EVE General Discussion

There is a tremendous difference. The first one being that EVE is a persistent universe instead of unrelated sessions is the first important factor. The second, also very important factor is that withing this game, there is a player driven economy.

Let's really look at the consequences of making EVE truly F2P:

First of all, mineral supply would become virtually unlimited. Need to produce something? Simply make another alt, training him into mining barges "costs" you only 8 days. Even without ISBoxing, you can run 30+ clients manually without problem, when you use retrievers and not covetors. And since you don't need to be "efficient", running rets over covetors will be the better choice since it scales better when using more characters. This would also mean that there is no longer the need to purchase hings from the market, as you can manufacture everything in abundance yourself. You don't even need reasearched BPCs, if your ME isn't that high you simply click once more with all your rets.

There is no way to predict how exatcly the market would react to it, but prices would either drop sigificantly due to a massive over-supply, or they would skyrocket because ISK isn't longer the real driving factor behind the economy.

it would also mean that loss isn't longer relevant. Lost your ship? No problem, you have 10 more. This would also mean that you do not longer need to think about risk vs. reward. You can always take the highest risk, because the loss does not longer concern you.

Small gang PvP would effectively be dead, when you have to assume that someone will drop supers on your 3 cruisers just becaue they can and just because they have 30 clients each running in the background mining them already their next super.

EVE would be very different, and it wuldn#t be any fun anymore. Everyone would just pile into supers and titans as fast as they can, with some ppl still needed for heavy interdictors and maybe some subcaps to clear other subcaps, but you can do that with the drones of your carriers.

The other big difference you seem to not be able to acknowledge (or don't want to) is that multi-boxing in LoL is much harder, if not nigh-impossible, and even if done only affects one game, while in EVE, you can have as many characters as you wish and still profit from it. Want to be flooded with PI? Create 100 accounts, it not really a problem to maintain PI on them with enough cycles.

Need cyno alts? Just train one cyno alt for each solar system in EVE and park him there. Same with hictor alts. If you want to, you can have a hictor alt in every system. Or, if you want to invest in enough time, you can have one super per system logged off. There is no limit as to what you can do. Well, you'd need to organize the accounts properly, but if they all are free, they wouldn't hurt you.

If you don't see that all this would severly screw up this game and basically threw all balance out of the window, you are delusional.

So, in order to limit what people would actually do, you would need to have another wall. And that would be a paywall. Want to train cyno? Pay $5. Want to fly a super? Pay $120. You'd still pay for the game, either by being cannon fodder and not being able to do what others can do in the game, or by buying into all of these areas of the game. But the game wouldn#t be fair anymore, people who invest more would simply be more powerfull. Because otherwise there is not even the slightest chance that there is even some small glimpse of balancing.

So you would only move the paywall from a subscription elsewhere, and all F2P models have shown that F2P games are actually *much* more expensive for people who want to enjoy a game in full.

Best five word summary of a full thread in ages

This would only be the case if people were not losing ships, buying them etc, Its something you seem to keep leaving out.
You mention more supply, but not more usage, Do you think people will fly around in pods all day?

Don't be single sided, this is generally why we developers dont have conversations on forums like this, because in general people are massively ignorant.



Next,


lets assume what you say is true, for the sake of argument, Another major problem with this position is you do
not consider the idea that ccp can fine tune the mining values, to equate for the population differencial.

Do you think that things stay static in this game? that is a delusional position, we adjust when there is a need.
There is a full time hired economist handling this games economy (maybe more then one actually).

Dont think CCP is not capable of dealing with such things, and for you to advocate against free to play on this bases
WHEN THE GAME IS BUILT WITH A REAL MARKET concepts, Is utterly.... insane... Foolish... Ignorant? i cant really pin it, but its like your arguing a moot point for the sake of your personal / whemsical desire of not being in a game with an item shop because of previous repeated ownage pay to win.


If you and everyone else left this game, eve would still be successful, because of the amount of people that would come back or to this game.


This genre has a HUGE DEMAND... there is no other games out there of note, and eve is the BAR for space sandbox.

I am absolutely sure the population will jump back up to 90-110k like it use to be with such a move.

what you advocate by including modules and/or ships into your "I buy it mode" is a bypassing of the process of harvesting resources, refining resources, moving resources, processing resources into things, moving things to places, and selling things.

This quite literally, in no uncertain terms, breaks the economy. You are not as smart as you think you are. Your idea is bad, you need to accept it as such, and you need to apologize to the rest of the world for being as bad as you are.

Get better soon.

Lord Of The Rings Online is free to play.

I like Lord Of The Rings

Go is free to play.

I like Go.

So, currently EVE is pay to win based on the amount of accounts you can afford?

Adding tot he chorus.

Hell no.

I am perfectly ok with services, ship skins, station skins, clothing, pos skins, CQ decorations, etc being paid for in microtransactions. I have zero issues with that. if someone wants to play space babribe then cool, ccp gets more money, eve last longer, i'm good.

Going total FTP will not only kill eve, but is a stupid idea. So no

I looks like a lot of established players feel the same way. Don't want a bunch of new people competing for their rice bowl.

Show me an FTP game that has a life expectancy beyond a year or two. Going FTP would basically mean the game is finished and just trying to harvest whale money before it implodes. Part of the reason EvE has permanence is because time and characters are somewhat limited resources. Almost every MMO I can think of that has switched to FTP collapsed within a year or so.

Here's the scoop. Want to grow EvE? Okay, that's a good goal. How you do it? It's important to make getting into the game slightly easier, for sure, but the better way to do it?
Make. Veterans. Happy.

Stop pissing them off, fix and refine the things that keep them logging in. I'm not going to put out a full grocery list of things here, but things like ship balance, the toxic speed meta, balance of risk/reward between security sectors, and easier tools to find ways to get involved. The game is what you put into it at the end of the day. No amount of tutorials, gimmicks, walkthroughs, or opportunities will even come close to what a happy veteran can do as far as new player training and recruitment. Your best tools for getting new players are the current players - make them happy, make them want to get more friends into the game. Look at all the reddit based organizations - that is a lot of players.

You'd break EvE if you made it have mass appeal out of the box. You need to cultivate patience and an appreciation for what EvE is in new players, and the very best way to do that, is have veterans happy with the game, make them want to share New Eden with other people.

I started this game with a few other friends from other MMOs. They all quit after essentially leveling their ravens; the game was dry and seemed very distant from what was described by all the lore on the internet. The only reason I stuck with it is becasue I found people to play with in game - you NEED veterans to get new players to want to stick with the game until they actually like it, and get to the potentially interesting bits.

You gain subs when you make your veterans happy.