Blue Koolaid

Yea sorry an entire race is a bit odd, I mentioned this in another thread. If you pre-order though I guess at least with the new any race option for alliances you can look at it as you have 9 options instead of 3. But yea an entire race is going to make a lot of people angry. I was mainly mentioning that bonuses are common and that normally they are given to everyone later. Also to note on the xp rings Age of Conan did this as well but it was a measly 2% xp bonus at the cost of a gear slot. So on that bonus I would want to know the actual bonus xp given before getting angry.

It is odd for a bonus to include an entire race, I do admit that is going to be big for many people. I still would be shocked if they didn't release the imperial race later for everyone else through in game content however. As for the mount that is very normal for a mount and I would bet that it is going to be the same speed as all other mounts in the game. As for the rings of Mara what is the xp bonus? Because Age of Conan did the same thing and I bought the collectors edition for the xp bonus and it was a 2% xp bonus which was a joke not to mention eating up an entire gear slot. Again if it is a small % bonus at the sacrifice of a gear slot...it won't matter one bit. The race bonus though is a tough pill to swallow.

For me this is a good thing because I always pre-order MMOs that I plan on playing. I know many people want to wait and read forums/reviews but honestly this is a bad idea for an MMO. I have played countless MMOs in my life and if you wait for reviews and forums you might as well not play. Most reviewers will give the game a positive review no matter what because they don't want to hurt their advertising revenue. Forums are the complete opposite you will get terrible reviews with countless people complaining and threatening to quit the game even though many of them will continue to play for a year or longer. Getting your own opinion on an MMO is the only way to know if you are going to like it. This sucks because after this you have already spent money which is why free to play MMOs are so popular. But F2P MMOs are always pay to win via an item mall. Many will still complain that the pre-order and collectors edition is a form of pay to win but in my experience it is not. The imperial race might have a passive that will anger you because you really want it but do not want to pay for it, but come end game I would bet the impact will be much smaller than you would imagine not to mention it is highly likely they will release imperial to all at some point. I hope they don't force us to pay for this although some recent MMOs have done that with collector edition bonuses because if they don't then the people who did buy the collectors edition will fill the forums with tears. This is all very normal for MMOs and very predictable to be honest. I don't like all of it but at the same time I figure if I pre-order the game and play for 6 months to a year then the price of the entertainment is worth it. Most console games are $60 and when I am playing an MMO I buy almost no other games because of the time sink anyway. I do however understand the complaints on this stuff and of course for console gamers this all is going to come as a shock.

This has been standard for MMOs for quite some time is everyone here new to MMOs? Also the standard digital $60 pre-order allows you to use any race with any faction. So really all this does is try to entice you to pre-order. This is done in MMOs because they prepare their servers for launch based partly on pre-orders and then partly by projections. This allows for a smoother launch normally as they know what kind of server stress to expect. Especially by allowing pre-orders in 5 days early, this trickles the fan base in a bit more slowly which from a technical stand point makes a lot of sense. I will not be buying the collectors edition because I don't care that much about the imperial race and don't feel like dropping $30 extra. I will however pre-order the standard digital version of the game. I always buy digital versions when available for MMOs anyway. $60 is standard for a new AAA MMO you get 30 free days and then the $14.99 after that is also standard for subscription based MMOs. One thing that caught my attention in this thread though is that they announced expansion packs would be free? This is actually not standard as WoW and other traditional MMOs normally charge $20-$30 dollars for a new expansion pack. Later they combine them with the sale of the game but that is well after each expansions release so getting these free will be a nice perk. Also it is standard for MMO companies to eventually release many of the collectors edition digital bonuses later for the rest of the player base and normally for free by unlocking it through in game events or story line. Of course this will cause the collector's edition people to get all up in arms and we get to have this kind of argument and bitch fest one year or so from now so there is always that to look forward to. lol