A lot of the changes to skills have to do with unlocks to ships and modules, so one curious thing:
I noticed that alphas will gain access to T2 ECMs and Weapon Disruptors, but not T2 Sensor Dampeners and Target Painters.
Is this an oversight or intended?
There are two possibilities, no one thought of that, it was missed, and will be corrected,
Or they expect alphas to train beyond the limited range of 20mil alpha skills and train it to 4 to get battleships trained, and when they drop down, they will still be able to fly the battleship.
Whether that would actually work remains to be seen, but usually when you train the “superior” required skill, the prerequisites no longer apply.
Letting it be trained to 4 as an alpha makes a lot more sense though.
Would SC 4 cause any other unexpected side effects if it was available to alphas?
My guess is if you want battleships, you have to sub or buy an injector at least once.
The same as who is paying for PLEXed Omega accounts, CCP. All accounts cost CCP the same amount in overhead, dev costs, and server load. And CCP pays for that. They sell some of that cost directly as a subscription, and for the rest they provide “free” accounts, that they pay for to create an in-game market that drives “wallet warriors” to buy PLEX, on which they make money (the buying of PLEX for real world money, nothing that happens to the PLEX after that).
Regarding the bankruptcy example: it isn’t a matter if you will get anything, it’s a matter of what is or is not legal. The EULA can restrict refunds regarding people not wanting to play anymore, or an account being banned, but it is worthless if the company goes bankrupt and can no longer provide the service. Yes, subscription refunds would most likely come last, and not pay out anything, but they would have to be legally dismissed by a bankruptcy court.
Here you get it. 
Accounting 101:
Assets - Liabilities = Equity
Everything that is money, currency, or “paying” can fit into that equation, if it doesn’t fit in there it isn’t money, currency, or “paying”. (I’m not saying everything in the equation is one of those three.) For those who are arguing that “time is money”, despite the common saying the “time” you work will never show up on any accounting statement, ever. (Salary will, but that is the payment for time, not the time itself.)
When CCP sells a subscription (for more than a month) the money paid is an asset, but there also has to be a liability for the extra months as “deferred income”. You can think of it as a legal I.O.U. They can’t claim that money yet because they haven’t earned it yet, and if they never deliver that product or service, they will legally owe a refund.
Now let’s look at a PLEX: When CCP sells PLEX, once the PLEX is in-game, they don’t owe anyone anything, they could say “PLEX can no longer be used for Omega upgrades” and other than losing all of their players, they wouldn’t legally owe anyone anything. In-game PLEX does not create a liability, because it’s already completed its real world transaction.
I don’t think this is true, and I’ll address it more regarding the financials you linked.
I think the author of the post has made a wrong assumption. I don’t think “In-game purchases not yet consumed” refers to in-game PLEX, I think it would refer to ETC, MTC, and PLEX activation codes, these are un-redeemed items, which would cause a real world liability. Once PLEX becomes an in-game item it has been redeemed. Of course in accounting you can makes a lot of things show in a way that it’s really the truth of the situation, so they could have been showing PLEX as deferred income.
Here is the main reason that fictional in-game money/currency/commodities don’t actually have real world value (even though they can have a real world cost): because Eve players aren’t being arrested! If 500 PLEX is $20, and you take it from me against my will, that is a criminal offense. I know you might say that by playing the game I consented to losing my PLEX, but if that were the case Eve would have to carry warnings/consents like gambling sites do. If ISK or PLEX has a real world money value, then CCP would have to issue tax statements to all the players so they could pay taxes on their in-game earnings. None of that happens in the real world, because fictional in-game currency is just that, fictional. And being fictional CCP can’t pay in PLEX to keep the devs paid and servers running.
Server load has no cost, its physical hardware already in place, its costing them the same regardless of if plexed accounts or free accounts login, the same goes for development time, their costs haven’t gone up because someone started free to play, there isn’t any cost to them financially and the extra dozen or so DB tables aren’t going to amount to much when its all automated, yes there is going to be a tiny amount of extra CPU load but in the grand scheme of things the CPU isn’t sitting at 100% anyway so its just using already paid for idle resources
Sure and they would be dismissed, it would be almost guaranteed, to the point that i would just write it off as a loss personally and just move on with my life, so yes legally speaking you would be among the list of john does technically owed money but there would never be a return on that so its not really even worth considering
Wow! I don’t think you could have missed my position any more than this. But, you have illustrated my point quite nicely. You have taken my argument as an insult to in-game PLEXed accounts because it makes them second-class customers and drags them down to the level of the filthy Alphas. I understand how it can be seen this way, because elitist and bigoted minds are always insulted by statements of quality.
