EVE General Discussion

Yes, and I am. It's called a subscription.

So we can have all the skill we already trained permanently unlocked and play with the actual state of our chars?

Sounds sooo sooo good...

Well, since skill trading came out, if you sacrifice your skill training you can more or less afford a PLEX a month just by extracting and selling your skills.

What if I were to tell you for ~$.50/day you can unlock all the ships and skills?

How much would you pay as a one time fee to have all the skill and ships you access to right now unlocked?

What is it that you find objectionable about CCP being able to pay its employees?

That would be a lot more "hilarious" or whatever you were going for if EVE didn't actually almost die at one point, and then spend half its lifetime in steady decline.

As for the other clone types, I tend to think it's unnecessary. The fun I'm having in the game doesn't require any of it. As long as the fun to suck ratio in the game doesn't drastically change to make that stuff more appealing, I probably won't be changing my behavior, and therefore probably won't spend any additional money. I guess there are a couple adventures I still want to have, but they still wouldn't require a sub. And that's what the devs claimed the point of alphas were... that there's fun to be had regardless the clone states. If you suck at finding fun as an alpha, you're not going to find the fun as an omega, and any paid mid clone states will just end up being a ripoff.

Yes, but it perfectly answers your question.

If you don't want to train further skills, but play 'for free' indefinitely, you can sell your SP to pay for PLEX.

It works because CCP makes money on the PLEX you consume, that someone bought from them.

If you could play without a subscription, the business model wouldn't work, even if you paid, say, 100$ upfront. Because 20$/month (for PLEX) 'forever' is much better than 100 bucks and then nobody pays anymore.

So what you're asking is:
a) already doable through SP selling + PLEX buying
b) would make CCP broke if done in another way

I don't think that's the reason. The reason probably is to keep alphas below the SP extractor threshold. Now, they can't reasonably fit all racial cruiser, frigate and destroyer skills within 5M SP, so were they to allow alphas to train anything up to 5M, we'd end up with a bunch of Alphas who trained minmatar cruiser, medium beam lasers and repair drones, with no way to respec into something sensible.

So, it's to keep Alphas below where they can be used to farm SP, but prevent them from training useless crap they can't fix later.

Assuming someone found a way to grind a PLEX every month with a free account, it wouldn't be much of a problem, really. Every PLEX bought on the market with ISK has been put there by a player who bought it with Money first. So, even if you finance your account with ISK, every month you play as Omega is a month CCP gets paid. They wouldn't really care who exactly pays them, as long as they get paid at all.

That's why it's also not a problem if you for example have all the skills you want already, and decide to finance your account by selling your excess SP training and buying PLEX for it. So in practice, you can currently easily play an Omega without paying a dollar to CCP, just by selling your SP and maybe adding a minimal amount of grind on top of it. CCP still makes money off that, as long as PLEX are involved.

If they were to let you play a fully trained account without a subscription or PLEX however, no matter how you pay for those skills, as long as it's a one time payment,they would stop making money off of that account at some point, and that would be really bad, because even vikings need to eat sometimes.