Lol. So for 20 USD I could play the equivalent of 3 hours every single day for 8 months.
In seriousness though, some sort of alternative payment option(s) where you do pay in smaller chunks might work, and discourage 23 hour botting accounts, but it would be hard to sort out the price points, minimum session charge etc.
You’d need access to CCP’s user metrics to find a range of options that maintained revenue overall, while offering more choices (and ones which didn’t pander to inhuman usage amounts).
Too many systems in Eve would be usable if you could use plex like this.
Industry: takes 30 minutes to put in jobs. So you burn the minimum plex required to get past alpha restrictions, put in the jobs, then let it lapse back to alpha.
If you were charged a minimum login time, let’s say 3 hours on login, and each hour cost 10 nuplex, then 20 USD pays for 50 hours of game time. That might suit someone who can play twice a week for a few hours each time (As opposed to Mr Botski, who’s on 23/7) while limiting cyno / PI / industry abuse.
Just some numbers for illustration, as I said, you’d need usage stats to preserve overall revenue. I just get annoyed at bot accounts tbh.
Honestly, this has been discussed previously at some of the CSM meetings I’m pretty sure and both there and the community railed against the idea.
There would be FAR more exploits and cheating taking place to the point that it would be an enormous task to control and monitor.
[sigh]… that’s not how rounding works, not when buying smaller quantities of some commodity than the retailers standard sales package, 80 minutes per PLEX would be far more likely IF they did this.
Something like a 2 week mini-sub with a 10% surcharge over & above the cost of half a months sub might be popular with some & reasonably acceptable to the others.
I’d of course then like to see an hours cap on the normal sub. Maybe 150 hours max per 30 days. Surely that covers all actual humans, while hindering bots.
The master plan is completed by letting people safe log while cloaked after 10 mins and with nothing within a million km. They then stay in local and bingo: environmentally friendly cloaky camping too!
Wait. Your original post wasn’t a troll?! Haha, wow.
Anyway, I think there are other options out there that could be balanced. My easy numbers were probably too generous to the playerbase, but I’m confident that there exist payment plans that would attract new customers (or, more likely, returning customers) without being exploitable.
There is one already. It’s 500 for a month. Anything where you can get some time for less will be exploited because sometime, you only need omega for a certain amount of time and people would do it on the cheap if they could.