EVE General Discussion

eve goes ftp,
the adults who enjoy the peace and quiet behind the pay-wall leave because the place gets flooded plebeians, teenagers and Koreans.

want to kill eve, make it free.
even i they can shoe horn the bushiness model in there the core community will leave.

PLEX isn't just put on the market by CCP. Someone pays for it. Every account that is active in the game, apart from trials, is paid for. PLEX'd accounts actually get more money for CCP, because a PLEX costs more than one month subscription, and someone has to buy it off CCP to put it on the market for you to PLEX your account with.

And as a matter of fact, I do pay for it. A lot of people pay for it. Quality gaming deserves payment. Self-entitlement deserves crap, which is why 99.999% of stuff that is free to play is crap, until you start paying money.

EVE won't, and never should, go free to play. EVE is not for the self-entitled.

and btw for those who do not realize this about playing with a plex

-> someone else has bought it with real money <---

it doesnt mean u can play for free, it means that some one else has paid for your gametime, capiche ?

wow's decline though is due to its design combined with its pay model, its a subscription theme park.

the content needs to be designed and crafted and while yeah imo that's worth a sub if the content caters to your taste i can see why one would have reservations about paying for it while there are so many "free" options out there.

personally i cant stand mmo's (with one notable exeption).

No, quite right too.

short answer No!

long answer Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Im confused.

I thought EVE already is F2P in a very real sense (with a few caveats)?

Im quite serious.

"Playing" EVE generally earns isk, to one extent or another, doing just about anything (minus expenses).
That isk can then be put towards buying PLEX ingame.

The more you play (if profitable), the freer it gets.
Playing makes it free to play (F2P).

The influx of PLEX into the game, does yes ofc require RLM, but people dont purchase PLEX with RLM for purposes OF playing, but to sell PLEX ingame rather for purposes of funding HOW they play.

Im not completely clear on the best ways in which a new trial player can potentially most cost effectively, in RLM and ingame playing/earning, fund their start, but the buddy program is a strong incentive that returns a substantial amount of the rewarded PLEX value to the old buddy, back to the new buddy, upon their subscription, especially in the competetive market of CCP certified "buddies".

Its genius, and imo by far the best alternate sub system Ive ever seen in an MMO.
Also remarkable how stable the system has been, even without CCP intervention, for so long.
(Though the large PLEX price increase from last fall of about 750mil, to 1 bil this fall in a single year (+25%) is a bit concerning. No "EVE is dead" claims, just saying something has changed noticeably in player behavior).

Considering the wretched job CCP been doing as of late in trying to rebalance ships and reconstruct null sov, I think it's not a bad idea. It would also invite swarms of subscribers back into the game which is what CCP wants. People wouldn't no longer have to worry about risking expensive ships grinding for Plex in WH/Null sec and pvp would be a 24/7 activity for everyone which would be quite fun.

This thread deserves +1

No NO NO No no NO NO no NO

Please no

Knowing that Children exist is already bad enough.

We all put something at risk, we all invest something, be it time to aquire PLEX or time to pay for the subs.

Kids are dumb. Remove them all from the game and preferably the internet, maybe life if we can convince enough people to agree.

Eve could never go free to play, quite simply, because CCP then wouldn't make money. CCP would be entirely reliant on the store and char trades to make money. By going free to play, normally a game will offer new areas by expansion, or for a small cost, that here doesn't really work, you couldn't make say an area of 0.0 only work via a paywall. You also couldn't really offer in game items in return for money, as this would break the Eve economy, fairly quickly. I guess CCP could offer EXP boosts, but that's a bit... limited.

What you would also have to consider would be servers, I can probably think of a good 10 people I know that would come play Eve if it was free, or certainly at least give it a go for a month. Throw in advertising and probably a lot of press, reddit, and news sites, and you are probably looking, certainly in the first week, of a boost of 10x the online players. With 90% of these new players in and around empire/newbie systems... Servers simply wont handle it.