Paying credits for minion missions, more locked caches, and more account bound items.

A few things I've noticed over the last week-

Locked Hammernknell Nightmare Caches: The kind you get from the Hammerknell instants. They're locked now. You need some kind of key to open them. I'm not even sure where to get them. So they're taking some of the best IAs, and making their rewards even less accessible? IAs are one of the things that makes Rift Rift.

Minion missions that cost credits: I send six minions out at a time on 8 hour missions. I can usually rotate two shifts of 8 hour missions a day. Now, at least one mission per shift pops up that costs like 150 credits. So you can pay the credits (the loot for them is better), pay the adventurine to shuffle, just not go on the mission, or pay adventurine and go out on 10 hours.

I guess Trion doesn't want players who have already paid for extra minion slots to actually use them? At least without not having to pay even more credits to use something they already paid credits for? If you pay for the missions, you could end up paying an extra 300 credits a day easy just for minion missions. Maybe the AH is full of all the stuff people are farming off the minions and Trion doesn't like it? Double taxation much, Trion?

Even More Account Bound items: A good while back one of my fellow wardrobe aficionado friends was complaining they didn't have Weeding Garb, so I ran down to the wedding shop in Tempest Bay, bought one and mailed it out. So now we have the flipped wedding garb, which is great. I run down and buy two. I go to mail one out to my friend, and low and behold, it's account bound.

Come on Trion. With all the crap they've pulled down on themselves, you think you'd want to burrow out of it. But that can't happen when you reach into every aspect of the game and make it progressively worse.

I guess on one hand, this is the "ripping of the bandaid" technique. Let's pile all the hurt on at once so we can get it over with now. Let's just kill the F2P model dead, deal with one massive killing off of accounts instead of trying to survive a death of a thousand cuts.

I will say though, on the player end, that this is feeling more and more like a death of a dozen cuts.

I really hope that all this nickle and diming is to prepare for something truly better, something truly worth sacrificing for and not just the death throes of a game that resents the lofty goals of it's youth. If you're really done being F2P, just own it and come out about it. You would feel better, your playes would feel better.