This may have already been addressed some where around, but I could not find it posted. If I may, something has really been eating my french fries this lovely Monday...
I upgraded to gold last Friday. I wanted to try freeform for a while, but don't know if I'll keep it up forever. I've been a good, supporting member of the community, mainly by supporting the devs through C-store purchases. Quite a bit of money, actually, like about $50 worth in the two months I've been playing. It seemed worth it to me to go gold, I would get access to many new things, but of course you guys knew all that already. What I was not aware of was the fact that the two silver characters (both being PAID AT's, a devastator and an inventor) that I had been pouring all of my free time into for the last two months would no longer be accessible without an additional fee. To add insult to injury, if I were to convert them to gold from silver or vice versa, I would not be able to convert them back, and even if were able to, it would likely be for another 'nominal fee'.
MY REAL CONCERN is the stock of in-game resources, crafting items, and my two recently purchased (with MONEY) Become Devices that Professor Glesven (my inventor) and Dean Oglesby (the devastator) were holding on to at the time I upgraded to gold. The items are in their pockets. Their pockets are supposed to be my pockets! Why did I lose access to these toons for PAYING MORE MONEY? What if I don't stay gold forever? What is my incentive to bring these characters over to gold if I can't turn them back to silver?
MY PROPOSAL- Get rid of the "Convert" option entirely. Rather than considering a single toon "GOLD" or "SILVER", consider an entire account as "GOLD" or "SILVER". I have lost access to Silver characters with PAID AT's and Become Devices that I PAID for. Especially because I also PAID a 3 month subscription, I do not believe I should be required to PAY AGAIN to access my Silver toons, even more so because they possess premium AT's I already PAID to use before I had a subscription.

Anybody else agree?

That is a serious and known problem. The website informs us about the convertation of Silver <-> Gold and AT <-> Freeform, and still many people don't know how it works.

If you don't change to/from Freeform. you can swap from Gold to Silver to Gold within the same Archetype as often as you need to. There's no charge. Convert your Silver characters to Gold, and they and all their stuff will be accessible to you. Drop the Gold and return to Silver, you convert the characters back to Silver, and you still get to keep their stuff. (If you used the free bag slots Gold affords you, the extra bags and their contents will be mailed to your character.)

There was an issue for a time with Gold to Silver conversions, but that's been cleared up - I converted one of my Gold characters to check.

I was under the impression the Gold to Silver or Silver to Gold conversion was only available to occur once.

EDIT: Forgive me, I must have been thinking about changing to Freeform.

Okay, so what everyone is saying is if I own it (that meaning it is either a free or previously purchased AT, not Freeform) it can be swapped from GOLD to SILVER to GOLD to SILVER, etc. as many times as I need without a charge?

I'd guess so. If what they said, you can convert them back and forth as long as you keep the archetype. Although I misunderstood that even converting a toon to gold locks it. Heh, I'm used to being wrong, so ^_^';

put caps there to make sure that part is understood