You can also buy credits and buy an even greater experience boost if you want.

Same here, billed twice after a 404 error on the payment confirmation screen, but I did get credited. E-mailing support now.

Please send all questions, bugs or concerns to jeremy@ironrealms.com -- he's handling working out the kinks in the system.

Since this is such a new feature, I don't believe there will be any flexibility in how to pay, etc. in the near future. BTW, I think you don't have to become a PayPal member to pay through them these days.

When I signed up the PayPal site prompted me to create an account or sign in - probably because it's a recurring payment (so they want your bank or card info on file) as opposed to a one-shot expenditure.

Cheers to Jeremy, everything's taken care of now.

A suggestion: make the accruing credits unbound. Or some fraction of them. I understand the desire to keep the bulk of the credits bound to the buyer, but it's not at all uncommon for people to buy credits with the intent to sell for gold. Particularly for manses, aetherships, clans.

This is quite true, and would likely drive market prices down.

You could sell your dingbats if those aren't sticky. I think one problem with unbound credits is that players can pool together resources for membership and later distribute/share/resell credits, reducing the number of subscribers and profit. There would be almost no reason to make a normal credit purchase unless you needed a large number immediately or wanted to make your character permanent.

Rael brings up a good point. Those with alt armies benefit a lot more from this, and making them unbound opens it to abuses.

Those with alt armies benefit only marginally (each character gets lessons and the XP boost). For $25, you get 100-150 bound credits (and 20 dingbats) for a single registered email address/account, whether you have one character or twenty. Basically, 150 credits and 20 dingbats per month per $25 recurring payment, full stop. (I assume you're thinking that each character gets their own bound credits, which is not the case.)

What Rael's talking about is... well, I don't know exactly what Rael's talking about, but the gist of it is that if the credits were unbound, people would pool their resources and do bad things with them (I don't see this happening, nor would I foresee any major negative effects, personally).

My personal opinion? I don't care whether the credits are bound or not. Gold is used to buy: sundry items, aethermanse stuff, and esteem. I've gotten all of that pretty easily without converting credits to gold thus far. Lessons and artifacts will be far more important than cash gold for... uh, probably the entire time I'll be playing.

Rael is talking about pooling the credits given to EACH character on a SINGLE character, if they're made unbound. If you have ten characters, you get 100 credits each, no?

No.

Basically, it's like this.

$25 recurring payment linked to one email address ("account") gets you...

Per account: 100-150 credits/month, 20 dingbats/month, permanent 10% credit purchase discount

Per character registered to that account: 5-25% XP bonus, 150 lessons/month

One simple thing I could do is subscribe for 6 months, hold the credits in hand and resell them for $150. The buyer would benefit because they could enjoy a rate better than a regular sale (or even 30% bonus if you throw in all the dingbats) You would benefit because you enjoy an experience bonus for half a year, lessons for very little cost and the perks of a full elite membership. Moreover you've spent about $150 and get ~$150 back. IRE loses because they likely could have attracted two subscribers but now they just have one.

There are many other avenues of abuse if you get creative and pool resources but this is one simple example.

Each character doesn't get credits, the account does. It's up to you to split them up how you see fit.

Ah. My mistake. (Was too lazy/busy to go and re-read the original post.)

So, you can shift them around on your own characters, but you cannot sell them to others. That seems more than fair to me, as they still want people to buy credits straight up, whether they have a subscription or not. The two systems complement each other well.

That is certainly a possibility, though I don't think it would blow up into a huge problem. If I were an administrator and saw someone (Elite membership or no) giving away credits seemingly for free, I'd keep a mighty close eye on them.

Keeping the credits bound nips all this sort of thing in the bud, which is probably for the best.

I hate you Lusternia. Why now? Why release something that will hit it's maximum XP bonus just when my exams finish in October, why? On the other hand maybe I will finally be able to go for Demi this winter.

Sorry if this was mentioned already (I did read/skim most of the posts), but if we signed up for the membership should we have already gotten our credits for the month?

I was considering a membership but decided against it.

I'm going to be pretty busy for the next 3-6 months so I am not really interested in the credits/lessons/db or the experience bonus until I have more free time to play. In the meantime if I want to view things like bardics and the forums I can enjoy these for free. Perhaps memberships will no longer be offered after the end of the month but that's ok. The money I didn't spend can be savings toward other things like an iPad or a Kindle.

Had I had never purchased credits before the situation might be different but I already have a modest number of credits/lessons and many skills that I don't use well. The savings are tempting but aren't significant enough for me to subscribe.