EVE General Discussion

If you want Eve free to play for new players then you need to offer an alternative source of revenue for CCP. For the development teams - this is their job. They expect to get paid.

For experienced players, you can already use in game currency to pay your subscription. I don't bother - the cost per day for my subscriptions is less then a cup of coffee.

If Eve is the right game for you, I don't think the price will be a deterrent. If it isn't - free won't help.

There have been a few topics lately about what it's like to be a new player, so I made a trial account recently and messed around on it for the free month. I ended up making about 3bil ISK over the course of the month, killing a few people, stealing some stuff from others in hisec and going suspect, and generally having a fun time and exploring some lower level content I hadn't really done before, in addition to checking out the opportunities system. By the end of the month I was in a Gila with ok skills, and had enough liquid ISK to PLEX my account for 2 months.

It would probably take about 2 months to become well skilled at a cruiser. And cruisers are the best class of ship in the game IMHO. Or a lot of fun could be had as a newb by training into an Astero real quick and preying on other data/relic runners in low/null/wh. Certainly no reason to afk in station, training for the first month. Dunno why your friends thought they should do that. Or why you didn't set them straight.

I don't. I want CCP to have a quality product that attracts players that want a quality game to stick around with for a good long while. A game that keeps CCP employees employed for many years to come. F2P's just produce garbage that players hop from one game to another due to the poor quality of them all. F2P games are all made for the few fat whales that spend tens of thousands of dollars each, not for the general player-base.
So, the game just isn't for everyone, and CCP recognizes that.

Maybe you should abandon the idea that your friends are "good gamers" if this is a requirement for them or if they only play games that hands everything to them for free.

It is quite possible to make a name for yourself in EVE as a new player and outplay the older ones. But it needs some of your own ideas and some research, there is no power-leveling guide to EVE.

If they are so narrow-minded that they don't see the potential in this game then that is their loss. We don't need a bunch of kids from WOW here in my opinion.

Funnily enough, CCP makes more money off the people who play “for free” than from those that subscribe…

All those f2p's, when you play for free and not spend a dime, or very little, you take the long way around. You spend way more time trying to keep up with someone that pays a lot. That's how they make their money, and there is always someone willing to spend a lot of money that you just can't keep up with. Some of them are outright scams in fact, using tricks to cheat players.

So that makes no sense. They have limited time but play games that stick them at the slowest pace, to torture them into spending money. Big reason I stay away from those games. And even if I spend money, I'll always get stuck with other players in my group that didn't pay a dime, so I suffer because of them, or I need to spend even more money to pick up the slack for them.

If EVE ever went f2p, I'd be outa here, no joke, and so would many/most here. They may pick up 100000 f2p instant players, but will spend little to nothing and then leave in months for some other f2p game that catches their eye. So if your friends demand free (do you even know them irl?) and just won't undock and try EVE for real, don't worry about it, it's just not a game for them.

…and yet they've made more money off of you than if you had.

No, just ignorant of how the system works.

Through your reliance on the most expensive method, by far, to maintain your subscription.

But if your definition of wining Eve is to play for free, able to buy anything you want and being entertained while do it then you are getting the entertainment for free, fun for free, and the game for free.

You have made 28k posts on the forums so I assume you are from CCP?

You must have had internal discussions about Free to Play models and the direction the content is going seems to be bridge in that direction with vanity ship skins, and other vanity items.

What can we do to help CCP survive this transition?

But nothing.
They're still making money off of you.

They have. It was dismissed as the last measure right before the game is shut down since the game doesn't support it.

Mass-quit so they game is on the brink of being shut down and scamming a last wad of cash out of some fools is the last thing left to do. It might help CCP survive, but it obviously won't help EVE since it's being shut down.