With new custodians of the game, all paid content should be account-wide unlocked

khorban

There's a huge missed opportunity to keep player engagement by hamstringing alternate characters by forcing players to pay already high prices for the same content for any additional characters. As such, the many systems in the game to keep player engagement (e.g. reputation, alternate faction content, admiralty, R&D, etc.) go underutilized because players are not willing to put hundreds or thousands of dollars into each character to unlock content they've already paid for. The more players are playing the game, the more they will be willing to spend. Causing them to lose interest because they've maxed a character and it's prohibitively expensive to start a new character is a self-defeating business model. Furthermore, such a draconian model also makes brining new players in a hard sell. Please reconsider this practice and make all paid for content account-wide unlocked.

And for players who have redeemed the same character only content multiple times, give them the relevant selector (Infinity T6 ship, lobi refund, etc.). They may seem like a short term loss (it is), but there are so many ships these players won't run out of future content to buy, and the goodwill and increased account viability is a nice push to do that buying.

Edit: For consistency, I think Phoenix Epic Tokens and other means of unlocking missed events should also be account-wide. (Just get rid of character only unlocks using any currencies purchasable with real money (e.g. dil)).

phoenixc

People have asked for the ability to re-box premium ships and transfer them via the account bank (or to add an account-wide transfer option to the drydock). If they did that it would have a similar effect to unlocking account-wide except for only being able to have the number copies purchased on the account active at the same time. There are some other premium or otherwise limited items that limited transfer ability would be useful for too.

Nothing has ever come of those requests, and I suspect the same nothing will come of the request for everything to be account unlocks, though I may be wrong about that since years ago suggestions to make event unlocks account wide were eventually implemented.

khorban

phoenixc#0738 wrote: »

Nothing has ever come of those requests, and I suspect the same nothing will come of the request for everything to be account unlocks, though I may be wrong about that since years ago suggestions to make event unlocks account wide were eventually implemented.

I would 100% share your feelings if it was the same regime, but with new custodians of the game, I feel like we're in unknown territory. I think this is a great opportunity for DECA to take the game in a more player friendly direction. It's a very hard proposition to bring new players on board since there are so many ships/consoles/traits in the game now and catching up seems like a herculean task, both in time and money. Telling a player that they will need to invest over $1000 or wait 5 plus years for enough opportunities to get event ship unlocks is just such a no go scenario for the vast majority.

I think it's time for a wild restructuring of how players can access some of this paid content to bring more players in, so the game doesn't have to rely on diehard fans paying way too much for what they're getting.

Furthermore, as I said before, this puts new life into the game for these old players, who might think about getting more of these expensive ships/traits/consoles etc. on more of their characters.