Back on October 1st, SOE changed a few things for its player free to play tiers (the Free and Silver ones) to the point where it the Silver accounts aren't all that different from the Gold (paid subscription) anymore. And even though their account tier matrix does, for the most part, a good job on showing the differences between the different tiers there were still some limitations of a Silver Account I discovered only while playing. This won't so much a case of false advertisement as much as not much details given in that chart. It is probably buried somewhere in SOE's knowledge base somewhere but I don't know how many people will have the patience to look for that. So with that in mind here are some of the not-so-clear limitations that a Silver Account has:
The limitations
You can't sell on the broker
This is true. Although you can buy some tokens from the Marketplace (Everquest 2's cash shop) for 50 Station Cash (SC for short) which translates to about $0.50 right now. You get 10 tokens and each token allows to put only one item in the broker. They are also tied to whichever character you buy them with, you can't trade it with other players nor between your characters.
If you had a gold subscription with items in the broker and let it slip to a Silver account they will still be listed in the broker as normal until they get or you take them away. But you won't be able to add any new ones.
This may make earning money by trading with other players a bit more difficult but if you don't mind doing some face to face trading you can always try to peddle your wares in the auction channel which is an official chat channel provided by SOE.
You can not buy from another player's house
This one felt pretty arbitrary. You can trade normally with other players and even buy stuff from the broker. But if you go to another player house to buy directly from their selling crate the game just won't allow you. I have no idea what was the logic behind this one but again not that much a big deal unless you are buying something really expensive. In those cases it can hurt the wallet a little having to pay for the broker taxes. Of course, you can always trying PMing the seller to see if they are willing to take the goodies off their selling crate and just meeting face to face to sell it to you.
Can't upgrade spells and combat abilites to Master grade
Again, I'd say this isn't that big of a deal since I can't think of many situations where a master spell or combat ability is entirely necessary. Anyway, you can't upgrade those beyond Expert. Any spell or combat ability that you can research to master it just won't allow you. And if you have a book that upgrades it to master you will get asked if you want to buy one of the spell unlocker packs. Those packs allow you to upgrade any spell or combat ability to master and cost 150 SC (about $1.50) and the pack contains five unlockers. I don't know if the unlockers work for researching spells to master too since I did never try it. My guess is that it is not possible since if I try to research the only message I get is that my account level is too low to do that.
If you had a gold subscription with some spells at master before it slipped to silver you keep those spells at master and can continue using them normally.
If you had more than 4 characters before going to silver character slots will be used to unlock the other characters
Ok. This one is a bit complicated to explain so let me try to do it with some examples. Suppose you were a gold subscriber with 7 characters. You decided to let your account slip to silver level. Silver accounts however only allow for 4 characters. So what will happen is the 4 characters you will be able to play will be the last 4 characters you logged in with. The other 3 characters will be locked and unavailable to play until you buy character slots.
Now suppose that you are a gold subscriber with 7 characters plus two unused character slots you bought. You decide to go to silver. In that situation you would have the last 6 characters played unlocked (4 from silver plus the 2 unused character slots).
Now, let's say you bought the character slots and decided to go back to back to being a gold member. You will get back your 7 character slots plus any other character slot you bought. So, let's say in the first example you bought 1 character slot to unlock another character you had. You would go back to having all your characters unlocked and be able to create another character since you bought a character slot while silver.
Same thing for the second example. You would just go back to having 7 characters unlocked and being able to create two more characters just like before.
Myths
Silver accounts can't get loyalty tokens
This is pure myth. I don't know how or where it started. Maybe things were different before the October changes or perhaps it is different in other SOE games with a similar system. Whatever the case may be that is not the case with the current system in Everquest 2. You can do the Daily Quest and spend the loyalty point tokens just like any other player.
Other notes
Starting on November 21st 2013 gold members will get double the tokens for any quest that rewards it. This includes the daily quest that givens loyalty point tokens. The only exception are from tokens earned by killing other players in PVP, those continue as normal. This will go until February 25th of 2014.
So if you are in doubt to subscribe or not this is a good reason to do so. Earning those loyalty token points faster will allow you to buy stuff sooner from the Loyalty Merchants, like that bag that gives 75 plat. If you like events or decoration that means less grinding for tokens so we can buy furniture.
All in all it is a good incentive for people to subscribe.
You can read about this change on the official Everquest 2 forums.
I hope this post has useful to someone and may help them decide if they want to play Everquest 2 with a silver account or pay the 15 per month for a gold subscription. Let me know if anyone has any more questions about the subject in the comments and I will update the post approprietly. 🙂
I was wondering which tokens you were talking about until I read the last paragraph and realized it was about those loyalty point tokens. So they are doubling for gold accounts then...that's great! That means one could get the Kromzek house in one month instead of two, among other things.
I found out too that there's a heritage painting available on the loyalty vendor that I'd wanted since the game first started, but wasn't able to get it since my account was never linked to a previous EQ1 account and so I'd missed out on that option. It wasn't a huge deal, of course, but I still really liked that painting and now it seems I have the option of getting it!
My gold account ends tomorrow unless I subscribe. I'll probably go ahead and do that even though I'm not playing much due to work and school and other things, but it would be nice to be able to get double tokens, and Frostfell is coming up soon too.
It is not only loyalty tokens. It is any quests that given tokens. So that includes writs (for city tokens), grottos (for the elemental tokens), the new quests in Tears of Veeshan that give etyma (I am pretty sure I spelled that wrong!), and so on and so forth. We'll certainly get double tokens of whatever Frostfell gives too and the same with Erollisi Day.
And yes, there are some nice painting and other furnitures in that merchant. I am still aiming to get the Kromzek house first though despite not having any idea for whom or what I would use it for!