Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Allow free accounts, that are limited to in-station interactions, and no ability to create market orders, build ships, or trade away items (though they should be allowed to recieve imo)

This would also be a good way to keep players in the community who's subscriptions are unpaid, or simply to introduce new people into eve

I 100% understand the need to keep these accounts unable to interact with the economy, and i believe incarna could be the key to enabling f2p with microtransaction for clothing / avatar related items

The ability to receive items would encourage the person to subscribe, (like a currently unpaid account, it can recieve isk, but it is unable to send anything)

In-station currency could be Aur only, and fill it with sinks, such as clothing, but also minigames, boardgames, etc etc, allow the f2p player use some basic minigames for free, but require Aur (and allow it to be transfered to f2p players so they can spend it for me!)

i want a way to invite people from other games and give them a taste of eve

the first 14 days, even 21 days of eve were hardly enough to get me hooked tbh, i didn't subscribe until much later.
It would also allow basically a GUI access to your API, but also chat etc. Promote eve as your new desktop background!

The point is, it will place eve into the f2p market, while not murdering the economy. It would also be a nice way to test new MT models, using station-only items. They could tie this into Dust somehow and get very creative, and it wouldn't affect our spaceships

-day-pass to for major events, like major patch/expansion, alliance tournament, etc
-day-pass to get more people into the major sisi test events?

One thing i hear in corps is how many people they're booting due to inactivity, or how many inactives does that corp have? etc This would be a good way to keep them at least connected, or the option of checking back in and possibly resubscribing

It would also give CCP a way to make more money, and thats good for eve too

Eve is already F2P by way of plex that can be had for in-game currency.

What you are suggesting seems to be that people can enjoy an opera by looking at the program from afar .. you are a very strange person.

F2P in eve is quite abusable by bots still.

Agreed. Most F2P MMOs I've played have been bad or just trivial, which is the exact opposites of what EVE is.

why would f2p need api access....thye wouldn't be able to train. Want the sp's, want to buy a sub. Eve killed ghost training way back, they aren't bringing it back in any fashion. Ghost training was f2p. Put in your freightter 5, "quit" eve for 2 months
and come back to said freighter 5 skill all trained up for free.

If leaving eve.....get a fresh final update on your evemon/eft before the sub dies. Thes programs don't wipe data. Evemon will warn you it cna't pull api data, but leaves old data in place. I know this well....I have a dead account that gets full evemon functionality except api (which is not needed, the char's record does not change) on a char who if I return to eve full time and go 0.0 I can wake up this char and do a power cap alt train.

And again...how does letting people type /dance for months on end = more subs. Eve is learned playiing it. For example in blockade you learn to not kill the trigger NPC's. usually after you do it the first time nad have 2 waves of ships in the room and you being sensor damped to death and it takes forever to clear out both waves. then if really stupid...you kill hte 2nd waves trigger early and you now have 3 waves in your room. PVP more of the same. I can tell you what to do iwhen you land in bubbles. I will also tell you the first time you land in one you will forget hlaf of what I said to do. I did anyway, read all the bubble tactics, went in prepared (I thought) and acted like a tard my first bubbles since it was sink or swim and and I sank lol. What exacly does typing /dance do to ease player transition to this game for the above?

My god people, there was a thread on this started 3 days ago, no joke.

The forum search actually works now, you have no excuse.

I'm not going to re-write the comprehensive article I wrote in the last thread about why free to play isn't needed for eve, and just right to why it isn't technically possible.

Eve has a hard cap on the number of users it can support. Although we hold the record of the largest number of concurrent users in one server (WoT doesn't count, its basically a login server, you get put on different servers when you battle), we actually have the smallest maximum user cap. If wow runs out of computational space, they can just slap another server up and dump players sideways into the new server. Problem solved.

Eve, on the other hand, had reached a point of demminishing returns on computational power. We are at the point where we get more gains from optimising software then adding new hardware.

Typically, when a game goes F2P, its userbase quadruples (although its income goes down, SEE OTHER THREAD, no I'm not going to link it, this is as good a time for you to learn to search as any), and tranquility couldn't handle a quadrupling of the playerbase.

See what you did there

So your argument against F2P is simply that EVE doesn't need more players because Jita can't handle more people?

In the "for" column: Trial accounts could be extended indefinitely, with key skills set to "Licenced Pilots Only" (to replace the current "Not trainable on trial accounts"). These could include (as an example) Advanced Weapon Upgrades, Trade, Science, Cloaking, Cyno Field Theory, Race Industrial, Race Battleship, Race Strategic Cruiser, Battlecruiser, and Covert Ops. Any skills or ships which rely on these gateway skills will not be treated as available unless the account has an active subscription.

Other tweaks could be a restriction on entering certain acceleration gates (e.g.: 3/10 DEDs) and mission agents (L1 & L2 only).

More people playing the game (F2P or otherwise) means more people to interact with, which encourages more people to interact and thus more people to stick with the game. It could also be possible to run competitive events with PLEX as rewards, etc.

In the "against" column: persistent trial accounts would open up the possibilities for RMTers, spammers & local trolls. More people playing the game for free means more suicide ganking alts which don't cost you ISK to maintain, thus reducing the impact of security penalties when ganking miners in those disposable catalysts.

More people playing the game means more fail fit noobs roaming lowsec looking for "good fights" but not being able to cyno in reinforcements when they actually get a fight.

I was actually far more concerned about the login server.