So non-patrons can't withdraw from our cabal bank?

Despite me giving someone the permissions to do so?

What’s up with that? Did I do it wrong somehow?

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This is the reality that Funcom defined. In other games, features similar to this can be purchased for a one time fee by “F2P” users, but Funcom decided that without patronage you can only look at your cabal bank.

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Yup, cabal bank use is one of the benefits of being a patron. If someone doesn’t have patron status active then they can’t withdraw or deposit items in a cabal bank, regardless of what permissions their cabal rank has.

Thanks all for the info.

I started playing TSW when it was released with 3 other players, but lost 2 of them in Scorched Desert, because we thought it was an MMO, and those two decided to play pure healer and dps, and couldn’t complete a solo only main story line mission. I lucked out by choosing a balanced build, blade/AR, but quit TSW when my friends did.

A couple of years later, a guild I joined in FF14 decided to play TSW, so I went along with my blade/AR toon, but it fell apart when we hit Tokyo. Despite the fact that AR was a bad choice against aegis, I tried to carry on alone, and failed (if there was a path forward, I couldn’t find it alone and lacked the will to replace my AR with a new weapon, which was harder to do in TSW.)

When SWL was released, there were 7 of us who started (all friends I met in MMOs or knew in real life). Only two of us made it to Tokyo. Because of TSW, I made sure that AR was not one of my weapons. And immediately detested the new “console-itis” interface". I didn’t spend several times more building my own PC than a console would cost because I wanted to play with console controls. Is this game even available on consoles?

Because of Covid-19, 4 of us decided to try SWL again, but have again found that our original gear choices are no longer valid. But I was happy to pick up AR again although it is now nothing like the original, and now it’s blade that sucks.

And have pretty much found that not only are the gear choices we made in 2017 are no longer valid, most of the Best In Slot recommendations available on the web are wrong as well (I assume because the players who like to post that kind of stuff have quit playing).

And now silly stuff like this, where a non-patron cannot withdraw from the cabal bank. As before, I will quit again when my friends do.

After all I’ve experienced, it feels like the devs want this game to die.

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It’s rather silly to expect gear choices from 3 years ago to still be Best In Slot.
I’m pretty sure the same could be said for just about any online game.
Cabal bank has always worked this way in Legends, it is not like it has changed.
Replacing weapons was easier in TSW than it is in SWL.
AR was actually good in TSW as well.
As someone that plays this game with a controller (among other things), it requires a lot of extra work to do so, so no, it does not have console controls.
There is so much wrong with your statements and conclusions it is mind boggling.

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I wouldn’t be confident to challenge your experience, I haven’t walked in your shoes. In my experience though, I’ve never got the feeling that the devs want the game to die.

I am admittedly a huge fan of the idea of the game more than the mechanics, but everything they have done is in an attempt to save the game. Of all of the non-patron restrictions, the Cabal bank one is the one that has p’d off my friends that play the most.

I can also see precisely why it’s there.

Part of what has reduced what they can do with the game is due to what they can’t make pay. Development time takes money, and storage (or access to storage) pays; making that a patron perk makes perfect financial sense. I do see where you are coming from, though, and every time I have to withdraw something from the Cabal bank for a F2P friend I can see that it is a pain point.

I think the reason they don’t offer a one-off purchase for access is that they learned a lot from the mistake of lifetime subscriptions that they don’t want to reproduce. Maybe something like a reduced cost sub for bank access would work, or an access charge for a certain number of withdrawals?

It’s worth them giving it some thought if it drives people from the game rather than making them want to subscribe…

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Pretty much every monetization decision is based around this. It’s hard to say what Funcom’s thought processes are exactly, but one of their aims will be to make money from the game, not to kill it. Without access to Funcom’s metrics, it’s hard to say how much of an issue this is. I know plenty of F2P players, and whilst many have remarked how inconvenient it is to not be able to deposit or draw from the cabal bank, this is the first time I’ve seen anyone say that it’s the aspect of the game which will stop them playing.

Our cabal bank access is limited by rank, so not everyone is able to withdraw items anyway. With a sizeable membership, we found that there were too many incidents of people taking more from the bank than they should have, so we restricted the rights. We’ve never really had a problem with people asking officers for stuff that they can’t withdraw themselves, regardless of their patron status.

