Player Features and Ideas Discussion

You missed the point, the OP said flexibility of adding a 2nd character that has some skills WITHOUT cutting your main chars training time. He did NOT say to have 2 chars training all the time and paying for both monthly.

FOR EXAMPLE, if you were living in a wormhole and you wanted a Starbase Defense char it would take a few months, but you will proly never log onto it unless you're defending your POS. Or in case you're living in a wormhole and want a scanning/probing char in case you get locked out. Why would I want more accounts for something that requires 3-5 million skill points, yes I could just go to the forums and buy 1 but that's an alternative to his proposed addition to the game.

You need to stop playing "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader" and just play the game... Eve online. And FFS stop telling us what CCP's profit motives are 10 years ago or today for that matter. You respond more as a corporate apologist than a game subscriber. Spaie? Perhaps.

-teh end-

No it doesn't. Again, say you have 20 jump bridge POS's to maintain and you need that many 5 mill sp toons to anchor/defend/refuel/haul etc., you want to stop your training and start a new char, buy 1 OR start a new account.

You want the char sub'd so you can use it when you want, but you don't want to lose training on your main... so why not pay monthly to train 2 chars on your account... why not?

People who sub an extra account are planning on having a full fledged char they can train indefinitely. Does not meet the OP's needs.

Simply put, we don't need second training slots.

If this was implemented, CCP could not show the world true subscription numbers. 1 account, is 1 account. This is bad for business.

This is the proverbial foot in the door. When up and running, there then would be a steady stream or players, asking for a reduction in price. Due they would say, to the fact they had reduced accessibility. "But CCP, we can only log in one at a time, why should we pay the same?"

There is no logical reason for this idea, as a second account will do the job.

I would like it if I could just logon and manage all my characters with a single login. Same money to CCP but easier for me toto manage.

CCP already can't show the world "true subscription numbers", nor do they want to. Showing true subscription numbers is what would be bad for business. Do you honestly believe there are 300,000 separate human beings with active accounts? The number is probably more along the lines of 150,000-200,000 after you average out all the alts. That's much less impressive though and even CCP isn't sure which accounts are mains or alts, so they just go with 300,000.

People see "300,000 subscriptions" and think that there are 300,000 separate people subscribed to the game. That's the whole point behind advertising subscription numbers. If I have 100 people subscribed to my game and each of them has 10 alt accounts, which will I advertise? The 100 separate people or the 1000 accounts?


Your slippery-slope argument is exactly that. People are stupid, but not that stupid. Most people who are intelligent enough to play EVE will be intelligent enough to understand that the pricing is fair and "extra services" cost extra.

EDIT: All the OP wants to do is give more money to CCP, in fact almost a full subscription's worth, for the convenience of training a second character even though they can't play it at the same time as their main. While you may be vehemently against anything that looks on the surface like CCP would get less money, it's not at all guaranteed that they would. Many people use their alts for purposes that in fact require them to be on a second account. Still other people don't have any alts at all, but may be quite likely to train one up if they could use an option like this to do so. In the end, CCP stands to make a net gain in profit.

Honestly, your replies reek of Bittervet Syndrome, so my expectations in communicating with you are limited. Still, I will try.

Yes, they do release numbers. That's part of advertising in the MMO world. "We have 450,000 active subscribers playing our game, so come join them because the community is huge." Another part of advertising is conveniently omitting the fact that people may or may not have one, two, five, ten accounts which reduces your 450,000 to a much smaller number and hoping that the target audience interprets it as "separate people". Most MMOs tend to have all of your characters on one account and so the numbers are reasonably accurate. It makes the employees' lives a lot easier come administration time, for each user to have all their characters in one place instead of having to hunt down all the various accounts someone might have.

In EVE, "characters" only translate into "accounts" because you cannot effectively maintain more than one character per account. That's not to say you can't have alts on your main account. Certainly you can stop training your main in order to train up an alt, but.. why would you stop training your main unless every single training goal you have has been reached? You'd have to be insane to do something like that.

In every other MMO, since you were so keen to bring up MMOs other than EVE before in the other related thread, skills are trained actively rather than passively, meaning it's feasible to keep multiple characters on one account. There aren't any artificial limitations on skill training, it's based entirely on which characters you play and how often you play them. I'm not saying we should move to a system like that, just that it's possible to have multiple useful characters on a single account without the sky falling down.

