EVE New Citizens Q&A

Different people have different issues.

For me - it is the basic dishonesty of saying PLAY FOR FREE - when you are not playing the GAME but playing a TRIAL. If CCP has said somewhere that Alphas are a trial - I haven't seen it and neither have most of the people who click on the PLAY FOR FEE button.

Now, I would have no problem with Alpha's as they are if that button were labeled "Play The Trial". As a trial - Alphas are better than the old two week trail and EVE is certainly a game worth paying for.

It is the dishonesty of trying to lure people in with a promise that they can PLAY FOR FREE when you can't past a certain point.


Now - there are a number of games out there where you can PLAY FOR FREE. Of course there are limitations but these limitations have more to do with the speed at which you can advance your character rather than IF you can advance your character.

Then you have a number of other games - such as EVE - where you can play for a while but then after that you have to start paying in order to advance your character. So - this dishonesty is not something isolated to CCP - but that doesn't mean it isn't dishonest.


Advancing your character, or city or whatever, is a major part of the fun of playing most computer games. You work on this character, you build them up and then take satisfaction in what you've accomplished.


I had a number of accounts when I was playing. I went in and activated them and it was sort of fun to look at my old characters and reminisce about the good old days. But ... those characters had all been built for specific purposes and were mostly if not all way beyond anything I could do as an alpha. As I went through the old ships in my inventories I saw a lot of Omega signs saying I could no longer fly that ship.

But - it wasn't just the fact that I couldn't fly my old ships - I couldn't multi box my characters any more. Part of playing EVE the GAME for a lot of people was multi boxing. That was one of the things about EVE that was unique and I did it A LOT.

I saw a dev blog where they said that they restricted multi boxing because players felt it was unfair to people who didn't have alphas that they have to create one in order to compete with those who had. Well ... the same damn argument could be made about multi boxing by people who only want to run one character - and when I was playing WAS raised against those who multiboxed.

Another thing I did with all those accounts was a lot of PI. Can't do that any more either.

So - I can't come back and play EVE as an Alpha - I can only come back and play a TRIAL.

Now - if someone else wants to take their gigantic number of skill points characters and fly them around running missions or PVPing in a cruiser - or go mining in a frigate - by themselves - sure. If you're having fun - do it.

But not me. For me there's no point in playing most of those characters any more.


Now ... there's another game I've played where I still go back sometimes, play their trial, make a new character, run them around until they reach level 20 and then ... make another new character and do the same with them. It's just messing around - but then I know it's just messing around.

I might do the same thing here and it's nice to have that option but I am under no illusion about what I'm doing. I'm not here playing EVE - I'm here playing it's TRIAL.

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