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No you don't. You pay for the ability to log onto the server and play the game.

You don't get it. There are A LOT of such alts out there that will profit from that. Take for example our alliance. We use gank alts who only need a few SP to do what they do. There is no point in training anything else. All you want is more toons active in parallel for "free" so you can gank cheaper or bigger targets.

The same goes for mining alts. They have a limit of how many SP are useful. So instead of grinding the ISK for the PLEX you just sell that SP and keep all the ISK from mining for other stuff.

There are a lot of other types of alts out there that share the same characteristics and my guess is with this their number will increase dramatically.

=> No more grinding for free (or almost free) alts, but they will not progress.

This will change EVE, a lot in my opinion. It takes absolutely no effort to run such an alt. I talked about this in the old thread, no one seams to care. Somehow you are all focused on if this is p2w or whatever and don't realize that there are a lot of other implications.

Well I don't care, I am ready for the change. This will probably increase my accounts but lower my costs. Someone will have to pay that, not sure who that will be and it's probably the guys who where in favour of this anyway. All's well that ends well.

I think you need to make different considerations for tiers. The scaling effectiveness is the right intent, but you'll still have low SP characters and high SP characters in the same market. There should be different extractors by SP tier.

An extractor for first tier use, another for second-lowest tier use, and on.

Otherwise the high SP characters who need more extractors will put more pressure on the extractor market than low SP characters (who receive more of the SP in an extractor). If you want more benefit for low SP characters, you should also insulate their market price from higher SP users... right?

Secondly, to simplify the math and the process, extractors should all yield 500k SP (or another standard amount) but consume more SP in their creation based on the tier.

I don't think the PLEX inflation resulting from this additional AUR sink can be helped, but you can still make extractors more granular and isolate extractor markets from each other.

I was just thinking that over dinner, and wondering what the implications would be for doing it that way and not.

And whether you could allow a straight 500k SP = 500k SP that way. But probably not.

Have you tried gaining SP with a lapsed account? Maybe it's a coincidence that it just stops, but I bet it's related to paying money.

Skill Injectors and Skill Extractors should require Polaris V to use.

Didn't Johnny mnemonic forget parts of his past when he injected excess of 80GB into the chip in his head - If you need a reason

SP are a retention tool. Their role is (was) to create a need to extend the subscription time, by blocking access to content and lifting that barrier based on player action over time (skilling). That's a key element in EVE's access monetization. Yet by allowing to buy them as a commodity, SP shift from access monetization to activity monetization -SP are bought not to lift a barrier, but to do something ingame onxe the barrier is lfited.

CCP is very literally trading subscription time for a short term income -and they are loading the dice in their favor, obviously. You bet that CCP will earn more money for traded SPs than for "subscription" SPs. Say, a PLEX is worth some 2,000,000 SP, for a base of 5 $/€ per 500,000 SP (remember, PLEX are more expensive than subscription time). 5 $/€ yield 900 AUR at the shop, so that's the bare minimum for extractor cost... maybe some will expect that cost be modified by the devaluation of SP when they're transfered to high SP characters, but come on: CCP's cut is from the extraction, not the injection.

So you pay money and lift an access barrier (fly that ship, use that module), yet that doesn't grants access to the game. Access still depends on a subscription... does that sound fair? If extractors and SP yield more money than subscriptions, why keep mandatory subscriptions then?

Some weeks ago, I already pointed how CCP's apparent acceptance of higher activity even if population is lower pointed at the possibility to shift access monetization for activity monetization; and activity monetization is how F2P games work.

F2P games also have high server populations, which need properly scaled hardware. Hardware like, accidentally, Tranqulity III compared to Tranqulity II, that old server which never was used beyond 30% of its capacity.

CCP doing some of the things required to go F2P could be an accident, specially if the development led to naturally higher populations rather than be focused on splitting niches into smaller niches.

But maybe, you know, it's not an accident and my intuition is terribly right.

No, it does not. You pay money to log on onto the server. End of discussion.




Have you ever tried PvPing with a lapsed account? Have you ever tried undocking with a lapsed account? How about selling something on the market for isk? What about clone jumping?

Glad I made my point.

Perhaps in some future hypothetical iteration this might hold more true, but the current model isn't divorcing anyone from access monetization. Rather, it's trying to capitalize on that same access monetization by selling it in part again. Basically someone at CCP decided that a portion of the access model, the SP from timed training, had a value on it's own. That actually happened when MPTC was introduced. This is an extension and abstraction of that.

Further, it's an extension that depends upon, rather than divorces us from, an access model. SP is still first and foremost tied to access. Without it SP doesn't form, which means there is no purpose for extractors beyong the current amount of waste SP, and with that a capped potential to further induce PLEX sales for those willing. What this actually does from a monetization standpoint is allow 2 potential player groups to feed from each other. The multi account players without need for continual training get a passive stream to fund their accounts while the SP hungry players inject the PLEX the passive accounts use to keep active in order to buy the SP, returning that same isk to the first.

Now you asked, is that fair? Ultimately the answer I come to is the opposite of yours, mainly because no one mandated either of them participate using the means of real money. There is enough PLEX floating around that the SP creating players can get through other means, and the SP hungry can simply grind their own isk. Basically CCP is only monetizing those that explicitly chose to be monetized with this, and that's not terribly sustainable when at some the SP buyers are going to a) have less to unlock over time and b)have access to better isk generating capacity that may have been SP prohibitive which may decrease dependence on PLEX.

Further, the greatest doubt I have that activity monetization is a rational or even possible direction is the way skills and activities work. Problematically for this model, most activities in the game have a wide variety of tools that can do them, and while we crave the progress that is a part of the price of admission, would we be as hungry when each meal has a price point? What happens when the access model gets turned off, and the SP with it? The subs that go inactive playing skill queue online suddenly become non-contributors to CCPs bottom line, and with SP functioning as it does is there enough repeat demand to keep the current population paying?

To be blunt, the monetization based on SP with access being the source is only being strengthened regarding the revenue it can generate. Meanwhile activity monetization would take even more radical changes because it by nature cannot currently sustain the game without a continuous influx of players, something I think CCP knows it can't count on. SP would need to be changed to need refreshing of some sort to prevent every player from reaching a fully "free play" point.

Also TQ 3 isn't about the full server load, it's more about the fact that load can't be redistributed the same way split server based games do without, again a massive and fundamentally game changing alteration to how being in space functions. As a result the metric of most importance isn't how much of the total cluster capacity is in use, but what the max a single node can handle. Fact of the matter is, if Tidi'd battles are still pushing the nodes to their less than graceful degradation points and you can't seamlessly split the load, you still aren't overprovisioned regardless of your total capacity.