We've established a baseline level of service in EVE. One skill queue active per account. Premium services already exist in EVE. Character transfers, Resculpting. We even have the infamous Aurum. Has anyone started a thread saying that transfers should cost less or that Resculpting should be free? I say again that most people who are intelligent enough to play EVE will understand the concept of something being a "premium service" and will see it as such. Why are you so steadfastly convinced that allowing a person to pay less than a full account subscription for a character they can't use as freely as they could a character on a separate account will result in people saying that full subscriptions should be cheaper? You're obviously getting less, so of course it should cost less. Why is this concept so hard for you to understand?

Why do you hate the idea of CCP getting more money?

So really, what I'm getting from this is that you don't care how grossly inflated the subscriber numbers are, you just want them to be bigger. Bigger numbers to sound more impressive, because the only thing that matters at all is advertising to the people who actually only care about subscriber numbers instead of the game itself.

To use arbitrary numbers, you'd prefer to have 1,000,000 active subscriptions played by only 500,000 people than to have 500,000 accounts played by 500,000 people, right? Better still, each of those 500,000 should instead have two alts each for a subscriber count of 1.5m. That way, we can advertise that our game has 1.5m active subscriptions and is played by a meaningful percentage of the entire human population. Am I right?

If this is true, and you're really as convinced as you sound that subscription numbers count for 100% of a game's success or failure, then there's just nothing to say to that.

As for my "agenda", or "game" as you've put it, I'm afraid you've caught me. I am indeed guilty of happily paying $15/month to play EVE and think that being able to train an alt for an additional $10 per month is completely reasonable. In regards to OP's idea of paying double price, I was pretty sure we'd all decided that was ridiculous and are ignoring it.

You steadfastly refuse to see anything in this but the Death of EVE (tm) and I cannot for the life of me understand how you can arrive at that conclusion in such a way as to make all other possible results... well.. impossible. Yes, some people may transfer alts that can function independently of their mains onto their main account and pay $5 less per month to keep those alts training. Many people will not be able to do that, as alts are extremely commonly used in conjunction with mains, and thus are required to remain on a separate account. Still other people, not having any alts at all for whatever reasons they may have, may find this an enticing reason to start an alt or two. Then there are people who could transfer their alts but wouldn't, just in case they ever wanted to use both their alt and their main at the same time. This would end in either no change to CCP's profits or an increase in them, along with increased user satisfaction which, as we all know, leads to users sticking around longer and continuing to give CCP money.

However, you seem to feel that this would be bad for business because although the playerbase would not shrink (and it may even grow, if word got out that training two characters on one account had become possible), the subscription numbers would drop, even if potentially only by a little.

That's just it. You're 100% convinced that such a thing will absolutely result in decreased revenue when you have no possible way of proving it. EVE's subscriber base of actual human beings is too large to accurately predict what each of them will do.

You and your friends count for a portion of the playerbase, and certainly there are others who will do the same, but there are many others who will in fact not do the same, for whatever variety of reasons may exist.

As for OP's idea of paying $15/month for a second slot on the same account, you may as well have a second account if you're going to pay full price (and the maximum price at that, as a year's subscription is roughly $10/month).

However, the responses in this thread seem to indicate that nobody likes the $15/month idea and would be fine with $10/month since you are in fact losing some functionality compared to a full second account. I don't think anyone's paying attention to OP's original price point anymore.

You must be kidding me? Too greedy?

You mean industry standard pricing and in fact cheaper than industry standard, when you take a years sub?

Eve pricing as of now.
Europe:
1-month-plan € 14.95 € 14.95
3-month-plan € 12.95 € 38.85
6-month-plan € 11.95 € 71.70
12-month-plan € 10.95 € 131.40

UK:
1-month-plan £ 9.99 £ 9.99
3-month-plan £ 9.33 £ 27.99
6-month-plan £ 8.33 £ 49.99
12-month-plan £ 7.50 £ 89.99

Outside Europe:
1-month-plan $ 14.95 $ 14.95
3-month-plan $ 12.95 $ 38.85
6-month-plan $ 11.95 $ 71.70
12-month-plan $ 10.95 $ 131.40

So 3 x $10.95 is $32.85. That's a whole $2.85 more for full access to all three characters and of course the 6 alts.
Then let's not forget CCP gave us the Plex. So people with more time than cash, can trade ISK for gametime.

But hey, don't let facts get in the way of a good old whine.