additional points of failure to something that doesn't work intuitively.

aesica · March 2018

xoez wrote: »

It's 1 button that costs you nothing to push. I'm not really seeing how this is an issue.

OP has a point though, in that it's a pretty bizarre, slightly confusing, and ultimately unnecessary way to handle going from f2p to subbed and back to f2p again.

rajakaji · March 2018

I thought "convert" just meant if you wanted to retcon an AT as a FF when you went Gold. That is kind of weird.

morigosa · March 2018

Yeah, from a user-side UI and usability perspective, it's a bit of a disaster, won't argue that.

My suspicion is that it's a result of someone designing the UI from a "well this is how the back-end database entries work" approach, and not really thinking about how it will look to someone who doesn't know anything about the innards of the game's code.

Assuming that there is some low-level reason it has to differentiate between 'silver AT slot' and 'gold AT slot', it should really just auto-convert silver to gold of the same AT when you get the subscription - and back again when you let a subscription lapse. ...Maybe someone should post that in suggestions, actually; the current dev team seems the sort that might actually do something about it.

nevyn34 · March 2018

I'm going to be honest, I really couldn't figure out why I couldn't log them in. I completely missed the convert button. Thanks for answering me morigosa.

markhawkman · March 2018

The way I understand it, there are several not immediately obvious differences. Possibly most important is that the daily questionite refining cap is different. they can also pick up subscriber perk costume options.

No, I don't know why the devs coded it that way, but they did.

I personally think it'd work better if they moved the button. It's not particularly obvious in it's current location. I mean, there's always buttons there.

jonsills · March 2018

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GyBfZ1xLhM

nevyn34 · March 2018

Heh, if the convert button flashed I might have noticed it changed from Re-train to Convert. Bonus points if it made a twinkling or beeping noise.

I've been playing around with what I can and can't do since I have purchased FF slots and Silver slots. I can't get the 16,000 questionite cap on my FF slots and I don't want to use the Re-Train token provided to convert one from FF to FF to see if it gives it to me. I can purchase the monthly subscriber costume piece on my FF's and they get the discount at the Powerhouse. I can't tell whats subscriber costume options and whats not since I've bought a few costume packs at one time or another.

Basically it's a little more complicated than your average Rube Goldberg machine and no-one seems to know much about it. If I had bought a LTS it would be trivial to convert everything but bouncing back and forth between subbed and unsubbed is too complicated to make it worthwhile to do more than color powers on a FF slot you own. They should just make a $15 account service that allows you to do that. I'd even pay $15.50 for it.

revanantmorituri · March 2018

Keep in mind I am NOT defending the approach.

I suspect that administratively, a Silver AT character and a Gold AT character are fundamentally different animals under the hood. Everything that makes them different (Questonite cap, costume access, power effects, etc) is detailed in the character record, on an individual basis. This makes that "convert" button necessary, as the CO servers need to be told to go through the arcane process of transforming one character type to the other.

Yes, it would have made more sense to put a one-bit Boolean flag on the character, and slip an "IF-THEN-ELSE" into the places where it would matter. However, one must keep in mind 1) ATs were added on well after game development, and 2) the game code is an unimaginable spaghetti tangle of identically colored wires. (Dark Kat, you maniac!)

aaronkorr · March 2018

Just spit-balling but with the mess the code is if some kind of automatic conversion would require too much extra work. Wouldn't it be simpler just to add a tool tip to the greyed out play button just telling the player to convert the character to continue playing? And as an added detail removing the zen logo from the convert button. Considering anytime a person sees that they typically assume they have to pay for it.

markhawkman · March 2018

Given the way STO works.... I kinda suspect the difference between silver and gold is that they're actually not even the same AT.

nevyn34 · March 2018

markhawkman said:
Given the way STO works.... I kinda suspect the difference between silver and gold is that they're actually not even the same AT.

CO architecture in one GIF:

Ok make that two:

markhawkman · March 2018

nevyn34 said:

markhawkman said:
Given the way STO works.... I kinda suspect the difference between silver and gold is that they're actually not even the same AT.
CO architecture in one GIF:

Well... what do you expect when it's not built all as one design?

nevyn34 · March 2018

A coke and a waffle. Well? Get on it minions.

(I was just making light of it. Un-clench a little.)

markhawkman · March 2018

nevyn34 said:
A coke and a waffle. Well? Get on it minions.

(I was just making light of it. Un-clench a little.)

