EVE General Discussion

I know, and in the very obvious things, Eve is CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP value for entertainment.

Play more than two hours a month? Well is cheaper than a theatre ticket (before snacks)

One month of eve is less money than it costs to fill the gas tank in my motorcycle. Vintage bikes I have, is a shocker on the money spent in upkeep. I spend less on a year in eve than one month of insurance... on one of my bikes.

Did you eat fast food? Buy a coffee, how about pop and a bag of chips? Well that is eve subscription.

If we reverse look at FTP model. I will go with the one I had the most fun, before it was free to play. STO. Is now a free to play MMO. How does it stay afloat? Well they rely on those who are more into the game. My bro is one. Him and his buddies want said ship, or item or whatever. Instead of paying to play the game, they pay for those bits that make their play fun. Essentially FTP is similar model to a DLC scheme for offline, non MMO games. A very tricky balance. The people who don't put any money into STO is only there because the free entitled group makes the game on whole more lively and as such, money to the people who put dollars into there system. If those guys have fun, even the self entitled will put bucks in.

Relating it to eve, we have a similar. The subs model still works and since changing to monthly updates, is more effective. People like me are paying because (I think) they are getting essentially new DLC, features and as such, game is keeping more fresh. You know what? If I am having fun, I will even spend a few more bucks on the DLC to enhance that. I have bought AUR and ship skins. Not much dollars. I mean a frig skin is less than the cup of coffee I am drinking from a dollars perspective.

As others have said, a true FTP model just wouldn't work for eve mechanics. There is too much advantage to having heavy access accounts. There are people who might be of limited funds, so making use of the plex system (indirect FTP) is quite advantageous. They are playing for free, and somebody else is able to use dollars to get above, like a FTP model. Both however are the same universe. Person A is not reliant on spending limited funds to get access to a T2 ship. It is more in game work for them.

So in the end, Plex has made Eve function the same as a FTP model. Difference is just that if playing free, you progress less as apposed to being forced to pay money to get more.

What about a system like Guild Wars 2? You pay for the actual game, and then you do not have to pay subscriptions to keep on playing. It would eliminate the entire Pilot License system (part of what makes PLEX so valuable), but it would make the game more easily accessible to those who want to play, and those who do not want to be weighted down by needing to pay additional money to renew subscriptions.

Well I think people would buy the game, see that they need to train an account for X amount of days, then just log out until that X passed. Then feeling that they can't perform Y until X arrives, when X gets here they wont be able to do J S because they don't know how to play since they'd been logged out the whole time.

Kind of like how it is now, new players being REQUIRED to play eve offline for at least 6 months until they're finally able to do anything worthwhile.

#fact

No. Plain and simple. I have hated the F2P system since I first heard of it. These MMO companies are providing a service to us; and thus, to compensate for such service, we pay a monthly fee. It is no different than paying a monthly fee to access internet, TV, or cellphone. Yeah, sure, you can get those services at reduced costs, but you lose out on the full experience. That's what I believe with F2P games. Those that prefer to play for free lose out on the full experience of the game versus those who actually pay for the game.

There are a lot worse things to throw your money at versus paying a monthly sub for a game. If an Eve player has one account and paid monthly for 10 years, that's $1180 at $15 a month. That's chump change compared to paying your monthly electric, cable/DSL, cellphone, whatever bill. IMO, certain people want everything handed to them on a silver platter w/o having to work for it. Do you think after the 10 years I've put into this game, I'd be happy to see it converted to F2P? Hell no!

l2read

I'll let you pick: did you spell “fiction” incorrectly, or did you forget the quotation marks around the word “required”?

Really, because GW2 was suggested to me because you don't pay subscriptions for it. Is it really that sparse in the actual game world?

Here is a question:

What if free accounts could access the test servers only?

It was a good idea, I played it regular for about a year from launch day (mostly for WvW), and since I played GW1 early on too, but yeah they screwed it up. After about six months people were leaving in droves after Anet went back on all their pre-launch promises, their visions of the game. It really doesn't function as b2p, and only until the game was dead did they start working on an expansion after two years into the game.

As for the servers, your server is mostly just a flag on your account profile. All the servers were technically merged into one server, and when a zone fills up they make another instanced copy of the zone. Still leaves most zones empty, apart from the few heavily farmed zones though often still on a single instance of it. There are some daily farming events that will fill zones on a daily timer, such as that dragon Teq, because easy loot and chance of rare stuff. The game has become so easy my cat can play.

Yeah I don't know why they did that, at least by the design of the game it could have worked as a b2p with paid expansions. I guess the money shop just got too tempting for their investors, looking for the small amount of players that will spend big money gambling as such, like how most f2p's function with their item shops.

Wouldn't work for EVE, it's too late. The design/layout of the game is all wrong for a b2p, and most players would leave if it were redesigned in a way for it to work that way. Essentially EVE would need to become a whole different game, way unlike the EVE of today. And it'd need to be a rapid change, which games usually don't survive.

I'm pretty sure that everyone who is selling those PLEX you use to sub your game is paying for their own subscriptions as well.