I tried help chat on Atlantic today. There is nothing except Avatars or other RMTs. You banned them from General Chat and now they are abusing Help one. General chat is much better now.
Why EJ accounts are unable to use General (and other ) chats at least in a read-only mode? Currently for EJ's this game looks really dead. You cannot find where are activities, who is gathering party to fight something. I think it will affect how many new players we will get in the future.
also because you cannot connect 2 or more chats, there are no people in Help one. Even if some newbie EJ will yell there- no help will come.
Simple. Pay your subs like the rest of us and enjoy the benefits
Do you realize the 99.9 % of the EJ "accounts" are just alts of paying accounts? Most of which are only to "help" the paying accounts in various ways, right?
Also you need a 3rd option:
3) No. If they want to see general chat they need to pay for the account.
It is unfortunate new players are stuck with the help channel where no one is there to help them.
I tend to think helpers who want to help are in fact in the help channel.....
I played an EJ account because I was not willing to commit to paying a subscription fee after just playing a game for two weeks. I don’t know how to cheat the game and don’t much care to learn. From what I’ve seen you need to be fairly familiar with programming to be able to comprehend the commands the third party programs use. Sorry to hear EJ accounts are being abused by I am assuming mostly by long time players that have learned how to use those programs.
On my shard the player base appears to consist mostly of old time players that developed their characters a long time ago and are playing the game because they enjoy playing the game. Maybe it’s different on Atlantic but really can’t see these players needing to buy anything from players using EJ accounts to cheat the game.
Agree with Gwen the game needs newer players if it has any hope of surviving. It’s older player base is not going to last forever. With so many free options available, UO needs EJ accounts to compete for new players. Don’t know the solution but in a game already quite biased against newer players in almost every respect making the game more untenable to prospective new players is not the answer.
Maybe try contacting some players that have gone from EJ accounts to subscription accounts.
Some can't see past their cheat blinders to understand that EJ did bring paying accounts. Not sure it can now.
To be fair... if she can post on these boards she needs to have a paid account so it would seem she has at least one paid account.
I think they are saying they wanted to play for free to see how the lag was, if any, and if they found the game to be fun in the long term before subscribing. They clearly subscribed at some point. They said they were EJ 2 years ago, not EJ for 2 years.
I played for eight months before subscribing. Starting from scratch it just took that long. EJ accounts can’t have vendors to generate gold and the storage limitations really suck. But the EJ account allowed me to experience most of what the game had to offer with a character that had grandmastered most skills in it’s template.
I’m not sure what downside there would be to EJ having listen only privileges to GC.
How did Free Trial Accounts survive for so many years when alls they had was Help and had far more restrictions on them than EJ Accounts have. They should have just taken the 2 week limit off Trial Accounts and we would not have all these problems with EJ Accounts and RMT spammers.
I have been in Help Chat on Atl for 30 min and saw a conversation between 3 people, 1 new and 2 helping him and ONE, I repeat ONE RMT spam that did not hurt the conversation one bit so all those people screaming that nobody is in Help Chat helping true new players and RMTs are jamming up Help is %100 WRONG
ONE hour Help Chan 3 RMT spams and TWO help requests that were taken care of by Atl Players that must be monitoring Help Chan, so where is the problem. Help is being provided and RMT spam is not interfering with it.
When the change was made for EJ being only in the Help channel, the RMT spammers were just as frequent as ever. But if that has died down some, that’s great to hear.
Might be true but storage, number of players, vendors and other restrictions on these accounts would take most of the joy out of the game for experienced players. For example, actual secure storage in your bank box is limited to 20 items. Not enough room even for all of the rewards you got from Yukio.
Clearly EJ is a completely failed experiment. Just drop it already. Its not bringing new players to the game and the limitations put on it to keep it from being abused by paying players makes it useless. Just undo it already. They clearly don't know how to run a pay for play model.
The perceptions of a couple players on these forums does not prove EJ is anything other than a subject which is of interest to a couple players.
Returning to the thread's original point, I'd absolutely welcome a read-only function as would many of the EJ players I've met in-game.
I've encountered quite a few EJ players over the years on the smaller shards. In most cases they are old returning players, coming back after anywhere from a 2-21 year break on an impulse and just want to check out the state of the game and if it's what they remember. Many of these people slowly ease themselves back into the game with a few hours here and there, unable to justify a sub while seeing if the magic is still there and usually building a new character/getting updated gear. Sometimes it isn't and they are gone the next day, other times it is and they start regularly playing which often leads to them subbing even if not within the first 6 months.
In saying that, smaller shards are a different experience for EJ players from what i've seen, for one many smaller shards still use the help chat as the only channel and put up with the gold spam but also the smaller/closer community usually means people are happy to help minimize any restrictions with help/advice (ie, solutions work around limited storage/sharing PS drops with an EJ player at a spawn/ helping them earn decent enough gear/free vendoring or transferring items)
I agree that EJ should be able to view all chats so that there can be a default one on each shard and subbed accounts can at least communicate in one direction to them ie send out general group event invites or buy/sell offers with a location if they are interested.
how about we address the real issue with chat... and that is you can only be in 1 channel at a time?