Quote Originally Posted by SXTC View Post
However this ruins the experience for a lot of trial players who because of this do not get a sense of community behavior which may be off putting to them.
This also differs a lot per server they play on. On some servers the novice network is very strict, while on others its used as general chatbox. On servers where its like a chatbox, trial players do get a good sense of the community. While on strict servers, they get more like an opposite experience.
Linkshells are nice, but thats only reachable if there is a more generic chat available, which on strict NN servers means there effectively isnt any.

It could be as easy as adding a public chat, but on that i still think its better to tie it to the NN as that allows a lot of abuse to be prevented/removed (RMT spam on its own can mostly be prevented if it requires an invite like the NN, even if someone abuses it and invites these, SE can trace it back and ban the inviter, or even just automate a system to track it automaticly and if for example over 50% of invites were RMT, an auto ban for inviting can be applied).

Without the NN community, i very likely would never have bothered paying, or even continue playing. While these days we do have a linkshell, it only exists because during patches the NN is unreliable for mentors. And yes, it does contain free trial players in it as well.

More features like FC access dont help, if there is no way to join them due to lack of interaction.
Trading through friends is still abusable as you can use f2p bots and then 'trade'.
PMs to friends however is something i do consider essential. It makes no sense they cant as it already did require a paying player to become friends. Its a similar requirement to linkshells.