Charging a fee for recerting is a terrible idea. The $15/month general fee will ensure SOE sees returns. Microtransactions will lead us down a slippery slope which ends in being able to buy other features in-game, and I don't want PlanetSide to be a contest of personal wealth.
Benefits of the old/current system:
- Specialization, which encourages team play.
- Prevents players (mostly) from changing their gameplay mid-battle, which keeps battles realistic and encourages strategy.
Cons of the old/current system:
- Restricting of what a player has a chance to experience. This is important as it hurts the game's mainstream appeal (which pays the bills) by limiting those who don't have a lot of time to play and are forced to wait days to try something new. And for those that argue in favor of alts: many of the high-end and synced loadouts require a lot of certs. Someone who plays 1-2 hours a day isn't going to be happy about it being a long grind just to have a grunt character as well as an infiltrator, and so on. That's a lot of time spent with MA running around getting blasted by maxed characters.
The old system is too restricting and should be replaced, but we need to preserve the encouragement of team-play and strategy. Each player should have a primary and secondary cert loadout.
- The primary loadout will be a type of specialization in a certain branch of certs. It will take a while to change, but have incentives like an extra inventory slot for stealth, an extra two mines for combat engineers, and so on. This is the more permanent loadout and will create different player roles.
- The secondary loadout will take less time to recert, but offer no incentives. This will be used to experience new content, practice something you plan on investing your primary loadout into, or anything a player wants to do with the certs.
- Players can switch between the two every six hours.
2011-04-04, 11:59 PM
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