EVE General Discussion

Ok,

So, If I got to an event where someone else pays for the caterer, I'm not getting free food?


I will agree that the REASON that CCP is agreeing to let me have 6 active accounts is that some other guyse bought extra tickets they gave to me.


together, those guys paid for 6 times game play. I paid for nothing


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$(or euro etc) revenues coming from a focused sub-segment of customers is a meaningful metric to finance types

If a tech materials company derived 80% of its sales and profits from one customer... say 80% of their sales were to Samsung... they will assess the risk and stability of the earnings differently than if the sales were spread more evenly among many vendors and even more differently if there were multiple lines of products the company sold less related the specific end products Samsung sold (say they produced a rfd device used both in phones but also in oil well monitoring devices).


The distribution graphs (multiple) of 1) the number of accounts per player 2) the number of plex purchased with isk per player 3) the number of plex purchased(or created via gtc conversion) per player are relevant number in terms of who they could not afford to lose from the game.

It would be wise for them to pay particular attention to the play motivations of those using RL money to purchase plex

the risk of losing me as a player that uses 6 plex paid for with isk that is a by product of my game play recreational goals would hurt far more financially than the type of guy who uses $ to buy those subscriptions for me

I would never dream of paying real $ for 6 accounts (although I'd probably pay real money for 1, tops 2) .. they lose him, they lose 6 x 15$ = $90 . They lose me, they lose maybe a latent $15 I'd pay if I had to use $.. far less costly a loss.

The distribution could be quite alarming if they found that the 5 % (edit mistake) of the human players bought 30% of the plex , and/or the top 20% of players in terms of purchasing plex with real money bought 80% of the GTCs converted to plex.

I don' think think those guesses are outlandish. It is just as subjective for someone to ignore the issue because they don't have data to define i precisely as for people to offer their own best guess. You can't deny there are people like me and multi-boxers who have 10 or 15 accounts. I'm sure you've also heard of people buying a few dozen or more to purchase a 60 million sp ... 20 billion isk character. Those ends of the spectrum while smaller in numbers of People are quite significant as a portion of revenues on the $ side and relevance of the number of active accounts as an indicator of growing popularity or not of the game.


Also important, is to know what sort of play those people using real $ like to do when they play. I know they don't play for the same reasons I do .... if you play the game to keep score by piling up isk ... you don't go out and buy yourself the pile of isk you challenge yourself to get.

* perhpaps it is irrelevant how many tickets I used to go to one concert, but 6 extra tickets were bought that i used on one person. That has pro's and cons... less over priced popcorn bought than 6 people.. less flushes of the urinal to pay the water bill for.

* I do have a character with 740 kills, admittiedly 25% of them inanamite objects... I don't only play the railroad barron - get wealth game .. but my total ship losses are well less than 200 milion per active month and my eve fortune grew at near 50 times that loss rate.

Yes, that's a pretty apt description of yourself. It's nice to see you're become so self-aware. So I take it you can't prove any of what you claimed?

What info exactly? The info that all accounts are paid for? That EVE does not operate on a F2P model? All of that is common knowledge directly provided by the account management site and by the devs. Or are you talking about your unfounded nonsense about how EVE makes its money on PLEXes rather than subscriptions? Because, you know, we actually can get that information… and it doesn't point to what you're claiming.

No, it doesn't, because at the end of the day, it comes down to a very simple fact: if your account isn't paid for, you can't play. This is the fundamental difference between EVE (and any other subscription-based game) and a F2P game: in an F2P my account remains active for as long as the game remains active, without me doing anything. In EVE, my account remains active only as long as I pay for it. Just because I pay for it in PLEX (=subscription money that has gone to CCP) rather than through a subscription (=subscription money that has gone to CCP) doesn't mean it's not being directly paid for.

Your problem is that you incorrectly equate a subscription with other income sources. F2P games rely on those other income sources; subscription games rely on subscriptions. EVE has pretty much none of the former and all of the latter.

