Goblin Squad Member
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Well, almost everyone is sure to be playing in the alpha this weekend so it might be a bit before you get a definitive reply, but my understanding is that the early enrollment package being sold now in the goblinworks store is actually for month 2 of early enrollment (month 1, beginning on the 22nd, sold out already).
What more I can share with you is what is in the goblinworks FAQ:
This is the first phase of our launch of the game. Early Enrollment begins after Alpha testing is complete. During Early Enrollment many key game features will not be implemented or will be implemented in a very basic state. Based on feedback and interaction with the players the Goblinworks team will be iterating on the design, prioritizing the order that features are added and incorporating suggestions from the community into the design.
This is a process similar to the way Minecraft was developed. We know it's not for everyone, but we're sure there are lots of players who want a front-row seat to watch an MMO being built from the ground up.
Early Enrollment will not be a "beta test" in the classic sense. The objective is not to find and fix bugs - although that will be a part of what happens during Early Enrollment. The objective is to begin with a "minimum viable product", and then expand the game in a feedback-driven process.
To ensure that the game systems have time to mature we are limiting the access to the game during Early Enrollment. The first month of access has already been allocated to the people who backed the Kickstarter at the Crowdforger Pioneer level and higher. The second month of access is being sold now on the Goblin Squad Store.
Access to the game during Early Enrollment is limited. Each month we'll set a cap for how many new accounts can be created. We want to ramp up quickly to about 20,000 accounts, then grow more slowly based on how we believe the game is evolving. We expect to fill the first 20,000 slots in the first 3 months of Early Enrollment.
As each month is filled we will change the Early Enrollment signup package on the Goblin Squad Store to indicate which month is being sold.
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CEO, Goblinworks
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You can begin using your game time when Early Enrollment begins. You can use that time sequentially, or you can play a month, put your account in suspension, and then play later. While your account is suspended your characters will not earn XP.
Early Enrollment is just like Open Enrollment in that you have to pay to play each month.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Well, almost everyone is sure to be playing in the alpha this weekend so it might be a bit before you get a definitive reply, but my understanding is that the early enrollment package being sold now in the goblinworks store is actually for month 2 of early enrollment (month 1, beginning on the 22nd, sold out already).
If that's the case, they need to update the store page, because it's still saying "Join the game in the first month!" for the Early Enrollment $100 package, which this individual says they have purchased. They have the Explorer's package at $50 which is for month 2, and only comes with 1 month of game time. It also does not include the New Player pack that the Early Enrollment package does.
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The Early Enrollees from the Kickstarter, the Goblin Squad Store and the goblinworks.com shop will all begin in Month 1. The Explorer Enrollees will all begin in Month 2.
Thank you Ryan, I know I've fielded a bout a dozen questions like this in personal messages and private forums. I think it would be a good time (Before EE)to re-editorialize the GoblinWork store descriptions to reflect current info.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I didn't see it answered before so I will answer it here.
It was asked above "what happens after those 3 months? do you start paying or what?
Answer: yes, after those 3 months, you will need to begin paying to continue to earn exp. I am not 100% but I think you can still play with an inactivated account (meaning after those 3 months without paying) but you won't be able to advance. If Ryan or someone could confirm please that would be great.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I am not really sure, I have almost the first 2 years paid up so its never been a concern of mine :-)
But that would make sense and I think would be best IMHO. Require paid accounts for EE to ensure 1) GW continues to get funding to keep moving forward to OE, and 2) ensures we don't have people making "dummy" accounts for 1 month and then just gathering or what not.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I didn't see it answered before so I will answer it here.
It was asked above "what happens after those 3 months? do you start paying or what?
Answer: yes, after those 3 months, you will need to begin paying to continue to earn exp. I am not 100% but I think you can still play with an inactivated account (meaning after those 3 months without paying) but you won't be able to advance. If Ryan or someone could confirm please that would be great.
I do not think the plan is that you can play with an inactive(not accumulating XP) account at this moment, as per this quote:
Conclusion
I think that we will likely begin with a 1:1 ratio between paying characters and active characters. In other words, to begin, you'll have to pay for a character to be "active" in order to log that character into the game. The minimum amount of payment I expect we will begin with is a 30 day time increment. (There are some oddities because we'll have subscriptions and yes that means that subscribers pay for 28 days in February and someone who buys 30 days of time and uses it on Feb 1 will get 2 "extra" days. But there are 365 days in the year so if you are a full-year subscriber you will get 5 more "extra" days than someone who bought twelve 30-day time increments.)
There is no specific reason we should not let you pay for multiple characters to be "active" on a given account. There's no functional difference between 1 person paying for 1,000 characters and 1,000 people paying for 1 character. In fact, trying to do something useful with 1,000 characters will be suboptimal considering the network topology between us and you, but if you want to saturate the network and accept the downsides, who are we to argue?
The people who got game time with their Kickstarter Rewards will get tokens equal to the number of months of game time included with those Rewards. They'll be able to chose when to use those tokens, and the tokens will be 30 day tokens. So if you wanted to play in the 1st month you were eligible for Early Enrollment, you'd use 1 token, get 30 days of game time, and then if you did not use another token, your character would become inactive and you could not log that character into the game. If you had more tokens they would sit in your account management screen until you decided to use one more more. You will therefore control when you use the game time you have received.
Inactive characters won't get XP. They probably should not be able to have crafting jobs that continue to advance, nor count for any "number of character" mechanics. There may be issues in implementing those rules in the short term and for the sake of speed and simplicity we might not try to implement those limits to begin with, so there could be some gamesmanship around doing things on the last day of a character's active game time which break the spirit of this system. We will evaluate the severity and impact of those corner cases if and when the issue becomes meaningful.
At some point I would like to have some mechanism for a test account. These are virtually required once the game reaches a certain level of population - after the early adopter pool is exhausted, later adopters are very wary of playing a game they cannot try before they buy. But that is a problem for a much later day, maybe not even before Open Enrollment.
There is a potential that we may decide we have the ability to support some amount of "Free to Play" accounts. That would be awesome from a population experience perspective. If it is also awesome from a revenue cost perspective and a game mechanic perspective, we'd love to do it. But it is too early to determine if it is possible, or desirable.
Here is the post from Ryan: characters and XP
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Goblin Squad Member
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If you have an Alpha invite, such as from someone here on the boards, that's only Alpha *access*, not all the other goodies that come with the $1000 investment in the future of PFO. That said, everything's getting wiped after Alpha anyway, and that's the last wipe.
Early Enrollment is the real start of the in-game portion of PFO; no wipes will follow. A lot of us, of course, began playing PFO a long time ago, here on the boards and elsewhere, and that can't be wiped, either :-).
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Goblin Squad Member
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So if i have both an new alpha & early enrollment acct., i can use the alpha but will i keep my xp and stuff gained as alpha player when game launches or would that only apply to my EE acct? I would hare to get attached to a character and lose it all on launch.
Everything in Alpha gets wiped at the start of EE. Don't get attached.