Aside from Daffid's response regarding the devs working on the F2P servers and content, I'm not sure why people are so worked up over this (or why they think *this* is going to be the tipping point that ruins SOE - really?)

Think about it - right now, if you have a standard subscription, you get 7 characters.  I know MANY people who have Station Access subscriptions (myself included, although I haven't logged in in over 2 months) JUST for the extra slots (12 total).  Technically, you would get more for your money to maintain 2 separate accounts (14 v 12), but those 12 get shared resources (like banks and what not).  I guess you can argue you get more with SA, because you have subscriptions to other games included - but I don't play any of them anymore (short stint with PotBS).

One of the reasons I remember seeing repeatedly stated that they wouldn't give additional character slots is because they wanted to keep people paying for SA subscriptions - if they kept upping the number of slots, they'd lose out on income.  And face it, EQ2 isn't the most popular MMO out there (although I still think they must be doing alright for themselves).  Thus, it was a smart BUSINESS decision - I imagine them not upping the slots didn't cause that many people to quit.

Now, they're giving people the opportunity to increase the slots permanently at a much cheaper cost when you think about it.  For a subscriber like me (and most of my friends in-game), we have SA subscriptions JUST for the extra slots.  That's an extra ~$15 / month ($30 / month for SA vs $15 / month for standard).  Now, I can drop the SA, purchase 5 tokens for $50 (actually less, more on that in a moment), and drop my subscription to standard, saving $15 / month and maintaining all of my existing characters.  In 4 months, I'll have saved $10, and every month thereafter, I'll save an additional $15.

Now, if I'm smart about it, I'll wait until Sony does another one of their 'bonus SC' weeks or weekends (I never really paid any attention before) - apparently, if you buy one of their SC retail cards (Best Buy, GameStop, whatever) and redeem it during one of their special periods, you get either a 25%-50% bonus (I'd have to check an old e-mail).  If it's 50%, all I need is $25, and I can buy 5 tokens - thus in the first month alone, I save $5.

So really, for long-term players, this makes a lot of sense and will save a LOT of money *if* you only use the SA subscription for the extra slots - if you use it for other games, the benefit is diminished (although some people may REALLY want 300 slots... they're just odd).

I see this giving them a decent amount of 'burst' income - maybe the EQ2X is requiring a quick infrastrucutre upgrade, who knows.  But overall, I think a number of people (myself included) will take advantage of this and save ourselves some money, which probably ends up being a bad business decision for them ;)

Either way, I don't see why anyone would think this is a bad thing - if you don't want it, don't use it.  It's the whole concept of supply and demand - if nobody buys these tokens, they'll lower prices until they do.  Would I like to see it cheaper?  Absolutely - but I'll take advantage of it the first chance I get, even at $10.

Oh, and keep in mind - The Realm (super old "MMO") still costs something like $8 / month, and you only get 4 slots!

Wow, comments are growing like crazy... jumped by like 4 pages while I was reading.

Anyway, just a thought I had - and saw it mentioned briefly by a couple others in the first few pages - is that I didn't see box sales figured into the $150M figures for calculating revenue - only subscription fees. Granted, subscription fees will generate steady (hopefully) income over several months, but to reach 'break-even' you don't care where that revenue comes from (steady, burst, whatever).

So a few other things to keep in mind:

* At an average price of $49.99, ~3 million copies (digital / retail) must be sold to 'break even' ($150M). Lets assume they sell 1 million in the first few months - keeping in mind that we all know people who have multiple accounts, and you need the account key to set that up. So already we've reached the first third of our goal - $49.99M. I think 1 million is realistic, worldwide, considering again the IP and developer involved here (although admittedly I haven't followed the game much).

* Given the nature of the IP / publisher and production costs, as well as recent trends, it's safe to say we'll see a collector's edition, somewhere in the $60-70 range. Lets say another 100,000 purchase the collector edition (probably those same people who buy a standard copy for their secondary accounts), and we add an additional $6.5M assuming a $65 average.

* Similarly, cash shops seem to be entering mainstream games more and more. I'm not necessarily opposed to these (unless they become 'required' purchases to allow or significantly improve advancement *in addition to* a subscription fee, but that's another argument), but I'm sure these product a good chunk of money as well. How much? I can't really say - but I know on EQ2, average prices seem to be about $2-5 for appearance items, so lets say 100,000 items are purchased at an average of $5 and we add another $0.5M over 11 months (which assumes roughly 9,000 items a month).

* Already we're at about $57M, and haven't even looked at subscription fees. Speaking of subscription fees, we assumed an average of $15 ($13 when accounting for overhead). Who's to say it wont go up? I remember paying $5-$10 / month for MMOs... and $15 has been the new average for quite some time. Further, we usually have the option of paying 'up front' at a discounted rate for multi-month subscriptions, or even lifetime subscriptions. So let's assume we have 500,000 paying $15/month ($13 * 500,000 = $6.5M) over 11 months and we add another $71.5M, bringing our total to $128.5M. Pretty close to our $150M goal (which is also an admittedly fairly arbitrary number), and relatively conservative in my opinion.

I don't know, but to me, this seems reasonable to reach...

Hah, Amatal beat me to it!  I was stumped on that one too... although technically he was close, as there are 12 classes in the game and 24 subclasses.

But really, overall I thought the 'noobs look' / review was decent.  What bothers me the most is the sidebar 'cons' that are listed:

Can get repetitive
Not Casual Friendly
So much to learn
Innovative Gameplay

Every MMO gets repetitive - technically all games can, since you'll always be limited by the system in place.  Nonetheless, I agree to some extent - I would say tradeskills are fun to mix it up, but ever since they made it so dumbed down from the original system, I've never been able to get back into it (not to say the current tradeskill dev hasn't been doing a great job).

Not casual friendly?  Again, a PVP server was chosen - PVP in general isn't very 'casual.'  EQ2 is exceptionally casual, unless you plan to do any of the end-game - and a look at levels 1-20, that's not a concern.  As noted previously, a large number of classes (especially summoners) are completely self-sufficient, able to breeze to level 80 solo.

How is so much to learn a bad thing?  It's an accessible game, being able to jump right in - although you wont necessarily very good right from the start.  But at least having a lot to learn keeps it interesting and lets you feel like you have some progression.

The one that really gets me though - Innovative Gameplay!?  Why is this a con?  I don't even know how to respond to that one...

So aside from those 4 items, I think it was a pretty fair look - and it's always interesting to get the perspective of a new player (as I think I initially had some of the same thoughts, which have changed over time).  I always thought the 'tutorial' / hand-holding ended too abruptly for such a vast world too; although if you try the newest noob zone (Timorous Deep), that will take you all the way up from 1 to 20 until it lets you loose on the world.  Would be good to get more input like this to give to the devs to hopefully improve the experience!

My recommendations - start again on a PVE server.  I bet any number of current players would be willing to help.  There are tons of out-of-game resources you can use too; www.eq2i.com is a great starting point.

Good work Chris.