Your Ever-Shrinking Dollar: EQ2 Players July 16, 2008
Posted by Kendricke in Everquest 2.Tags: EQ2 Players, Monthly Subscription
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It seems like these days, you can’t turn on a TV or fire up a website that isn’t talking about our “shrinking dollar”. Either prices are rising or you simply get less of what you used to for the same price.
Walk into your local grocery store and you’ll find that the cereal box costs the same as it did a year ago, but the amount of cereal IN the box is now less. That bad of premade salad you used to buy for $1.99 is still the same price, but now there’s 25% less salad in the bag.
It’s not just food producers who are trying to sell us a smaller bill of goods for the same price - if you’re still paying SOE for access to their EQ2Players site, you’re paying the same as ever, for less of what you used to get.
One way SOE has reduced your monthly payment has been to add in rotating ads. Whether or not you pay SOE to use EQ2 players, you’re subjected to the ads. There is no way to turn these ads off. You can’t even pay SOE to turn them off - there’s simply no option. The ads weren’t there a year or two ago…and yet the price you used to pay for an ad-free site is the same price you’re paying today. Interesting, eh?
Well, if you think that’s something to think about, realize this: Within the last year, without any real fanfaire or announcement, SOE started letting players turn off their profiles completely. If you’re paying access to SOE because you’d like access to different player profiles, you’re out of luck if that player decides to switch their profile off. No more looking at the gear of top players to see what you might want to try for yourself. No more checking out possible applicants for your guild. No more following up on old friends who switched servers. If someone wants to shut off their profile (even if they aren’t currently paying for the service), then you can’t look at them (even if you do pay). This wasn’t always the case, but it is now.
Remember when you could look at a guild roster in EQ2players and get a quick look at everyone’s join date? Remember when you could see a guild of the day? Player of the day?
Sure, they added some new features here and there along the way, but they also yanked quite a few as well…and most of the time, there wasn’t much notice that it was going to happen.
So, while you and I and the rest of us keep paying SOE the same $1.99 a month as you always have, the truth of the matter is that you’re slowly paying for less and less and time goes on.
Being able to completely turn off profiles is a great enabler of fraud. A great number of discrepancies are found with the help of the eq2players.com website, especially when I try to decide whether to petition someone as a plat pharmer.
The item database is an utter joke; I only use it to see discovery dates.
You can turn off ads… but it requires using Firefox and NoScript
On the one hand I can see the point of being able to access the profiles of any one you want to prevent, as Illuminator said, fraud, but on the other hand, it could be considered a privacy issue.
If I don’t want people looking at my data, I should be able to prevent them from doing so. If I don’t want you to know I have 11 alts spread across 3 servers, I should be able to do so. If I don’t want you to know about an alt I have on the same server as my guild so I can go off and harvest or whatever in silence, I should be able to.
Should I have to pay extra in order so I can protect my privacy? I dunno. I personally am more of an opt-in proponent than an advocate for requiring payment to opt-out.
I’m not talking about blocking specific parts of your profile, though. I’m talking about blocking your entire profile.
Morever, this wasn’t some service that was a minor addition. This was a specific selling point that Greg “Baelish” Short pushed regarding the “new” Eq2Players when it relaunched back in 2006 - that customers who chose to pay for the additional services would be able to at the very least view the basic profiles of every character in the system.
Players have always had the ability to block alts. That’s not a new function here. However, being able to fully block a profile was something that was removed with the relaunch and was used as an advertised feature of the service to entice further sales.
The fact that this function was removed is not merely an opinion. The fact that it was put back in place is not, either. That equates to a loss of functionality and value…for the same price we’ve been paying all along.