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A ship on it's own isn't a worry. Just because you can fly it doesn't mean you can be combat effective. An Alpha account will be able to max skills, which a trail cannot. Moreover, they can use it forever, instead of having to constantly make new accounts and train throwaway characters. It's much more convenient, which will make it more commonplace. Ultimately I think it comes down to common sense. CCP said no faction ships. Is the Genosis a faction ship? Do YOU really think they will let Alphas fly the Genosis?

My fear is that existing (paying) players will abuse this system by making a large number of free alts. Every fight will involve 20+ meta fitted Logi. In highsec one can expect suicide ganks happening a lot more. In low/null i expect to see 50man free2play caracal fleets being piloted by 1 person.

"But Dopenose, how could anyone control 50 accounts at once?" you might ask. Well they would do so the same way multiboxers do now: using multibox programs that are "technically bannable. Only you can now hide behind a VPN / Proxy and not care if your accounts get banned, since they didn't cost you anything to begin with.

Hope CCP has considered the amount of abuse they are making possible with this system.

Ah but that's the issue, it's hard enough already to prove if someone is using input broadcast.
Lets be real here, a large number of people that multibox do use it. Now they can do it on a massive scale without fear of being banned. A minor inconvenience to create new accounts and you're back in action.

Personally, I'd open up Battleships to Alphas as well so they can get in on the Incursion Communities.

Ill nutshell it for you...

The good:

1) Allows current subs more flexibility with alts
2) Allows new players to experience eve without time constraints.
3) Provides subs with more targets.

The bad:
1) Subs keep out a certain type of player many here will find undesirable. While people say well you can just avoid them, ignore them, etc... its like avoiding the white elephant in the room... lots of white elephants. At some point, it becomes easier to just stop playing.

2) Lots of free players do not always mean lots more paying customers. In a F2P/P2W game about 50% of the players will never pay 2 play despite the fact they are at a significant disadvantage. The Clone model of eve doesnt put them at a significant disadvantage. They can still do everything paying players can, just in crappier ships with crappier mods.

3) I see alliances capitalizing on the free players and creating huge TIDI blobs of cheap fleets to take and hold space.

4) Free players really dont add a lot of value to the game but will suck up a massive amount of resources.

5) Welcome to The Market Chaos Era. This is going to have all kinds of weird effects on the market from a variety of angles.

6) No game that i have played that has started either A) in game advertising( despite you paying for it) or B) a free to play mode has done well after that point. At that point you are on a slippery slope and about to lose your footing.

7) Hi! im Roenok and i have 782 Alt Alpha Clone accounts!

8) You, CCP, claims that support will not be affected. But we know thats not true. There are only two paths support can take with this and both of them hurt sub players. The first is that we have to wait stupidly long for our tickets to make it through a constantly backlogged system because of all the Alpha scrubs filing support tickets for stupid stuff. The Second is that CCP hires more support staff. Guess who is paying for that support staff? Sub players. So we either get shittier service or we provide welfare support for free players.

9) Keeping in line with point #8, taking revenue to spend on more support staff for free players also takes money for CCP staff to develop the game.

10) F2P players are going to crowd sub players out of high sec. They are going to suck up most of the resources in high sec while contributing very little to game play. High sec subs are going to get tired of this and do one of two things. One, they are going to move to low sec or null... which is great. Or they are going to unsub and go play something else where they dont have pay to compete with thousands of free players.

11) We are going to have the same tolerance of free players as we do bots, afk miners/ratters, and other undesirables. We are going to try to kill them to make them go away until they become to frustrating to deal with and then we are going to go away.

12) Honestly we would rather you spend more time on making eve awesome and less time on generating revenue. We have bugs that havent been fixed for months. You guys are fixing things that arent broken ( module tieracide) while neglecting things that we hate ( Fozziesov, SBU sov, Pos bash Sov). We ask for the game to have more entertaining PVE and your answer to that is super rats that will WTFOWN you faster than a cap hot drop. Your answer to everything the last few years is to either nerf it or dumb it down.

The only good thing ive seen in updates these last couple of years are ship rebalancing and possibly new structures but im still reserving judgement on those. Before you start trying to get new subs, try to keep the ones you got.


You want an answer to the trial BS... here it is:

1) Set up a free to play server that is separate from TQ.
2) No restrictions on this server
3) No customer support for this server. You want customer support you have to pay for it.
4) No plexes or skill injectors on this server.
5) The server is wiped clean every 6 months.
6) At any time you may transfer your character and your assets to TQ with your character in its current state. The cost of this transfer is that you buy a 1 month sub plus $5 transfer fee. The transfer fee is waived with a 3 month sub or more.

Play your heart out free player. When your sick of being reset, come join us on TQ. Otherwise take all the time you need to learn game mechanics. You could also leave the trial up on TQ as is and give people that option.


Ive been playing MMOs for 20 years. My first was a text based browser game on dial up. Ive player MMOs from EA, Blizzard, Atari, Trion Worlds, Big Point, Aeria, Kabam, Rockyou, Plarium, Machine Zone, and a host of other developers i cant remember atm, some of which have been defunct for years. And i can tell you from experience... going down this road is never good for the developer nor the paying customer.


But dont take my word for it.... ill quote this post and " i told you so" in a couple of years.

Just curious - the punishment for botting is banning - but now its free to make accounts - so ccp would have to ban the ip. But I think (I may be wrong) that you can manipulate your ip address if you want. So CCP just effectively threw in the towel on botting - a botter gets banned - he just keeps making new accounts - since there is no cost or punishment to him there is no disincentive to botting.

Personally, I'd open up Battleships to Alphas as well so they can get in on the Incursion Communities.

They can get into Incursion communities by them doing the smaller sites.

My biggest gripe with this is that CCP has not done anything to improve the NPE, they do nothing to promote E-Uni and actually throw new players into E-Uni instead of leaving them in rookie corps. With this F2P plan, they just hope for a BNI 2.0 and throw new players into the same environment like the last time. They should have improved the NPE with the countless suggestions first and then introduced these Clone states. That would have been the proper order and it would have made a lot more sense with their focus on new players that looks more like a farce.

You'll have to make it so all alpha skills are unable to be extracted, otherwise it will be very easy to milk free SP at no cost.

And by the way, I don't think this will influence subscribers unless it is matched by an improvement in the NPE.

This is basically just the same as the free trial in many respects, and so I wouldn't expect any major changes in subscriber numbers as a result. The possibilities for exploitation though are great if this isn't implemented carefully.