This argument and the (true) idea that PlEXed Omegas are not actually paying anything is only insulting if “free to play” is a pejorative. I have never used it that way, and have have been against others using it that way. The point is not “PLEXed Omegas are less than subbed Omegas”. My points have been:
Just in case anyone is wondering, I’m not an Alpha whining for more free stuff or more equal treatment. I pay CCP each month in real world currency, and the Alpha update will not cause me to unsub any of my accounts. I don’t have to be an Alpha to want/expect other players to stop treating them like space-junk.
LOL LOL LOL Sorry, but that comment deserved even more laughing. In a business like CCP’s server load would be a main operational cost (new development, marketing, etc. is not “operational”) along with bug fixing, and customer service. You are right that one account doesn’t add much to the server load. But you would be wrong to think that CCP isn’t calculating a cost for each account/active account.
It isn’t that each user/account makes the dev cost go up, I didn’t say that. I said that all accounts (Alpha or Omega) cost CCP the same. You can’t say Omega accounts cost them dev money but Alphas don’t. what ever the dev cost is, and I’m not saying it’s per account, it’s the same regardless of clone state. Sever loads, whatever they are, are the same regardless of clone state.
I never said omegas cost them while alphas didn’t
And the server load is a non-issue, they use their own physical hardware compared to other developers who use things like amazon EC instances which do cost more the more you have, they will have a pretty flat rate for running their hardware, extra players won’t factor in to it
I didn’t say anything about what you said, I was only clarifying my point. Which I’m still not sure if you get, if you are arguing it by by disagreeing and saying that both are zero. Zero = zero, which would be what I said, the cost is the same.
But you did say:
Which implies, by omission, that only a free to play account doesn’t make their costs go up. And so needed clarification.
Also you appear to think that one user account and 1 million user accounts cost the same in server resources, because if each account doesn’t cost anymore adding a bunch of zeros together is still zero.
Translation: “I don’t know anything about hosting businesses” Why do you think amazon EC charges more for more load? It’s because more load costs more, it’s more use on the server, it’s higher cooling and power costs. Saying that sever load is a non-issue because they use there own servers is like saying your ship was free because you mined all the ore yourself. Running their own servers makes server load more of an issue than if they didn’t. But this is really getting off any trace of a topic, and doesn’t matter since any value, including nothing, will still make my point true.
pls add for alpha players Planet Managment and if can use only t1 BC,BS so pls add ships Masteries all skills to lv 3-4 masteries for full use BC,BS thx
I’d say no on this one personally, it’d flood the market with PI as this is one area that would scale really well with multiple free alts.
No. The power of the planet is not good in the hands of alphas.
With amazon you are hiring a server instance, your costs go up the more instances you require, the EVE cluster is NOT instanced, they own the same amount of hardware and processing power regardless of if 100 people login or 1000 people login, its physical hardware not an instance spun up as required, TQ being at 70% load costs them the same as TQ being at 10% load, well technically there will be a tiny minor difference in power draw but thats more going to be a saving made by the hosting company as they charge for “up to” x kw/h and if TQ doesn’t use that much then thats a profit they have made, CCP won’t get charged any less for only having 100 people logged in compared to 1000
Amazon EC on the other hand is a VM running on physical hardware, they charge you for each instance used, it “can” work out cheaper because with them you only pay for what you use rather than paying for the physical hosting of hardware like CCP does, more load reduces the amount of resources amazon has to offer customers which means they will charge more for people using more resources, CCP’s host isn’t billing them based on server load because CCP owns the hardware rather than by leasing on-site hardware or by using EC instances that are spun up as required
The 2 companies operate in very different ends of the market
This is a BIG no.
Sorry, if they made PI available for Alphas… everyone would create 1000 PI alt alpha accounts… and PI would lose all value since the market would be flooded. Anything that works without being logged in (like PI) should be excluded from Alphas.
I completely agree with you.
Or find out their character from the past was stole years ago, and nothing can be done about it but send out a TOS violation email…
That’s what happened to me when I “returned”. lol
What about auto-targeting missiles? at least lvl1
Ready to be banned for side stepping the EULA, right? 
If “access” is what matters then there’s no need for T2 weapons, battlecruisers or battleships for alphas.