Lothic wrote:

Huckleberry wrote:
I hate having to repeat myself, but by your answer, Lothic, I think you missed the point.
CoX was a subscription based game. So naturally, things were included in the game. If CoT will be F2P, then a lot of features that were included in the subscription based model will, naturally, have to be cash shop in the free to play model. So you can argue that charging for things in a F2P game that used to be free in a P2P game is a step back in capability, but you may as well argue against gravity.
Also, in your answer you state that
Lothic wrote:
I'm sure almost no one would buy them unless they did something really silly to make them artificially desirable for some reason. Also remember the number of people who'd ever actually want to "slow down" XP earning will always be much, much smaller than the number who'd want to boost it. Would MWM even make much money from the tiny handful who'd ever want to have a way to reduce XP earning so badly they'd pay for it?
, but I have two rebuttals:
1. So what. The number of people wanting something was not the point. The point was to avoid the perception that playing the game is just a means to get to max level rather than something to enjoy itself.
2. In your own argument you state that
Lothic wrote:
The XP toggle switch was added to CoX several years after the game launched presumably based on a number of requests for it (from what I recall from the CoX forums).
So which is it? Is it a feature nobody wants, or is it a feature so many people wanted that the developer had to rewrite code and put it in an update?
Of course, this whole argument would be made moot if the game includes a feature that ensures a character's power level is always appropriate for the content. There would be no need to stop XP gain and thus no need for an item to offered it.
Then we would be back to square one, dealing with the unintended consequences of offering XP boosters.
By the way, if we come out and state that the only reason to boost XP is to allow one person to catch up with his or her friend(s), then one way of dealing with it is by making XP boosters only available to people who are already at max level, who can then give it to their low-level friends. Of course, no sooner do I say that then I can think of a number of ways it could be abused. I think in principal the idea has merit, but I'd have to think about a more practical implementation.
I found the XP on/off toggle switch to be a very useful feature once it was added to the game. I personally knew at least a few other people who used it. It was requested in the CoX forums before it appeared so I can only assume the CoX Devs agreed it would be a useful feature thus explaining its origin and its implementation as a freely available toggle switch option for everyone. Obviously I don't know how many players ultimately ever used the toggle switch for their own characters, but I have to assume that adding it to the game was seen as a generally "positive" update regardless as far as the Devs were concerned.
Now I suppose one could make the argument (as you're trying to do) that virtually nothing should be taken for granted as a "free default" feature in CoT because of the differences in how the two games will be organized money-wise. Theoretically there would be nothing stopping the Devs of CoT from making the concept of a "XP delayer/reducer" only available as a temporary/limited "potion" like item in the cash store. All I can really say to that scenario is that I would consider that, at the very least, a step backwards and at the very worst a blatant cash grab to charge for something that worked perfectly well as a built-in free GUI option in the previous game for years. Again to me it'd be akin to charging players extra for using the color green in the CoT Avatar Builder - sure the Devs COULD do that but it would be seen by many as a very nit-picky and player-unfriendly maneuver.
It's also possible (as you point out) that CoT will be designed in such a way that the very idea of having "XP delayers" or "XP boosters" might be moot. In that situation I could accept that the need/desire for even a simple XP on/off toggle may be rendered quasi-pointless in CoT. But barring any other foreseeable eventuality like that we don't know about yet you have not demonstrated any substantial benefit the game would gain by NOT providing a straightforward XP on/off toggle switch as a default option regardless. Even if the Devs decided to sell some kind of strange "XP delayer" that provided some other random non-intuitive advantage (e.g. a temp buff that say gave you a big Defense boost in exchange for having to sacrifice say 50% XP earnings) there's absolutely no legitimate argument against ALSO having a binary XP on/off switch built into the game as a permanent default.

I personally hated that you could "outlevel" content in City of Heroes... and even when they introduced the "Earn XP" toggle, I had to refer to paragonwiki to work out *when* to enable/disable it so that I wouldn't miss out on content.

Other MMO's? Oh wait, you are level 50? Sure you can still run the content, but your rewards would be the same as someone who was level appropriate for said content.

For me, the toggle was a fix for something that shouldn't have been an issue in the first place.