SoE will unlock all pre-existing characters the morning of 12/09

Sonly Online Entertainment is listening to the issue experienced by veteran players who tried to return to EQ2 in the new free-2-play model only to find themselves unable to roll a new character on top of having all their characters locked.  Earlier this evening, EQ2 Executive Producer `SmokeJumper` posted that characters which existed before the F2P switch will be unlocked.  This change should happen sometime is happening during downtime on Friday, Dec 9th at 7:00 AM PST (patch notes here).  You can find his original post here, but you can read below for the highlights.

EQ2 Free-2-Play or "We REALLY don't want you to come back to our game"

Update: Looks like SOE listened to this issue and is speedily moving to address it.  See my update for details.

A short while ago I got interested in giving EverQuest 2 another shot.  My wife was eagerly on board with this as we've both had an on-again-off-again love for this game.  We also heard that SOE, the company who owns EQ2, was making it free-2-play so what better time to give this MMO another shot?

"It's free-2-play so we'll at least get to see how we feel about it before we pull out the credit card", we excitedly told ourselves as we downloaded the installer.  Of course, being avid MMO players with more than a few F2P ones on our resumes we knew there would be limitations and we full expected to be dropping a few hundreds on all kinds of perks and fluff items once we got sucked in.  Re-launch day rolled up and servers finally came up.  Eagerly we logged in, already thinking of what feature we'd like to check out first.  And then we saw this:

Sony Online Entertainment's idea of welcoming returning players to the game.  Note all the locked characters and disabled Create Character button.

"Wait a second ... all our characters are locked... Is this a bug?", we thought to ourselves and tried to figure out how to remedy the problem.  But no, nothing as understandable as that.  The issue is that most classes and races are locked out - not unexpected for F2P, right?  What is unexpected however is that they are locked out even for past paid members who not only cannot create new characters of any race they previously could, but can't even log into their existing characters!

Apparently Sony decided that just because I paid $60 to purchase access to those 20+ classes and 12+ races they were listing on the back of the box 7 years ago it's completely OK to charge me again to unlock the exact same classes and races.  Only in the MMO gaming industry something like that would fly even for a second.  Think about that for a moment, will you?  Let's say you bought a car 7 years ago.  You paid for it, and you also understood it would be useless if you didn't pay for gas to keep it usable every month.  Now, 7 years later, your car's manufacturer has decided to give away free gas to all owners of their cars.  But they also lock out existing owners out of their cars until they re-buy the car at the current price.  Somebody would get sued!  Or lynched!

The thing is we wouldn't have even asked they let us use those classes and races without limits (say to create more alts).  We didn't even expect to get access to all of our toons without paying.  What is ridiculous is that a  company who invited me back to "EverQuest II Free to Play. Your Way!™" decides to make it impossible for me to even log in a single, existing character until I pay.  In a free-2-play game!  I think someone somewhere in SOE's marketing department must have decided free-2-watch-the-character-select was too long to fit in their promo email.

End result?  My wife logged off, uninstalled and hopped back on WoW.  I logged off and went back to my EVE account along with a few good old games I recently picked up from gog.com.  Two players who would have almost surely subscribed (getting rid of bag/item/spell restrictions is something I consider essential and worth $15/mo if I am having any fun in the game) and bought additional content ($20 for the vampire race plus $10 for a new alt slot for my wife, plus the dungeon-creation expansion for $40 for myself would have been almost immediate purchases) instead went back to other MMOs.  In fact, in my case, this leaves a bitter enough taste about Sony that will have me thinking long and hard before even considering any of their future products.  Someone give those marketing guys another raise!