*sends GlaDos to redesign nevyn's house*

aesica · March 2018

aaronkorr wrote: »

Just spit-balling but with the mess the code is if some kind of automatic conversion would require too much extra work.

The code would have to be exceptionally bad, and even then, this is the kind of thing that really shouldn't be too hard to for an even-remotely-competent coder make happen automatically when the player clicks the big play button. If anything, implementing the UI elements required to make the player click manually seems like the harder route: The same if...else logic required to determine whether or not to set up the necessary UI elements could also be used to just make the switch happen without confusing the player. In fact, typically there's supposed to be server-side logic in place to validate client-side actions to make sure players aren't spoofing something they shouldn't.

revanantmorituri wrote: »

I suspect that administratively, a Silver AT character and a Gold AT character are fundamentally different animals under the hood.

This is most certainly true, but typically, there's going to be also a lot of other things happening under the hood, switching themselves on and off automatically as the player does various things in the game. These are things that the player really doesn't need to know anything about in order to play the game. In a properly-designed system, this would've been one of them.

soulforger · March 2018

What they need to do, is when a player goes gold or silver, is to have the "play" button be replaced with a "convert" button, that way, it is obvious of what you need to do to play that character.

rajakaji · March 2018

soulforger said:
What they need to do, is when a player goes gold or silver, is to have the "play" button be replaced with a "convert" button, that way, it is obvious of what you need to do to play that character.

And even if you just clicked the play button out of habit without reading it, you'd still be halfway through the process. You'd probably just click again thinking it didn't take. Then we'd be closer to that "player doesn't need to know" territory.

jonsills · March 2018

aesica said:
The code would have to be exceptionally bad...

Aesica, were you around when vehicles were first implemented? For some reason, it broke global chat, which isn't even supposed to be on the same server. People were reduced to using /killme to lay their bodies out on sidewalks to spell out messages. It took almost two weeks to fix that.

Or when the Wild Hunt was first implemented, and the Desert became a slough of rubberbanding and crashes - even after the event ended. The fix for that? They eliminated all the coyote mobs near Greenskin Base. The mobs didn't interact with anything, and they didn't have anything to do with the Hunt, but somehow taking them out of the code fixed the rubberbanding issues.

Yes, the code is exceptionally bad. We have empirical evidence of the truth of this hypothesis.

nevyn34 · March 2018

Update: I can see the subscriber costume options even if I check the box to hide costume parts I don't own. However if I select one it defaults to "None" at the top of the list and there's no preview of what it looks like. That was even on a Gold AT in a new slot.

Update to my update: I can't figure this out. If I create a character without logging one in first I don't have the costume pieces, if I log a character in, log out and then try I do.

morigosa · March 2018

Interesting - that sounds like the inverse of the bug where, if you try to create a character without first logging into one, the game would pretend you had several z-store sets unlocked that you, in fact, did not own (and would then disconnect you when you tried to actually finish creating a character using pieces you didn't own, likely deleting all your work on costume creation if you hadn't thought to save the costume out first).

So, yes, it's generally a good idea to -not- go directly to character creation when first logging in from the launcher. (Oddly, at least the last time I was able to test this, logging in from inside the game worked fine.)

markhawkman · March 2018

morigosa said:
Interesting - that sounds like the inverse of the bug where, if you try to create a character without first logging into one, the game would pretend you had several z-store sets unlocked that you, in fact, did not own (and would then disconnect you when you tried to actually finish creating a character using pieces you didn't own, likely deleting all your work on costume creation if you hadn't thought to save the costume out first).

So, yes, it's generally a good idea to -not- go directly to character creation when first logging in from the launcher. (Oddly, at least the last time I was able to test this, logging in from inside the game worked fine.)

Heh, that happened to me! My first costume looked like this:

Which uses a bunch of parts from the robot samurai set. Needless to say, after I started the tutorial I was surprised to see that most of my costume had been replaced with a default Grimoire one.

Yes, I actually had the forethought to save the costume before exiting the character creator.

soulforger · March 2018

rajakaji said:

soulforger said:
What they need to do, is when a player goes gold or silver, is to have the "play" button be replaced with a "convert" button, that way, it is obvious of what you need to do to play that character.
And even if you just clicked the play button out of habit without reading it, you'd still be halfway through the process. You'd probably just click again thinking it didn't take. Then we'd be closer to that "player doesn't need to know" territory.

