Elder Scrolls Online - 30 Days Free Subscription

???

Of course you have to register on MMO if you want it to track your progress! The registration on MMO (nick, e-mail, password) is not the problem here. Some SP games also want you to register, the whole fuss is not about registration.

Dear god, do you even bother to read what's written here?

I do. But like forum member Domein, I tend to misunderstand.

Aside from "Free to Play" MMOs (the real scam in the industry, anything but free) I have always had to setup a subscription plan at launch for any MMO. They verify your account and after the first month you get billed. It's a simple thing, and I'm starting to wonder if some of you have been in your RPG cave too long and missed the last 15 years of subscription based MMOs…

Yes, this isn't anything new. Seems too many people have over-acclimated to an era of shallow F2P games.

While it seems shady and is surely a PR disaster, I would hope that the intention was to mimic what's been done in MMORPGs forever - a free month with your box purchase, and I'm sure they'll make good on that.

Originally Posted by Aubrielle
This is just the kind of petty behavior I'd have expected out of ZeniMax.

Of course, I was bored by the concept (of ESO) from the beginning, and that yawn-fest of a trailer last week just drove it home for me.

Dunno about ZeniMax but I'd agree that I've found ESO to be boring - weak skyrim meets weak and generic MMORPG = please stick with what the ES does best - solo PvE in single player games.

Throw in the fact that all along they've emphasized PvP as group content - for a series that has been the pinnacle of PvE forever and the whole idea boggles the mind.

Also agree that the recent trailer was terrible - just CGI masturbation. It had no point and unless you happen to know that the characters in it loosely resemble the graphical style of Skyrim there'd be no reason to associate any of that with ES at all - it could just be random fantasy anything from a random source on youtube.

I bought WildStar and have grown to somewhat regret it because while it's a very well done game it's just more of the crappy modern MMORPG same. Too much solo ez-mode. Solo content in MMORPGs is just terrible. It's weaker that the most poorly done single player RPGs. It was a novel concept for a while but I'd really like to see MMORPGs return to being ALL about group content since that is the only thing really unique about MMORPGs. Soloing around other people online that you never interact with isn't all that compelling.

European server is down for maintenance. That's something that bothers me more than subscription plan and all that legal stuff. Couldn't they do it during european night-time?

Originally Posted by Voqar
Soloing around other people online that you never interact with isn't all that compelling.

Couldn't agree more!

This mostly screws the people that don't have any cash on hands to unlock their "free" 30 days.

I don't play MMO's but I don't really see the problem. If you paid $60 for the game wouldn't you be expecting to play more than the free month anyway. Then if you find you don't like it you can cancel anytime, so where's the problem.

I suppose if you didn't have the money as Domein suggests but if you don't have $15 somewhere then you probably aren't going to but a $60 game with subscription fees.

When I played Ultima Online I was still a teen and didn't have a checking account or a credit card and just bought the game and signed up and used my 30 day code to play and then quit after 2 days because of people killing me and taking everything I had. Also I bought Rift a month before it went F2P so maybe they changed it since they still don't have my billing information. With the SOE games I bought a collection of all of them with a free 30 day station account for all of them and never put in billing information. I did the same with LOTRO as I did with Rift.

personally, this is how ive always seen it done. im surprised by everyone else's surprise.

I understand the issue he had - I got irritated as well of having to choose a subscription plan with a credit card. They then immediately deducted a month's subscription on my credit card, but then reversed it a while afterwards thus verifying the credit card (they never gave notice of having to do this). This basically forces you in most cases to choose a subscription plan with a valid credit card before playing… because why would you have a pre-paid time card at this stage. I obviously cancelled the subscription afterwards but I can understand that this will be very frustrating to most people - especially to those that don't have credit cards.

Have to defend Zenimax on that one, having to setup a subscription to get the 30 free days is standard faire for any newly released MMO i joined.

What's silly though is deducting a month payment then refunding it for verification.
If you ever dealt with online communities you'd know that'll be immediately misunderstood.

Also i expect alot of people buying now to not actually have any MMO experience/interest and just wanting their Elder scrolls fix.
Without any earlier experience in MMO's the 30 free day setup might look misleading.

I think you don't understand the real issue here. The problem is not that ZeniMax is asking for billing info, but in fact it charges your debit/credit card for another 30 days. The amount is given back after a while, and from what I've read on the forums Europeans get it in minutes while US players have to wait up to 5 days to get their money returned.
ZeniMax could have charged only $0.1 or $1 if they wanted to verify the validity of an account, not the whole one month subscription. This attitude led to many players who purchased the game not being able to play because their bank accounts were empty. Do you think this is fair?

Originally Posted by Ranger
I think you don't understand the real issue here. The problem is not that ZeniMax is asking for billing info, but in fact it charges your debit/credit card for another 30 days. The amount is given back after a while, and from what I've read on the forums Europeans get it in minutes while US players have to wait up to 5 days to get their money returned.
ZeniMax could have charged only $0.1 or $1 if they wanted to verify the validity of an account, not the whole one month subscription. This attitude led to many players who purchased the game not being able to play because their bank accounts were empty. Do you think this is fair?

Ohh i haven't thought about that, if the charge doesn't go through the verification would fail too.
Well this makes it even more stupid to charge a whole month just for verification.

yes, usually they do like a $.01 pre-auth for verification, not $15.

Again though, if you don't have $15 somewhere then buying a $60 subscription based game is a terrible idea.

What if the person doesn't have a penny or dollar either?

To me it's just the price of doing business, you want to play the game then you need to have $15 in an account somewhere. Pretty simple.

Originally Posted by sakichop
Again though, if you don't have $15 somewhere then buying a $60 subscription based game is a terrible idea.

What if the person doesn't have a penny or dollar either?

To me it's just the price of doing business, you want to play the game then you need to have $15 in an account somewhere. Pretty simple.

I dunno about others but i tend to use prepaid cards for verification(if possible) and have a hardly filled bank account aside my main one linked to paypal.
None of them necessarily have more than the 5€ needed to keep them open most of the time in them.
Since you don't expect them to charge a full month just for verification i can see the problem now.
Basically people could get screwed out of early access or have to go through the support hassle to clean this up, would annoy me quite a bit too.

As part of the Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode services, some credit and debit card issuing banks may choose to validate the card using a process called a “$1 pre authorization.” This pre authorization is used only to verify transaction and credit card information. The $1 preauthorization shown on a credit or debit card statement involves no transfer of funds and will be dropped from the account within 1-5 days (depending on the card issuing institution).

So why $15 and not the norm $1 amount? This is a questionable amount of money to verify an account…. Maybe in time this might become a FTP model like others that started with the subscription based model.