EVE General Discussion

Time is not free ...
... unless your life is worth nothing.

Its a game, if you can't find something you like doing for fun to make isk then you shouldn't be playing it. The majority likely play this game for fun and given a plex is only 1 billion per month its a minuscule amount of time.

I have 8 accounts all funded by skill extractors and injectors. No grinding at all and I make 386 mill from each character as a bonus so 3 billion per month for pvp.

Its free to play.

Eve is already F2P via Plex. Eve already allows people to trade real currency for in-game goods via Plex. Hence not really sure what the OP is on about.

The game was already doing it. It was experiencing growth until ~2013, or somepoint thereabouts. And it was retaining the old ones at the same time. Why do I have to repeat myself like this? Try reading what I said.

Since 2013, players have dropped almost in half...pining for the past doesn't do anything for today and the future.

Yet again as you seem to not like to read, what would you do NOW to attract NEW players?


If you can't answer that question how about just moving on as you point about the glory day has been made...

Okay now hold on a second ...


Getting them back would be a wise decision, because these were a lot of former long time players we've lost back then. And throughout the years. We even lost Tippia. And where's Mag's?


Yes.

And I will now tell you why that is a bad idea.

The first thing are the forums. Either they're completely being locked out ...
... or moderation has to go overtime.

The amount of zilch the word "free" attracts, combined with the outlook of "being someone important", is attractive for those who feel like they are someone important and then play as if they were.

The primary whale is an insecure male with self esteem issues who will happily throw his money away for imaginary status in an online video game played by thousands. Just to feel better about himself. We all do that to varying degrees of course, some more than others.


He suffers from delusions of grandeur, would make dunning and kruger proud and only does "fair" PvP, because - and this is great - when you rip him out of his controlled bubble, you break apart his self image.

The situation then turns into something you would expect from a psychopath who's being told he has to change himself or the relationship breaks apart ...... and you really don't do that, he'll kill you or plot something against you to ruin your life. Unless you don't know them, of course, then they would just make their mothers sad in forum posts and mails.


Of course there's lots of shades of this extreme example of the whale and we have some of them in EVE as well. There's extreme examples you can find on minerbumping.com, but there's also people who overvalue their killboards. There's those who fly expensive officer marauders. A 20-boxer. All different shades of pretty much the same thing, with varying positive and negative effects for everyone else: The degree of "escapism" varies.


It sounds like I'm mostly talking about carebears here ... but it's not that simple.*


After this cluster-**** starts ...
... you will see a lot more of these shades ...
... and you will regret it.


I'll save you a description of long term consequences and just hope you drop this ...
... or, even better, think it through more thoroughly!

There are things you don't know you need to consider.



So many characters left to fill the post with ... sheesh ....




*("Escapism" is not about what you spend your time with.

It does not matter what you do ...
... but how you do it.

They want to dive into a universe, with a story and "feel immersed" so they forget the real world and can be their character. Please note that actual role-players don't behave like this. There's usually a clear seperation between the player and the character. Role-playing isn't escapism.)

But the entire F2P premise is that it trades player time for access to game content. So anyone wanting to play a F2P MMO accepts that trade off. Which is exactly what Plex is.

F2P mean that there is content that players can play for free from day one of their account to day X. There is usually additional content that one can access if one is willing to pay for it.

PLEX is not free as you need time to learn how to get to the point that you're earning enough ISK doing XYZ. Once you do get to that point you could argue that EVE then becomes F2P but even then you still must interact with the client/account-manager to keep things active and/or not have your CC charged.

By no stretch of the imagination is EVE currently F2P for new players and even established players still must do something to maintain their own "free" status.

I love reading. I have a room in my house devoted to bookshelves, almost like a tiny library. But if you want to go there, then I'm going to call projection, because it's not like I haven't made it clear that retaining existing players is more important than getting new ones. When you focus on the existing ones, the new ones come all by themselves, as is what we saw in the past. F2P doesn't attract new players, not the kind that stick around, and it scares off a lot of people who can still take this game seriously.

Now, before you reply with another, "but what do?", I don't need to do anything except play EVE, or something else, and I guarantee you if it goes 'f2p' I'll be playing something else. F2P is a demonstrably abusive model that ends up costing more than a sub in the long run anyway. Once again, if people struggle to pay what equates to 50c a day, then they have bigger priorities in their life anyway.

This works early and in the middle of a product's life-cycle but near the end there is absolutely no point in spending most of your resources trying to retain those that would already be staying. If CCP did something starting in 2013 that initiated the slow exodus not only does CCP have to "fix" whatever they broke in the eyes of those that left, they also need to make it attractive to those people to come back; people that most likely still have billions of ISK in inactive accounts. Yes some will pay but you are focusing on the groups of people that already know how to NOT have to sub. How does that help CCP's bottom line?





Yes F2P can be abusive but it also can be fine. The only experiences I have in F2P are DOTA, War Thunder and Wot. Never spent a dime on the first two but probably spent about $75 on WoT over apx 9000 battles. It worked for me. ANY system can be abused and any system can fail. Going to one or the other extreme is what I am against and support a hybrid F2P because clearly, something is failing for EVE. You're picking the status quo that doesn't seem to be working too well since 2013-ish and refuse to even entertain the idea that change might be needed nor actually offer any ideas other than "let's get the old-timers back". The very ones that probably made an ultimatum like; "If you do X then I quit!"



Never once did I make this argument.