My EVE

Nice work, chaps.

Was gutted this project didn't work out initially.

Maybe my memory is failing, but wasn't it $5 or $15 or something else that's cheaper than the average night at the movies? Content was more than worth it at either price point.

@Altaen
I think the price was misguided in some ways. It certainly could be argued as you do (and in some ways I agree) that even $20 a month is actually pretty fair. That's $5 a week for regular videos, roams with the EIE guys, and a private channel to communicate and ask questions of them at any time. Think about how much you would pay for golf or tennis lessons etc with the same level of access to your coach. It's actually a very fair price imo.

The issue though is that the game has a subscription fee. When a service like this has a price above the actual cost to play the game in the first place... well it just doesn't look good. And of course, image is everything in business.

And then on top of that you have to battle the dumb perception that: "Oh, it's just a video game, all educational content should be 100% free because video games can not be serious or worth putting extra money into in any way!"

Nevermind that many many people spend way more than $20 a month on plex's for fast isk or to avoid bearing. But paying for training and education is apparently a big no-no in EVE.

To summarise this rant, I believe the price was perfectly fair, but the impression the price gave was always going to raise a serious point of contention with a lot of EVE's playerbase and cause an image problem for EIE.

And then on top of that, Abaddon's sleazy marketing slogans he posted on the front-page of the website just made everything worse lol.

Yea you're right, I know I at least sound completely bored out of my mind in some parts, so sorry about that.

With regards to pricing the goal was trying to find where the best balance was between price and the number of people who would likely opt in to make it as worthwhile as possible. The smaller player pool in Eve compared to the similar service in WoW meant it would probably need to be a higher price point to be as worthwhile. We disagreed on where that price point was (i.e. considering the smaller pool of potential interest do you get 4x as much interest at $5, 2x as much at $10). Where ever we felt this balance existed some would always think it wasn't worth it and some would, with higher prices driving more people towards "not worth it". In the end though everyone involved agreed to go with the decision, however reluctantly, and so I don't think the outcome of that decision should rest on only one person.

In either case that's all past and the discussion doesn't matter anymore since they're all free now. What's more important is that people get something out of this and maybe it encourages a few people to try and play the game in a new way.

Is it really who? I don't recognise the alt, but I'm guessing Willl?

I wasn't trying to sound critical. I agree, on it's own, $20 a month isn't bad for the quality of the content that was provided, in fact it's cheap when you consider the time and effort the contributors put into it. However, the point I was trying to make (which you made better than I did) was that it looked bad when compared to the cost of actually playing the game. If EvE cost $25 a month, then the $20 would not have seemed quite so "steep."