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There is nothing wrong with your statements, since it is your experience thus far and your opinion.
Its perfectly legitimate.
Despite what the naysayers say. They haven’t had your experience and never will.
They can only speak from their own experience and they, most often, won’t share the same opinion.
Just like my opinion and experience is vastly different from others too, while at the same time quite similar to some.

For what its worth, I agree with you. As a non lifetime account player who subs as and when they can i find this part one of the biggest gripes when the sub runs out. My items are held until i pay to have access to . . . well, My items. When my sub runs out and i can’t pay and i’m locked out of my cabal bank, I tend to stop playing until i sub again. Of course, i am the sole member of my cabal (I also lost a lot of friends who i used to play with in TSW because of no PVP in SWL) I use my cabal for storage of non char bound items, but i don’t see why my items i have gained should be behind a paywall of a free to play game, when they are, my items i have already received fairly, i should be able to retrieve them from where i placed them.

I do see why Funcom do this, i just don’t agree with it. Despite it being “part of the perks” advertised.
I think some lifetime accounts overlook certain things they have not had to experience as a F2P account or monthly sub. It’s not just an inconvenience.

Back in TSW one of the things most asked for during every event or stream was more space, and in SWL it was restricted & monetised. We also had a trans-dimensional bank gadget.
Be careful what you wish for as they say.

But now that Funcom are out of their debt zone, is it time they re-evaluated the monetisation in this game? Perhaps. It’s not like we can say for sure ANY of the money people pay into this game goes solely back into this game, Does it make enough to warrant attention, content, a few more GM’s, development, the wake? If Funcom seem past the point of caring does that have an effect upon the players too? If the players are past the point of caring, what does that show Funcom? . . .
Nobody knows for sure.
Nobody knows anything.

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This is a very common tactic, and I’d guess that it’s one of the big reasons for locking cabal bank access behind the patron sub.
The amount of bank storage that you gain with a cabal bank just for you is pretty big. It’s a huge convenience factor, and that’s often the kind of thing which paid perks target. You don’t need it for the game, but it’s really handy to have. I’ve got bank alts which lose access to their cabal banks when I’m not subbed, so I know exactly how it feels. But I also know that when I choose not to sub, I won’t have access to what I stash in there. Most of the important stuff I have is character bound anyway, and the valuable unbound items I tend to sell, so the bank alt cabals are mostly full of things like event cosmetics that I want to sell when the event isn’t on and people are actually interested in buying them.

Back in TSW we had so much more bag & bank space, but we also had loads more to keep. Getting rid of the crafting materials and the glyph components reduced the need for a lot of bag space.

We don’t know how much revenue SWL generates, so it’s hard to say if it’d justify re-evaluating the monetization scheme. Without big indicators that making stuff cheaper would increase total revenue, it’d be unlikely that Funcom would put in the time and effort to overhaul the systems though.

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For me, (while subbed) it’s 2 mains and 3 sides daily, a free key and bank space - is all it is at this point for the princely sum of £10, a re-evaluation on those “perks” will come from myself, coz ultimately - i choose. So i am considering upgrading the personal bank and ditching the cabal bank altogether, a loss in sub in the longterm for Funcom tho because i’m not a fan of the tactic no matter how its dressed up.
“You can put a pig in a wig but it will always be a pig in a wig” (Is an expression often used here)
The rest . . . nobody knows.

There IS something wrong with factually inaccurate statements.
Their experience is their experience, fine, and their opinions on that experience are certainly their own.
BUT, a statement of replacing weapons “was harder to do in TSW”, is factually inaccurate.

The idea that someone can label something they say as “opinion” and therefore there can be no factual counter to it is absurd.

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Its still their experience none the less and their opinion, nothing changes that.
It might have been harder for them to do . . .
I see nothing here that says it was something that everyone experienced as a whole.
Its certainly not what i took from the description of their experience.
They literally said “After all i’ve experienced” that sounds very much like it’s coming from a personal level as opposed to how you have taken it.

