Guilds and Trial Accounts
I'd like to start this by saying that I don't want to discriminate against trial accounts, but I feel there needs to be some way to distinguish them from the other types, be it free or full access.
The main reason I feel this way is because when I look at my guild's roster, I see over 100 members (granted some are alts, but these are normally tracked by our officers), but only 1/4 of this number is active. Many of which have not been on since shortly after our guild formed in January. I have been in the guild since the 2nd day it was formed, have been an officer since the first week, and have moved up to one of the co-leaders since. I have no clue who some of the members are. And the other officers are just as clueless.
We don't want to remove them without knowing, for sure, if they were just trials.
I feel there should be a restriction added to trials that prevent them from joining a guild for this reason, and also because a roster showing over 100 members with 75 of those being trial accounts (which are now inactive) is greatly misleading.
I've overheard others recruiting speeches where they say something along the lines of "We have 75 members." But when checked by /who at different times of the day/night, there are never more than 4-5 people on. And these are usually the same people, be it on mains or alts.
Perhaps adding an asterisk after the players name or changing the color of their name in chat could identify them. Perhaps changing the color of their floating name from white to blue, for example, could be used as an identifier.
This next part is personal because I'm "Old school" and don't believe in "Overindulging" hatchies. It may meet with heavy opposition, but I'm sure there may be some that agree with it:
Restrict trials from taking the Rite of Passage. I say this because we had a member, a few weeks back, that was on a trial account and said his goal was to "Become adult in 10 days because a friend got it in 12 days. I need some help." He was already 2 days into his trial.
My first thought was "Hell no." I wasn't going to invest several hours "stuffing" this hatchie's hoard, harvesting tons of resources for them to grind their craft, then do all of their quests for them to hit 30/30, loan them the craft scales to get them to the required DCRA skill requirements, walk them through the RoP so they can fly one time, log off, and never log back on, and then be able to tell their friends "Yeah. I played Istaria. I got the trial and made it to adult dragon in 10 days." They convince others to play, and those others never make it past level 20 because they do the work themselves, get frustrated, log off, and never log back on.
This isn't a rant. I just wanted to express my viewpoint on the subject.
The game's community, at large, is awesome and helpful. I don't think that would change by identifying trial accounts.
