Skill Discussions

I'll add Nonsensical Whining to my training queue.

You'll make more sense once I've mastered that.

Yeah, and now imagine that you are a noob, want to sustain your account with plex (cause you've read that you can) and, while trying to figure out how long till it takes to fly a proper ship to do that, you see that it takes 2 1/2 months from now on. Would you stay?

Yes, a lot of guys do, but the majority does not. Personaly, I've tried Eve the first time in 2007, and the skillque and the long waiting times to make proper progress was just a kind of pita I couldn't come over - I quitted till 2009, and stayed with a buddy (who had the SP (yes, SP not ressources!) to carry me through the start). I stayed, and I enjoy EvE from time to time.

Bottom line is, there IS indeed a barrier, wheter it's psychological or theoritcal. Average Joe can live with having no clue or/and without learning a super-complex theory (which isn't needed anyway, and not even there) , but he needs to have progress in the game on a reasonable level. Yes, you can make ISK fast, but all the ISK is pretty worthless if you can't really use it. To spend it on stuff you want to fly - you need skills.

This isn't the only problem with noobs - lack of PvE content (because only a small fraction of players never use PvE) is another big one, but solving the SP-Issue could help a lot. Oh, and a skillpoint multiplier isn't enough either - it should be linked to playing the game, and not to paying the account (for the sake of involving them with the gameplay).

Ofcourse this is a matter of opinion, everyone got one, but the fact that a game is still having a low number of players while beeing arround for 10 long years should be an indicator that it doesn't really evolve. Something that is bad. Yeah, you can argue that you love this game how it is - I like it how it is too, but that doesn't mean it could'nt be better. Bringing more Noobs to the game is good, as it populates the world, provides opportunities and makes it possible to make the game better - and we should think of solutions for this instead of arguing to "keep it how it is".

500k subscriptions is "low"?

Obviously WoW has more, but EVE is certainly in the front rank of subscription MMOs

Sorry to burst your illusions but it's usually listed in the second tier (<1M).
That's not even taking the sub/person ratio into account.

Interesting post here:
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2729254#post2729254

Name 3.

Idiotic notions now contained in this thread:

-Eve has a F2P mode, but it's not available to people without enough SPs.

Eve does not have a F2P mode of any kind. Plex are not, in any way, comparable to F2P game models. At best they could be described as alternate payment - a way of convincing another player to pay your subscription for a month. Reality is that, outside of a handful of special offers, for every month an account is subscribed to Eve, someone is paying ~$15. This bears no resemblance to F2P models, wherein the ability to access the game is completely independent of any payment by any person.

-All MMOs share identical economic models, so if one MMO goes F2P at a given number of subscribers, other ones should, too.

I am sure CCP is dying to take business advice from people who think revenue - in a vacuum, absent any information about other petty financial concerns, such as "expenses" ( ) - is, in any way, a useful measure of financial health.

Games don't go F2P because their subscriber numbers are under some arbitrary value - they go F2P because their subscriber numbers are so low that the revenue generated by subscriptions does not exceed their operating expenses.

SW:TOR had a development cost of something like $150 million. Their financial expectations were geared toward WoW-like numbers. You do understand what effect this has on operating expenses... right? Do you think theirs were at all comparable to Eve's?

-It's not fair to say Eve's numbers are climbing because multiboxers! On the other hand, it's totally fair to say that they're actually falling because (some tedious anecdote about how your friend, Tommy, came over from WoW and spent a week shooting spacerocks before he quit).

All we actually know for a fact is that the sub count and the peak concurrent users have fairly consistently* grown, and even with the caveat regarding multiple account holders, it is a fact that trumps your personal observations many times over, so in this particular regard, fact up or **** off.

*Amusingly, the most noteworthy PCU dip that the game has ever endured was when it began making movements in the general direction of the microtransactional revenue model. It is only, just now, recovering from that particular action. Don't let that stop you from asserting that Eve is dying, and the only thing that can save it is by making it more like other games, though.

QFT

I just hope CCP never bends to the gimme gimme now crowd. By the way SWTOR is bleeding money F2P or not...

...and the minerals I mine myself are free, too, right?

No, actually, it's not a fact, unless your time has, literally, zero value. If a plex costs 500 million isk, and you go incursion running at a rate of 75m an hour to buy a plex, it will take you about 6.67 hours to earn one.

You're not "playing for free" - you're paying for it with a part-time job that pays about $2.25/hour.



Backpedal faster.



I don't think anyone has argued against doing more to change the incorrect perception that there is a skill wall. What is being argued against is that the skill system needs to be made "easier" to accommodate that incorrect perception. The solution is to fix the incorrect perception - the fact that it's incorrect illustrates that it is the problem, not the skill system itself.

Let's start by shouting down the idiots who tell new players that they're worthless without 25m skillpoints.



What I actually said was:

"All we actually know for a fact is that the sub count and the peak concurrent users have fairly consistently* grown, and even with the caveat regarding multiple account holders..."

Do you see that bold, underlined, and italicized portion?

How does that imply that I think it's all new players? What I literally said was:

1. Yes, some of it is multiboxing - we don't know how much.
2. It's still an increase in subs, which all on its own trumps ANYTHING you have you say about people leaving the game.

I literally and unambiguously said it is not ALL new players, and yet you have the gall to ask, "Do you really think it's all brand new players?"

Obviously I don't. I JUST said that I don't in the very text you're responding to, so tell me:

Are you illiterate, or do you just have a strong preference for arguing against strawmen?



Like I said before: Fact-up or **** off. Your personal anecdotes about your friends are utterly weightless, here. While Eve is not as large as some other games, it IS just about the only game in the genre that has actually enjoy any growth at all - the typical arc for an MMO is an initial burst of subscriptions, followed by a slow (or not-so-slow, especially in the case of the games people seem to think Eve should emulate :D) drop off of subscriptions over time, with the occasional renewing burst for expansions.

You are little more than the latest in a long line of, "Eve is obviously dying, but take heart, for I have the solutions! Do as I say and Eve shall be saved!" trolls. Those of us who have been here for more than a minute have been rolling our eyes at this kind of **** for years.

Actually, no, it's not. I cannot play Eve without SOMEONE paying a subfee. It doesn't make it "F2P on a personal level" if someone else pays it.

I can go sign up for a Nexon game right now and play it... or not play it. Without ANY input of ANY kind on my part, that F2P subscription can be maintained indefinitely.

Paying with a different form of currency is not "free" - it is, literally, PAYING with a different form of currency.



It's hilarious that you think they are.