Not even close to true, simply pout, clicking on the button would put up a prompt to explain what is happening...hell, they could make it so that when you select a unplayabe character a prompt pops up to tell you these things.

morigosa · March 2018

markhawkman said:
...Needless to say, after I started the tutorial I was surprised to see that most of my costume had been replaced with a default Grimoire one.

Oh, you got lucky - getting parts stripped off the character is the -good- failure mode for that bug; the disconnect (and no character created) seems to be more common, though.

nevyn34 · March 2018

I'm apparently testing out re-training a FF character with the free token. I'm hoping there are no issues when my sub is up. I'll find out in a few weeks.

soulforger · March 2018

nevyn34 said:
I'm apparently testing out re-training a FF character with the free token. I'm hoping there are no issues when my sub is up. I'll find out in a few weeks.

Well, that shouldn't be a problem due to the fact that the free form slot is there for silver players (for the most part). But, if anything, I wouldn't be surprised if there is something that messes that up.

nevyn34 · March 2018

I bought the slot. To me it was worth the money versus the subscription. I'll probably buy a few more during the next sale. I'm less likely to subscribe again. At least until I need to recolor my powers.

aesica · March 2018

jonsills wrote: »

The code would have to be exceptionally bad...
Aesica, were you around when vehicles were first implemented? For some reason, it broke global chat, which isn't even supposed to be on the same server. People were reduced to using /killme to lay their bodies out on sidewalks to spell out messages. It took almost two weeks to fix that.

Or when the Wild Hunt was first implemented, and the Desert became a slough of rubberbanding and crashes - even after the event ended. The fix for that? They eliminated all the coyote mobs near Greenskin Base. The mobs didn't interact with anything, and they didn't have anything to do with the Hunt, but somehow taking them out of the code fixed the rubberbanding issues.

Yes, the code is exceptionally bad. We have empirical evidence of the truth of this hypothesis.

The coyote problem sounds to me like those mobs had too many heartbeat-based* scripts or event chain reactions** firing off. Something like that could (and based on personal experience in the past, actually did) cause lag problems for whichever server is managing them in just about any game.

* Scripts that fire off every x seconds regardless of event dispatches, can be dangerous if loaded with expensive operations.

** Mob A fires off X event which causes nearby mobs B, C, and D, to fire off their own events which fires off more events among them all which ultimately grinds everything to a halt as the server tries to keep up with everything.

As for vehicles breaking chat? Okay yeah, I've got absolutely nothing on that one.

pantagruel01 · March 2018

The code is exceptionally bad. It's written in c (always harder to debug) with a custom pseudo-OO system layered on top. Different ranks of powers are actually different powers, and apparently whatever inheritance system they use only sort of works, and there are occasional completely insane dependencies (I think my favorite is from many years ago, when they changed the hit points per point of Con from 10 to 15. You would think that would be an isolated change you could make, but it wasn't -- it changed the scaling of just about everything stat-based, including passives).

markhawkman · March 2018

aesica said:
As for vehicles breaking chat? Okay yeah, I've got absolutely nothing on that one.

My guess is that activating a vehicle was creating an unhandled exception on the chat server. Why? Because EVERYTHING creates chat log entries. IF the chat log entry isn't understood by the chat server, bad stuff happens. How bad? depends on how well the error correction subroutines are written. In this case? probably badly.

riverocean · March 2018

Also another thing to be aware of when you revert back to silver. Check your Spec trees for the AT's you convert back to Silver status. More often then not they will be broken, with some spec tree options missing.

Don't bother contacting customer support, as they won't have a clue what you're talking about.

Just spend the 50g and retrain your specs. You should be able to re-select everything. I switch between Gold and Silver a lot... and this has happened almost every single time my account reverts back to silver.

wraith9th · March 2018

Hey guys. I've been around since CO went F2P. Never subscribed.
Began thinking about subbing for a month since Jan but haven't been able to make up my mind.
I've got some questions and I found this thread so I thought I'd post here instead of starting a new one.

I have 4 FF slots and 4 ATs. I got one FF from the giveaway CO had long ago and bought the other 3 in sales from the Z-store.
Now, if I sub and then unsub, what do I lose on these toons?
I get what happens to the ATs from the thread and also what @riverocean said about the spec trees. OP mentioned playing with power hues... Do I lose hue changes as well?
Also, I guess all the limit increases (Q cap, etc.) go away. Hopefully the resource cap I bought from the Z-store doesn't.
The monthly costume I get stays, right?