The simple fact remains: EVE is not a F2P game, by very definition, as shown by the requirement to have a paid-for account in order to play the game.

…but that's not what's happening in EVE. Here, you're getting food that you paid for through the cover charge of the event. Just because you didn't personally stick the bundles of cash into the hands of the caterer doesn't mean you're at a free-to-eat:ery.

1) You make the claim, the burden is on you to provide evidence to back it.
2) Before asking you to prove the claim, I looked and cannot find evidence of another western subscription MMO aside from WOW that has more subscriptions than EVE.
3) I also cannot find evidence of any MMO that has sustained year on year growth the way EVE has (there is a distinct initial boom then decline common in MMOs that EVE simply doesn't exhibit).
4) I also could not find any evidence of the average number of accounts per player being on the rise.

So, if the evidence is that obvious (and actually exists), surely you won't have any problem providing it.

As for Fountain, SniggWaffe's in Black Rise at the moment, so I'm not sure what you're talking about.



And a PLEX is only ever created by someone spending between $17.49 and $19.99 USD (or equivalent local currency).
CCP gets between $10.95 and $14.95 USD per month for someone paying directly.

Each PLEXed account earns CCP between $2.54 and $9.05 USD per month MORE than they otherwise would have earned (and that's ignoring the possibility that without PLEX some of the accounts would not exist).

How do you think PLEX are born? Does it involve storks?

Actually yes it is. It's the paying players that keep the game profitable, which in turn keeps it operating. If no one uses the cash shop an F2P won't keep running. The relationship is just less structured and direct than plex.

The Cash shop in F2P games represents the game company giving the player in game items in exchange for cash.

That is simply not what happens when you buy a PLEX and sell it to another player for in game cash.

In addition, in a F2P game, you can continue playing without the developer receiving a dime in compensation as a result of your play. You cannot do that in EVE (CCP always gets their monthly pint of blood from each and every active account).

I'm not claiming eve is F2P, I'm only addressing the idea that F2P games effectively don't have paying players subsidize non paying players.

That said, depending on the perspective of an individual it can be considered an F2P. But that gets into the argument of semantics and technical definitions that I'm staying out of as it's already gone on too long.

Oh, F2P games absolutely do use the cash shop to pay for the game.

But EVE doesn't. There is no "subsidy" in hiring people to do something and paying them for it.

Selling PLEX for ISK is simply hiring another player to grind ISK for you.

The problem is that the individual perspective doesn't matter — it's the actual functionality of the business model that does. Ace's description of how F2P games work is wrong no matter what: someone is not “paying more so others can play for free”. What's going on is that some people pay for subscription-unrelated services so that everyone can pay for free. It may seem like a small detail, but it's an important one: everyone plays for free until the servers shut down (for whatever reason).

Ace is trying to weasel-word it to sound like PLEX is F2P, which is blatantly false in every way.

…but then you're not talking about F2P either. F2P is a free-to-eat:ery… but the coat-room and toilets cost a fortune to use, and if you want a table for a company larger than 3, that's going to cost you an arm and a leg as well.

I assure you, there is such a thing. Ask 10,000 people in the games industry if EVE meets even a fleeting definition of F2P and 10,000 of them will tell you no. F2P has a specific meaning, and EVE does not fit that meaning.

F2P games have no barrier to entry. None. An account exists if a player creates it, and persists for free with full access to all game features (not necessarily content) for the duration of the game. A F2P subscription cannot "lapse." A F2P account cannot have its access to the game revoked. That is the soul and essence of F2P.

Ace seems to value knowledge of the "gaming industry" very highly, yet holds very little of his own.

That PLEX is F2P?

Do you want the proof, or will you spend 10 pages wordsmithing it?

Let's start with something that's sure to raise your blood pressure...

http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/07/06/free-for-all-eve-drama-due-to-bolster-waning-tv-soap-schedule/





But CCP doesn't provide that break down between actual humans playing vs multiple accounts. They counted all accounts.



Just like the F2P model with their ingame coins/tokens.