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But that would mean you'd be able to login on several characters in the same account. which would render your little thought experiment moot, and cost CCP a bundle in subscription fees.

That's textbook dumb as far as I can tell.

Huh? You only get to log in more than one character at a time if you pay for the equivalent of a monthly subscription. (ie you pay the equivalent of 1 monthly subscription = you get to log on 1 omega character at a time; you pay the equivalent of 2 monthly subscriptions = you get to log on 2 omega characters at a time; etc; plus everybody always gets the ability to log on a single alpha clone).

The whole point was the ability to hard force it that no single human can ever log on more than one alpha clone at a time. The only way to do this is to verify which person owns every character. This is really hard to do when people can have multiple accounts and it isn't clear which accounts are owned by the same person.

FTP is a great idea and long overdue. CCPlease dont listen to the whiners, just make it happen. Bigger flaws can be corrected later and smaller ones will make the game more lively Oh, and dont forget to add a big publicity campaign.

Here's another spin.

I have paid CCP in cash for my 84 odd million SP.

Why can't I just use what I've paid for?

Just don't let me train further in Alpha state.

You just quoted it yourself. Let me repeat;

You have to really understand what has been said.
This does NOT permit multiple Alphas despite a lack of definite restriction. Yet.
The emphasis in their train of thought is based on trial limitation instead of subscription freedom. This puts in the notion they lean towards restriction and not mutliboxing. This further infers they ponder if they will keep it as restricted or make it a little bit more loose, with a limited amount of Alphas at the same time, or many Omegas and one Alpha.
While reading between the lines is important, it was completely unjustified to construe this section as "OMFG they will allow unlimited Alpha accounts!!!!!11!!!1!!1!1oneleven"
Any and all arguments dooming a game based on this notion - which is not even remotely proven to be decided - are not helping at all and need to be called out.

If people want to voice their concern, they should do it, albeit taking multiboxing Alphas as future fact is a hyperbole.

Now let me address the Alpha swarm again, and why it is bogus;

1. If the only concern is suicide ganking, then you can be damn sure CCP will drop the hammer on them. There is no swarm of trial accounts killing ships in highsec. Suicide ganking ships are exclusively subscriptions. If CCP loses these ganker subscriptions because gankers can just as well go Alpha and stay there, CCP will go as the money flows and turn to protect their paying customers which fly are mining Barges and Exhumers.
2. Go grab the most common suicide ganker ships and put them into EFT and compare the damage numbers to what an Alpha can field. Then math up how many Alpha ships are needed extra to field a proper gank. Not even all ganker ships are destroyers. Look at the Talos. That's not possible for Alpha accounts.
3. Furthermore, I'd like to point out how in the past there was a limit on trial accounts allowed online on Tranquility at 1500. CCP can decide to limit Alpha characters in parallel and if they see how the allocated slots are taken up by gankers who are taking space away for possible customers, they will act accordingly.
4. If we get 1 Alpha + X Omegas making every Ganking player +1 stronger then the easiest way would be Safety restriction to yellow. Done.
5. Venture mining swarms. Again, take EFT, math out how many Ventures it takes to match the yield of a common Mining Barge / Exhumer. This is how many Alphas it takes.
6. T1 Alpha combat swarms. Your point? If you say the poor will use hordes of multiboxed Alphas and beat the rich, then the rich will laugh at you because they have better computers than the poor and can multibox even harder than the poor as they stack even more Alpha accounts on top of their Omega accounts. And? The fights are bigger, and the chances for actual new players to be involved there is higher too. Because if the vets multibox throwaway Alphas, why not take some real Alphas with you too? Same goes for the above mining point. If you can have free ventures on top of your subscribed alts in your belt, why shouldn't you use them?
7. Any argument which says more Alphas means more combat alts and more Alphas means more mining ships... can't do math. The increased mining output would be eaten up by the increased ship production. Most rocks are still in nullsec.

Let's summarize: take the average amount of ganking ships and Ventures required to do the same as one subscription character can with access to better ships and skills and equipment. As long as the Multibox Alpha limit is below that, who cares. I'm still convinced the limit to be 1. An optimistic outlook would be 1 Alpha beside X Omegas.

If CCP wants new players but the vets abuse the system in a way it conflicts with CCPs marketing, changes will roll out faster than you would ever believe.
And this is the ultimate reason why we're not going to see unlimited or barely limited Alpha accounts. They WILL be strongly limited. There is no way around it.
Game mechanics may change, but if the game becomes TiDi everywhere because there are ten times as many Alphas as there are Omegas online, this is the worst reputation for the game. Worse than any gameplay change they can make. If you can't even begin to play the game properly as it is unresponsive, objectively, for everyone... it's the ultimate reason to quit it.

Now please don't come to me with player online counters when you talk about money. They're meaningless in this regard.
Players online do not necessarily reflect the amounts of subscriptions running, and neither do players online reflect the amount of money generated by microtransactions.
Unless CCP publishes data, which they won't, this argument is worthless as it is pure speculation, spindoctored to fit the rhetoric. I think there have been fiscal reports floating around though, and they're not writing negative numbers.

If player counters were representative of CCP's equity, then we wouldn't see such a content schedule and neither would we be seeing hardware upgrades. A company for an MMO which goes not well has less content stretched over longer periods of time, has staff layoffs left and right, and takes down server hardware. To my knowledge, CCP has not just purchased new hardware, but will be continuing to use the old hardware on top of it. This adds maintenance and power cost. A company which doesn't do well wouldn't do this.

reminder: this guy can't remember plex exist for longer than ten seconds

the particular reality that our loser of the intellectual lottery here is missing, of course, is that alpha clones will have very low demand for minerals because they can only fly low level ships: they can and will easily outproduce and outmine the minute amount of extra demand they add, pcu counts are obviously irrelevant since its the balance of production and demand that matters

t1 production is extra-dead as there is literally no cost whatsoever to going wide, you have as many free t1 production lines as you want, even limited to logging in one at a time, and corporate hangars and roles make it real easy to go wide and you just log in the alt to start jobs every month

Oh its about half of year pass, and somebody still didn't get how things works.

Your character gets about 1.5mil SP per month - you can fill 3 skill extractors with it, and then sell them on market for 600mil each, you will get 1800mil isk = 1100mil for one plex + 700mil to buy 3 extractors for the next month

You see it, it's free to play this game if you do not want to learn skill.

Come again please?
Entosis Link requires the skill Infomorph Psychology. The current list in the devblog does not show Infomorph Psychology.
You ask for something that has already been taken care of in the devblog.


You do not understand the difference between voicing concerns for multiboxing and taking multiboxed Alphas for granted.
Both are entirely different arguments. I am on the side of voicing concerns for multiboxing. That doesn't make me believe it will happen, like others do.

Under current system, you stop paying = you stop playing. Under new system, you stop paying = you can still play with t1 frigs and cruisers or at least log in to shuffle stuff in containers around and insult people in local.

So the new system is more permissive than the old one. And you're complaining? You want Eve to go more free to play than it is already going to?

We imagine that all the alphas will go gank people.

CCP probably imagines that all the alphas will go mine, so they can function as self-replenishing unlimited-resource targets for the veteran PVP'er omegas.

Wolves need sheep, and sheep hate being sheep. Well, now it's free.

I think CCP should reduce the limitations of what alphas can do, as far as mining. Let them go crazy with exhumers, let them experience CODE and/or PVP, maybe they join the game or start a sub in order to train combat ships to fight back.