How are you to know how hard anything is for anyone else on any level?
You can only speak for yourself.
That is your opinion, based on your experience - doesn’t make it outright factual.

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Absurd, mind boggling. So dramatic.

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It’s hard to claim objectively that it was harder to replace weapons in TSW really. The best weapons were created using crafting kits bought for an easily available currency and had few upgrade kits required to max out. Black Bullion was given out for pretty much everything in TSW by the end. Upgrading the last few levels took a bit of time to earn enough Marks of the Pantheon, but it was still pretty quick - specially if you’d been playing for a while and so had a massive currency stockpile.
Compare that to the amount of work to create a max lvl weapon in SWL. And that’s assuming you can even afford to get hold of a BiS weapon.
Even if you’re not talking about making a fully maxed out weapon, TSW was faster. You could disassemble any weapon into metal, and then make a new weapon as long as you knew the right shape, and you’d bought a weapon crafting kit from a vendor. It was shockingly easy to get new weapons in TSW - that was one of the good/bad things about it, the gear grind was very quick.

It’s a regular complaint about SWL that it takes so much more effort to switch to a new weapon, specially if you also need to change around signets (which are also much slower to level than their TSW predecessors).

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It is a matter of opinion. See for example:
Tailsmen upgrading too easy, don't get it... :: Secret World Legends General Discussion and Reddit - Dive into anything

There’s also the fact most of my experience in TSW had this currency system in place: Chaos Theory: A guide to The Secret World's tokens and currencies.

until it was changed in 2015, i.e., for most of TSW career, black bullion wasn’t as easy to obtain whereas upon my return to SWL, I had about 150 cache keys and over 200 caches. Both of which affect my opinion about which is easier.

There’s also the fact that changing out weapons in TSW meant also replacing glyphs and signets (the last time I played, they weren’t removable) as well as possibly talismans with their glyphs and signets.

But my comment about changing out weapons was just an aside, and had nothing to do with the main point, which was mainly due to my frustration from friends leaving the game, which has always resulted in me leaving with them before too long.

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You could tank/dps/heal anything in TSW using basic dungeon drop weapons. Switching was not hard at all.

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150 cache keys aren’t something most people will just have sitting waiting for them without a significant investment. It would have been a lot harder to switch to a new weapon if you didn’t have 5 months worth of cache keys available. I can understand it seeming easier because of that, but if you’d spent 6 months saving up in TSW then you’d have had all the weapons at 10.4.4 at least.

I can totally understand leaving a game because your friends no longer play it. I’m unconvinced that your friends would stick with the game for longer if they were able to withdraw or deposit items from the cabal bank. It’s an inconvenience for sure, but really, quitting just because you can’t withdraw items? That sounds like a pretty minor complaint tbh. There may be other things which all add together to make your friends decide to move on, but I’d be astonished if that was the biggest factor.

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From reading, black boullion cant buy with money? but you can but cache key

Yes Black Bullion were similar to MoF in that they were earned as part of daily challenge rewards and even from general content like dungeons. It was not difficult to have a fully endgame ready character gear wise within 2-4weeks in TSW (even faster if you knew what you were doing or had a helpful cabal) and yes switching weapons was generally just as easy and fast. As mentioned earlier that was actually at times a negative aspect of TSW because players ran out of things to make or work on fairly quickly.

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But yet, all I had to do get the cache keys and now 2280 Third Age Fragments after using some of those keys in SWL was just log in.

I didn’t spend them because I didn’t need to. Whenever I did log into SWL, I did so only to complete the first set of dailies, at least. When I got tired of that, I cancelled, which has been about 3 times since SWL was released, but I still have more time spent playing TSW, heavily weighted toward the early days, before Tokyo was released since I first played TSW at release. I also started playing SWL at release (I do love this game, else I wouldn’t even bother posting here).

This time around, I got well into Tokyo before I decided to use the cache keys, and am now considering spending the Third Age Fragments on purple weapons that I’ll probably never use, just to use up weapon rewards, since I don’t need anima shards either, and our cabal bank is clogging up.

As I said before on this red herring issue, which wasn’t the substance of my OP at all, is that which game is easier with respect to weapons, is not a matter of fact, but rather opinion.