EVE General Discussion

...which would be an interesting observation if you could point to any evidence that the financing model was the problem.

MMOs are extremely hard to get right. The market is littered with the corpses of failed attempts. But EVE has survived 10 years.

You already have that answer in the Ishikone Watch Scorpion. Anything that spawns a combat-useable item in a manner that circumvents the crafting, mineral gathering, and transportation systems that govern every single other combat-useable item breaks the rules and ecosystem of the game. A skin is fine, since the ability to spawn a skin in deep nullsec doesn't get the ship there. Spawning the ship past blockades and station camps, right to exactly where you need it, at the time you need it, destroys the purpose of doing any of those things, and shreds whole layers of tactics from the game.

Anyone else smell an EA created alt. EVE online has been going strong and growing their player base steadily and slowly over the past decade.

F2P / Mirco-transaction models are never long term vision or investments. They are designed with greed and fast satisfaction in mind.

The only Grimm Reality will be only IF CCP decides to follow F2P/Micro-transaction model. I am convinced that OP and the alts supporting these types of ideas want nothing more than to see this game fail.

Greed and arrogance always precede the fall.

I could in fact, make that comparison, if you like, with miners as SCVs and goonswarm as the zerg.




The guys that sell plex to me might disagree with that analysis. While you might call it a month of game time, you do pay real money for it, and sell it for isk instead of using it. Thus money becomes isk.




I'll admit that there was more that went wrong than just the subscription model with FF15. However, I think that was a factor.

This could end up being the greatest scam in gaming history. Are you sure you don't want to wait until after the game actually comes out is successful before pointing to it as an example????

Because so far all of you have avoided the meat of the discussion to attack semantics or accuse me of somehow being in league with EA.

The fact is that, depending on how you view it, it's either already here or coming. My point, and I have to belabor this a lot for some reason, is that if it is coming, we should find some middle ground, and discuss the best ways to carry it out, so as to avoid the whole blowing up statues forum rage chest beating that will happen if they spring it on us.

So far, all but a very few posters have ignored that in favor of attacking the terminology used or tried to drive off on tangents. And a few half hearted attempts at trolling.





Sorry I missed this post in all the BS.

Hmm... One, an argument can be made that this happens anyplace there is an LP store if the player in question has sufficient LP saved up, but...

What if having a standard model were a requirement to spawn one? This avoids creating something from nothing, but also allows for customization. The only real issue I see with it would be coding the market to cover hull variations.

Why do you presume that it's an unavoidable reality we are all blind to?

*holds up one unit of plex*

Technically it's already here. You can do stuff with plex way more than 'just' buy time, just as with a 'freemium' game you can do more than 'just' buy time with their in game currency. CCP offers services that cost plex above and beyond what's available to 'mere' subscribers even, considering that plex costs more than a month sub (or it did the last time I checked).


Further, it's the nature of business to seek untapped sources of revenue. The only reason that CCP 'listens' is that they feel that there's a bigger risk of loss. You can coat it any way to like, but at the end of the day CCP is about dollars and cents. Dealing with it now allows the players to negotiate from a position of strength, whereas later that might not be the case.


Further, you can buy Aurum directly from CCP too, without buying plex. It's something like 600 for $5us.

We already dealt with it, it was called the summer of rage. The NEX store is hardly microtransactions, the PLEX to AURUM exchange rate made sure of that.

CCP got burnt in 2011, it's unlikely they'll try and push the MT/Gold stuff/$1000 pants any further than they already have without major discussions with both the CSM and us, the players. I'm sure that there are many players that unsubbed multiple alt accounts over it, and that many of those accounts are still unsubbed. They lost a lot of good faith with the debacle that followed Incarna, and they're only just getting it back.

As CCP Pokethulhu, EVE's marketing guy, has said: you can't disentangle the payment model of an MMO from the design of the MMO. If an MMO is to be "freemium," the design of the MMO at all levels of play has to reflect that decision.

EVE is designed around subscriptions. EVE's main licit RMT option, PLEX, is designed to fit seamlessly into that subscription model, right down to the name and its main functions: either one month's subscription, or one month's training for a secondary (or tertiary) character on the same account. It's not purely an RMT option, of course, because you can buy PLEX with ISK, too.

The second option, AURUM, is kind of in limbo now--CCP Pokethulhu is also on record as saying the NeX store is in for a revamp. In the mean time, it's getting used in DUST514. But you can buy AUR with PLEX, which means you can buy AUR with ISK. In other words, with only a few exceptions (e.g., the bennies for preordering a 10th anniversary box set) there is no real-money microtransaction in EVE that cannot also be made with ISK. This is a critical point, and a crucial difference between EVE's model and the "freemium" model: every PLEX purchased with real money and sold for ISK necessarily gives another person a PLEX without their having spent a penny. You are not just throwing money at CCP; you're subsidizing another player's game.

CCP has thought this carefully through, and it's worked. WildStar has a nearly identical scheme in place to complement its subscription model, and SOE is introducing a similar one. I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes more common, because it makes people who like throwing money at games happy and it makes people who like playing for free happy.