The aforementioned “very special offer” for multiple account holders arrived in my email inbox yesterday and I want to give CCP credit for having done what they said they would. They have offered up a deal as promised.
This is what I got in my inbox.
The offer proffered
Wulf Larson is one of my characters on one of my accounts. I am not sure WHY CCP chose that particular character to address. I wouldn’t even call it the main character on that particular unsubscribed account. But whatever.
The offer is 25% off of a 1 month subscription and 15% off of a 3 month subscription.
I went to the web store, logged in with my primary, still subscribed, alt account, and found the following under the Special Offers:
The special offers
We’ll just ignore the “skill point resurgence” offer, one of a number of ways that CCP sells skill points they generate out of thin air for cash. I have beaten that horse well past decency and gave up on that front a couple years back.
But you can see that with a 25% discount you are essentially allowed to subscribe your alt account in for a month at the old price of $14.95.
The three month offer is discounted 15%, which brings it down to $40.70. That is less than the current three month price of $47.98, but still more than the old three month price of $38.85, which is a bit weird. It is still a discount, and it is still less that three discounted one month subscriptions, but it feels like they should have just bit the bullet and gone with the old price rather than collecting that extra two bucks.
So, despite that odd blip, CCP delivered.
Of course, there are problems. For a start, it turns out that the option to update your email address on your account page wasn’t working for a few days, so if you were like me and rushed in and did the update immediately, you might have missed out. I only went back and redid it because I saw the problem mentioned on r/eve. (So don’t say there is nothing useful there!)
And then there is the offer itself. I haven’t yet extended my primary alt’s account because I am not sure if this is a one time offer or not. Do I waste it now or save it for later? Will it go away?
The communication on this has been… well, I was going to say sub-standard, but CCP hasn’t exactly been hitting it out of the park on messaging. Just yesterday we had the post from them about revitalizing multiple character training which technically included a price reduction for MCT certificates when purchased in quantity. But rather than leading with that upbeat bit of news, it was a push for how great is was to train two characters on the same account that, when people went to look at the pricing, emphasized how bad of a deal it was compared to just having a second account.
As it turns out, MCT was always an economically bad choice when compared to just running a second account, the announcement only served to highlight that aspect of them.
Then came the Omega deal for people with multiple accounts, so MCT certificates look like even a worse deal. Ouch.
Also, a lot of the more vocal fans area already in a bad mood over price increases, the lack of anything beyond a vague future vision for the game coming out at Fanfest, the in-game economy, and a bunch of other things I can barely remember. And in that situation a lot of people seem dissatisfied with this offer.
And I have to admit, I cannot raise any huge enthusiasm for it. It seems fine, and I am not sure CCP needs to be more generous than offering a reduction to the old pricing scheme for alts. But the delivery of this “very special offer” seemed a bit light somehow.
Anyway, it is there and might be in your special offers tab in the web store.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 