From SOE's site:
More features, more content and more fun! Free, for this weekend only
(11/19/10-11/21/10), all EverQuest II Extended accounts will be entitled to all
the perks of the $14.99 Gold Membership. That’s full access to seven character
slots, spell tiers, equipment grades, six bag slots, unlimited coin limitations,
eight shared bank slots, 75 journal quests and more!
There are a few quite odd aspects to this. First, it's been announced quietly and with very little notice. I keep an eye on the EQ2E forums and I've only just found out about it after the weekend has already started. There was no notice when I last logged in to the game a couple of days ago.
Next it has the potential for chaos. Sure, you can make new characters. However I don't think they've solved the problem I talked about before where if you're not subbed and the most recently played characters require a SC purchase you can't log in and because you can't log in you can't buy the character. So whatever you do don't jump at the chance of trying alts out and leave your account full of Froglock Paladins - you won't be able to log in when you revert to Bronze or Silver. (The workaround is to make sure your most recently logged in character, or second most recently logged in character is free or of a race and class you've already bought - you won't be able to buy it after your account downgrades but as long as there's a legal character displaying to log in with you can get into the game where you'll be able to buy races/classes/extra character slots).
The Gold upgrade offers three things which are of long-term benefit:
- you can upgrade spells to Master. Normally you can only upgrade spells to Master if you are Gold but if you upgrade them during the free Gold weekend they will stay as Masters after you revert to being a non-subscriber.
- you can use the broker. Fill up a couple of boxes with junk for sale and when you revert to non-subscriber it will stay on the broker listed for sale. As a non-subscriber you can't add to what you are selling but stuff you've listed will continue to be available. Every week or two you can check to see if there's some cash to collect.
- the other very useful thing is that you can tweak your AA slider. So if you want to have more punch than a character of your level would normally have set the slider to 100% and blast through some experience-rich content. Or if you want to accelerate your levels and don't mind being AA-light set it to 0% and grind some exp.
Oh, I'd forgotten about your experience with not having any legal characters that you could log into in order to purchase access to races and classes. Are you at least able to delete unwanted characters in that situation?
ReplyDeleteAs to the AA slider, it's supposed to revert to 50% when the subscription lapses, so you only get to take advantage of those effects for the weekend.
Nice breakdown Stabs. I have been busily queuing up master spell upgrades at the research assistant. However, the other tow benefits you mention had not occurred to me.
ReplyDelete@ GA I temporarily solved it by simply re-subbing. I have an Erudite Warlock as my second most recently logged in character now and keep it there simply by not using any of the others. This means I'll be able to log in on that character when my sub lapses.
ReplyDeleteThe AA, exactly as you say, is weekend only. However you could grind a lot of AA in a weekend. Any character who didn't ever sub or get a free Gold would have an identical number of AA, this allows you to get more which could be very useful if you want to be a bit overpowered for your level. So even in a year if every other non-subber has 120 AA at level 70, say, you could have 130 AA. It's a permanent leg up.
@ Yeebo. Thanks!
One other benefit someone mentioned on the forums is storage. I believe you can put boxes in all of your bank slots and bags in all of the bag slots and fill them up. You will then (I think) be able to take stuff out but not add it after your sub lapses. For stuff like consumables that's a very good way to store it since you'll only ever want to move that stack of level 30 drink when you want to use it.