I am a silver player and I agree with FF for silvers for a cost, but T-Hawk as a very valid point, allowing silvers to have a FF char, makes gold players less likely to continue being gold. so they should add something else to gold players that makes them still want to be gold.

Their investment in their previous characters will be a significant motivator to stay subscribed rather than go silver and buy free form slots.

Going to silver means:

For every character that goes silver, they need to buy a freeform slot, buy a premium archetype, or use a free archetype.
They lose all the gold costume pieces for every character that goes silver, freeform or not.
They lose the two extra costume slots per character.
They lose access to any character they aren't willing to convert to silver.
They lose the extra bag and bank slots from being gold for every character.
They lose the free character slot upon attaining level 40.
They lose the 400 c-point per month stipend.

Is that enough to retain the current subscriber base? No, and I don't think there's any reasonable incentive they can create to keep their subs 1:1 from before to after the change. But, anyone going silver, is likely to be paying through q sales or direct c-point purchase for convenience items, costume items, and of course for the freeform slot itself.

Now that the update "on alert" is live since the 13th april 2012, today is the 04 may 2012, can we have the new until field report please since the old one is 02/02/2012 old? Thanks.

you're making a false assumption here, and that is that every gold member has multiple gold alts, there are a few who only use one freeform character most of the time and it is they who will consider it worth dropping their sub to silver should freeform slots be introduced.

How about a new report? :)

How bout no.. Scott

Actually I'm not since I didn't say that every gold member has multiple gold alts. I said they lose access to any character they aren't willing to convert to silver. That's true if they have 1 alt or 10 alts. Plus, in the last paragraph I acknowledge that there's no set of reasonable incentives that will keep every single current subscriber, but that's true even if they don't add freeform slots for sale.

I know you, Ro, are working on it but can you please tell us if we can expect it this week?
Thanks. :)

WOW I just noticed this time capsule dating all the way back to 2/2/12.......

Wow. I remember this Field Report as if it were yesterday! Or oven a month ago!

Or.... even three months ago.