Player Features and Ideas Discussion

No, you can not activate your cyno alt just long enough to jump in the ships you need to move.

What invective would ccp have to do this? Rather than having to pay a month on muy super alt when i get a ping i could just pay an hr or two. Sounds like they just loose money

Only way I see this happening is with more clone states between Alpha and Omega, with more available skills the more game time is purchased.

Why would they do that? Either A) the more limited account costs less... which would mean subscribers moving over to the cheeper version on mass, which would loose the company a ton of money and possibly result in the game being shut down ( server costs would remain the same after all)
or B) they charge more for people who want to maintain the same level of access they have now. which will result in massive amounts of rage quitting, again, loosing the company a ton of money and possibly result in the game being shut down (because those costs)

I thought about this for a while and wondered if it would be feasable.

The issues against this proposal are valid and cannot be ignored.

However, I believe the move to abolish Aurum and create "granular" PLEX was the wrong way to go. Plex should have been converted to Aurum and we would then have bought game time with Aurum. It would have made more sense that way but hey ho.

Anyway, back on point; the proposal of more granular game time being available is a valid request. There are many people who enjoy playing EvE but a monthly subsciption just wouldn't suit their free time. Many EvE players and especially ex EvE players are older now. They have families. They have commitments. They have full time jobs and not enough time to actually justify the paying for a game they just can't play very often.

These people would benefit from more granular type PLEX time. The question is, would it be possible to do this without it being abused?

The most simple way to do this is to make short bursts of OMEGA time reletively expensive and gradually cheaper until you get to the standard cost of 30 days. Wargaming do this very well by allowing players to buy 1 day, 3 day, 7 day and 30 day chunks of "Premium" account with in game gold. The cost is higher per day the smaller the block you buy is. This format works for WG because their "Premium" accounts offer now benefit in player ability other than the ability to gain resources faster (A premium account gets a +50% bonus to silver and XP gained per battle).

This wouldn't work for EvE because of the structure of free gametime vs paid game time.

In EvE a "Premium" (Omega) account has a power advantage over a "non-Premium" (Alpha) account. There for short bursts of full power would offer far too muchcapability to allow for abuse of the system.

We also need to ask the question of what an Alpha account actually is. Is it just an unlimited trial account? Or is it a way for players to play a limited version of the game for free? Or Maybe, as I believe it, it's both?

Now the suggestion of multiple different clone states is an interesting one. It's something I've thought of recently and wondered how it would be possible. What do people actually want and how much should it cost? What safety's should be in place to prevent abuse etc etc.


A very very quick run down which is simply just an example of what could be done:

Clone costs and abilites:

Alpha - Free - Current alpha abilities

Beta - £1 for 3 days - is equal to Alpha + All Races + Small T2 gear + T2 Frigates + T2 Destroyers + T1 Large gear (Cannot use Cyno and other stuff that allows abuse)

Gamma - £2 for 7 days = Alpha + Beta

Delta - £1.25 for 3 days - = Alpha + Beta + T2 medium gear + T2 Cruisers & T1 Battlecruisers

Epsilon - £2.50 for 7 days = Alpha + Delta + T1 Battleships

Zeta - £3 for 7 days = Alpha + Delta + Large T2 gear + T3 ships + T2 Battleships

Omega - £10 / 30 days - all abilities


Now why do this? What business advantage is there to this. Well it's simple. It's way way easier to sell a million things for £1 then it is to sell one thing for £1,000,000. If it is very easily accessible to do (if Aurum was how you bought a Clone State) a simple button press in game would be great. Players would impulse buy shorter bursts of game time. CCP could then have been like a drug dealer and offered Aurum as a reward for certain tasks in game and then let the player decide if they bought a clone state with it or just kept it or whatever. Point is, the player might use it to buy a Beta clone and really enjoy that and then when they max out their Beta capability they might buy a Delta and so on and so on.