EVE General Discussion

CCP,

In short, there are a lot of solutions that could: increase player experience; reduce client and server technical requirements; facilitate free-to-play accounts; and also generate more revenue for CCP.

I imagine that these are some of the business goals that you hold:

• Recurrent Billing: Subscription and Microtransactions;
• Increased Server Efficiency;
• Higher Returns on Investments, (into Development, I.T., etc);

Alpha-State Clone Model Revolving Around Faction Warfare, and Certificates:

• Paying players will greatly benefit from Alpha-State clone players who have Tier V Mastery in frigates. It will increase the player base, retain them, and help our economy - injecting more LP Items, etc. Otherwise - Alpha-State players do not seem to benefit paying players.
• Allowing Players to get Tier V Mastery in Tier 1 Frigates SIGNIFICANTLY contributes to the amount of ISK they gain, and their ability to buy better ships/gear, which will necessitate better Skill Certificates.
• Injecting many more pilots into Faction Warfare SIGNIFICANTLY contributes to New Player Experience.
• Allowing Players to continue to train skills - even skills they cannot use - gives them an incentive to keep playing, and eventually pay for a subscription to use those skills.
• Applying Certificate Mastery Limitations is MUCH easier to maintain / track than large lists of skills.

*Granted: Those certificates need to be tweaked a bit.

A Free-To-Play Model based "Capping Certificate Use" actually sustains these business efforts:

That is: Players should be able to freely acquire skills, and certificates ... But their Alpha Clone-State can only use skills up to a certain certificate level.

• Blocking skills at "some level" is incredibly difficult to understand, difficult to manage, and difficult to maintain.
• At the very least, limiting to Tier 2 Master, etc, is much easier to maintain.
• CCP Will get an influx of new players, during the Christmas Season - and CCP Will have heavy I.T. demands to meet this need.
• But, limiting the skills these players acquire also means those players won't necessarily have an incentive, nor investment to return to.
• Those players will get discouraged, because the skills they can actually get - don't actually mean a whole lot.
• Those players won't significantly contribute to the economy.
• Blocking Content, rather than character development is a proven revenue model, (or by tying content to character development which can't apply).

Risks - Players Creating Even More Alternate Accounts:

This is an artificial limitation - imposed by CCP upon itself.

• Allowing players a one-time purchase to increase their number of characters is a proven revenue model.
• There are almost no client-side concerns to allow players the ability to toggle from a combat ship in space, to driving another, (a scout); or from a Miner, to Cargo, etc - WITHOUT EXITING TO THE CHARACTER SCREEN. (This is also a micro-transaction revenue source). CCP's Server Infrastructure requirements, and Client Requirements would be significantly reduced - if players were allowed to pilot multiple ships at a time - FROM A SINGLE CLIENT INSTANCE; even allowing players to "multi-box" from the same account has some potential to reduce server transactions, (multiple account management, payment management, etc).
• Having Corporation recruitment revolve around "Full API-Keys" encourages multiple-accounts and multi-boxing. This could be quickly remedied by allowing API-Keys to quietly hide alternate characters, assets, etc.
• More ships in space - over time => Better Value to Players; but not an artificial burst like this.

Most people have no idea certificates even exist, they're buried in menus, and when you get to them, the UI is more awful lists with somewhat verbose but generally unhelpful descriptions.

Mastery is a joke all by itself.

It's besides the point, but neither of them had to be that useless, of course, if they had allowed players to create, save and distribute them, then they would have become really helpful corp / alliance assets to assist in training.

Lol certificates

Here in scrubville people don't read stickies and refuse to learn logic and make arguments and "feedback"(read: whine) based on how angry they are.

Infinite trade slots, infinite research slots, infinite manufacturing slots, infinite PI, there's even infinite r&d agents for free datacores as long as certificates are used instead of SP.

How do I unsee this thread again? I don't want to remember it ever existed.

(IB4L) You speak as though the Alpha Clone is intended as a permanent class of player. Conceptually, this is not so. Though you'll have a regular population of Alpha Clones (theoretically) these are continually cycling into subs precisely because they hit this wall of development and "enlightened self-interest" demands they upgrade their accounts to keep that progression going.

Institutionally enshrining the extended trial alters this dynamic to such a degree, one couldn't expect it to serve as a conduit guiding a current of new players into the exaulted state of paying real money for a sub. After all, the microtransaction portion of the show will continually be there for both states of cloneship. That market will have its demand apart from the incentive to upgrade the account.

No. Though it might look good on paper to make Alpha cloners "useful" to subbers, that's not its intended purpose. Your conceptualization of it will only make the Alpha state appealing, robbing it of any incentive to upgrade. Edit: In fact, should it be the case subbers start rolling Alphas to serve as tools, the progression potential of the Alpha will be reduced before it's ever increased.