I still don’t understand why you can’t just keep the skills you’ve already paid for, and buy plex when there are new parts of the game you want to skill into.
What we have here, right, is two dining rooms. The first is for the Omegas. They are at an “all you can eat” buffet. That means you can eat as much as your physiology will digest over time (limited). But pay way more than the quality of the food warrants. The second dining room is for the alphas. They are getting prison gruel and yelled at by the power, and wearing stripped suits.
Why can’t we just buy the food and eat it as we wish? Maybe, you know, relax with a cup of quafe. Relax.
Folks will buy the skill books if the depth of game play they open up seems worth it. They might wait a while between sets of purchases. So, for example, someone might buy a bunch of skills to train into T3. Then once, skilled up, they might fly their T3s around for a couple of months, and not buy plex. But then they want to try BLOPS, so they decide to buy those skills, and do that.
If the game had been developed in this fashion from the start, Dust probably would have been viable. If you could take your Eve character down into Dust and skill up entirely different sets of ground based skills on the same character, the Devs who are now coming up with new skill trees to interest saturated long term Eve players, who have nothing left to train, could have been working on that directly related set of skills.
If you kept what you paid for, skill books would function as DLC packs. The devs would be therefore working on each new facet of the game as a new DLC release (likely to generate a lot of money if popular, if not…).
My suspicion is that a good deal of ill will would be therefore avoided. The current model of leasehold, where you lose everything if you don’t pay on time, generates an expectation of constant performance improvement across the entire experience. We pay you every month, so you (the devs) work for us. That is the thinking with the current business model.
If we were just buying DLCs (skills books), we could be less enthusiastic about some, and more about others. They would just be DLCs we bought. Nobody would work for anybody.
Anyway, bring the hate.