TY for your answers and apologies if anything I asked has already been answered in the earlier posts.

jonsills · March 2018

If you sub and then unsub, you would lose anything you get solely because of Gold status. This includes new costume sets that you didn't buy as a Silver, hue changes, and I believe power-emission locations. Also, the extra character slots don't vanish immediately, but if you delete a toon one slot will vanish, a process that continues until you're down to however many slots you had as a Silver. (So unless you're sure, don't go deleting any toons you created as a Gold - you can't use the slot while unsubbed.)

Anything you purchase as a Gold (including the pieces that are monthly subscriber rewards) stays.

Also, the "tip" on the login screens is unclear about this, but when you sub, you have to make your toons Gold, but you have the option of keeping the ATs on any of your old Silver toons. If you do that, you can swap those toons freely back and forth between Silver and Gold, for those cases when you can only sub for brief periods from time to time. If you change the AT, or turn the toon Freeform (both of which are free processes the first time), it'll cost you to change it back later.

nevyn34 · March 2018

You get to keep any changes you made to power hue and emission location on a FF slot you own. I did it previously for two FF slots. Didn't bother testing it with my Silver ATs. Actually that's why I subscribed again, to change a power from "Forehead" back to "Hands" on a FF and to get the resource discount in the Powerhouse for a few changes I wanted to make.

themightyzenith · March 2018

You also get to keep the free hideout that Gold Subs get.

markhawkman · March 2018

The hideout perk is basically a token to "buy" a hideout from the z-store.

themightyzenith · March 2018

Yeah, but once you get it as a Gold Sub you get to keep it if you revert to silver.

Another bonus to subbing that you get to keep if you revert to silver at any time. All good info for @wraith9th

markhawkman · March 2018

Well, I was just clarifying that the way it works is basically a discount on buying it in the store. The token lets you buy it for 0 Zen, but in all other ways it's basically the same as buying it for zen.

Personally I recommend the apartment, if you're only going to have one hideout. It's nice, and it has a free warp to MC if you jump off or fly over the balcony.

themightyzenith · March 2018

As I said, a "free hideout that Gold Subs get"

jonsills said:
Also, the "tip" on the login screens is unclear about this...

Yeah, a lot of those tips are unclear and many are just outdated now

nevyn34 · March 2018

It doesn't unlock any hideout. It's like Moonbase, Mom's Basement, Cave and Penthouse.

themightyzenith · March 2018

true.

wraith9th · March 2018

Thats neat.
Thank you @themightyzenith , @nevyn34 , @jonsills and @markhawkman for all the info!

markhawkman · March 2018

nevyn34 said:
It doesn't unlock any hideout. It's like Moonbase, Mom's Basement, Cave and Penthouse.

You left out Sanctum. Not my favorite, but it's really nice.

There's only 5 hideouts really, so even though Sanctum is my 3rd favorite, that's not bad. Most liked to least: Penthouse, Moonbase, Sanctum, Cave, basement.

soulforger · March 2018

markhawkman said:

nevyn34 said:
It doesn't unlock any hideout. It's like Moonbase, Mom's Basement, Cave and Penthouse.
You left out Sanctum. Not my favorite, but it's really nice.

There's only 5 hideouts really, so even though Sanctum is my 3rd favorite, that's not bad. Most liked to least: Penthouse, Moonbase, Sanctum, Cave, basement.

Mine would be Cave, Moonbase, Sanctum, Penthouse, and Basement.

nevyn34 · March 2018

I actually took Mom's Basement as my free one. I already had the Moonbase and Penthouse Apartment. I should have taken the Cave or Sanctum though because Mom's Basement is exactly like it sounds. My only complaint about the Penthouse is that the computer room is devoid of other furniture and my secret armory is all military/tech. But hey, jacuzzi!

jonsills · March 2018

I'm fond of the Penthouse mostly because if you can fly, there's a quick way back to MC from literally anywhere - just go to the Hideout, go out on the balcony, and fly off. (Technically you can probably use it with some other movement powers like Swinging, but the timing would be tricky, I would think.) Most of my toons use the Moonbase if they don't need quick transit to MC, though, because in my headcanon that's where Space Cowboy's ship crashed, and since all my toons are in my personal supergroup, they just use his ship as an HQ.

nevyn34 · March 2018

I wonder what happens when you jump?

Why can't I play my Silver characters while I have Gold status?

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