Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hi,
An Idea came to me the other day about expanding and enriching the universe of eve.

Once walking in stations is fully implemented, with the ability to leave the captains quarters and and interact with other players and their physical avatars combined with the associated activites within establishments and corporate offices etc, it may become feasible for CCP to offer EVE online as a free to play mmo.

Within the eve universe, you have capsuleers and everyone else.
Let people download the client for free. Like you already do.
They then roll a character that is a common denizen of the universe. (everyone else)
They have no capsuleer rights and are only able to possibly create or work in establishments and or in station oriented roles/careers. (bartender, musician, server, dealer, stripper, etc...) Selling to capsuleers for a limited quantity of ISK.
Maybe they are able to skill up for a civilian shuttle that has a low warp speed or that can only stay within a specified system or group of systems for minimal trade. But if they are destroyed in space, they are dead and have to roll a new character.


Then if they wanna make the big bucks, fly the big ships, shoot people in the face, start colonies, mine asteroids, Live Forever, and dare to be bold, they have to buy a monthly subscription, a pilots license.
If you let your license lapse, all capsuleer rights are put on hold until you re-up just like normal.

Yeah, I figured.
Hoping being put in features and ideas would mitigate that somewhat.

right, they can't use the capsuleer market, but they could sell you beer for cheep

Its unlikely the tranquility cluster could deal with the influx of new players and trading alts this would generate.

The purpose of a free to play model in massively multiplayer games is to ensure that the server population(s) remain above critical mass so the game doesn't failcascade due to lack of people to interact with.

Unlike every other MMO, which can just buy new servers when one of its servers reaches capacity, eve does have a finite player limit, not just in specific systems, but overall as well. Its probably about 2-3 times the current concurrent user record, as an educated guess.

F2P games have often seen their populations quadruple or more when transitioning to F2P.

The truth is, F2P in other games (independent of your idea, which I'll get to in a moment) is a saving throw taken when your subscriber number is so low that new players don't want to play because there is noone to play with. It produces more money then having a dead product, but less then if everyone subscribed. If you go free to play, and quadrouple your playerbase, you are relaying on 25% of your playerbase spending as much per month on the cash shop as they would have on subscriptions. Or on an 8th spending twice as much as a sub.

Realistically, its not as good as a sub. You do it when you are desperate.

Eve isn't desperate. Sure, we don't have 11 million subscribers. But then, we wouldn't want 11 million subscribers, since the servers couldn't handle it. The population we have is about in line with the population the server can handle. Sure we could take a bit more, maybe twice as much, but we couldn't handle the amount we would get from F2P. For starters, most eve subscribers would roll one of these trade accounts. Who wouldn't?

Add on the new players it brings in, and it will cause problems. Its a nice idea, but as a form of advertising it would have a huge implementation cost, and cause severe infrastructure problems.

I strongly suggest no.

Eve is F2P .. just not commercialized F2P which is the most common.

By introducing PLEX CCP essentially allowed you to spend in-game time instead of real-world currency in order to play the game. Compare the Eve ISK grind to the grind that usually associated with 'official' F2P games and you'll soon realise that the softer Eve approach is preferable (at least to me).

Once you start down the official F2P path you will inevitably run into major haves vs have-nots conflicts which is not in the interest of a one server game like Eve .. creating an A and B team based on real world assets without ingame checks/balances will kill Eve faster than Hilmar getting a sex change operation and living out his Barbie dream.

Sweet responses guys,

The idea came to me when I was thinking about how empty the stations are going to feel once we open the doors.

Yes upon reflection, it does seem like the influx of players would severely hamper the hardware for eve.



This is hella funny!

So, the first thing they find out is the well natured and likable Eve playerbase? That's supposed to encourage them buy a subscription?

It may work.

In theory let's say CCP does implement the idea:
Most probably we will have side arms (at least based on the promo), now that F2P players have only one shot at living we will have all the griefers camp the stations in jump clones waiting for a F2P player to show up just to be shot down for their own personal entertainment.

I am sure this will entice a lot of new players...

how does having players in station typing /dance and nothing else for months on end help eve?


14 day trial.....like it stay. not for you, go find a game that works for you.

Its not like this will get added subs. I'll let you have tihs, a dork types /dance for 3 months then says okay I'll go fly this rifter and subs up. then he will go wtf, I "played" this game for 3 months and now I am starting at gunnery 3 and frigate 2. Another sub bites the dust. Hell you get the emo rage quits from having to train this stuff day 1 of trial. Dont say backlogged sp......it be free char farming. make f2p account, wait for the new fotm ship and train it in less than 10 minutes.

I can imagine something similar would be good, such as f.e when your normal eve account's time run out, you can log in to chat with other people (non general chat channels only, to reduce spam), stay in stations and buy PLEXes.

Maybe even move around in shuttles, but definitely not able to train skills or use any bigger ships. Even shuttles could provide a viable spying opportunity which we don't want (maybe allow people to be couriered from one station to another?).

And btw, it shouldn't bring much stress to the server, as most of what they would do would be limited to a single station, which can easily be instanced. Tranquility may be one server from our perspective, but I really doubt that it isn't clustered to many more physical servers. And when you have such weakly coupled parallelization architectures, it doesn't really cause server issues.

Besides, if you add micro-transactions like CCP did, then allow people to freely play the game that involves those micro transactions, which is what exactly station bound 'gameplay' is.