Funny thing is, the main reason may actually be the USA rather than Russia.
The player count in the US timezone has absolutely tanked, not long after the big war. Software is a numbers game. More customers means the price can be lower, which attracts even more customers. This price increase has to be a desperate move.
The USA tops all the world charts when it comes to median income, mean income and disposable income. I reckon the Americans who left, were funding a big portion of this game, but CCP canât very well point their fingers at them. The customer is king and if they want to leave, that says more about the company.
Now if I were a Russian, Iâd definitely look into getting the most out of free Alpha accounts, account spinning and isk-PLEXing on rare occasions, like good events. Itâs only a virtual game. A dollar has a lot more real world buying power outside of the US and western Europe.
I mean just look at gas price. Most people will cut on online products before real life stuff like food. Still the solution was not INCREASE THE PRICE. If anything it exacerbates the problem, the other way, reducing the price wouldâve been a better call i believe. Itâs not like they are selling a product with a definite price per unit, selling more of it is a net profit, or at least try to get through the inflation period with as little damage as possible.
Yes. What they could have done instead is conjure up new digital âproductsâ to sell alongside the old stuff, like a Super Omega with a triple training speed, sold at a higher price. Might be worth it to some, while not disturbing the rest of the player base.
No, putting player counts in the hands of less customers, disaster waiting to happen.
Multi-boxing should not be encouraged nor depended upon for existential survival, that right there is a death spiral and last grasp to boost revenues.
Average is THREE (3) accounts per customer, thatâs a disaster.
If you canât afford to multi-account, then donât. Multi-boxers be gone. Thatâs like crying you canât afford THREE cars, or THREE houses, or whatever.
Hope This Was Worth It, Watched Eve Come Down In Player Count Steadily Since The Price Increase, So looks Like Eve Is Going To Die Now, WTF. So Sad The Greed Of The Rest of The World Made It Into Your Pockets. But Your Going to See Real Quick, That It Was A Bad Decision, and You Made More At 14.99 With More Subscribers, Then 19.99 and Almost No Subscribers, the numbers are Dropping So Quick I Dont Want To Pay For Another Month, Everyone Is Leaving, Minus the Few Hardcore Players, And Retired People, You just Totally Allieanated So Many Playerâs, that if you fixed it Today They Wouldnât Come Back. And the Stuff At Fanfest Wasnât Worth the Price Increase, And The Players, Are Thinking Of ALL THE MONEY WASTED ON AN ATTEMPT AT A FPS GAME, FAILED over and over, BUT LETS CHARGE THEM MORE TO KEEP TRYING ! DROP THE FPS IDEA and apologize to your community and revert the Sub Price. Hopefully it wont be to late⌠Ps i run 7 sub accounts, and plex, im a 200 USD a month player and im doneâŚ
industry and mining guys do this normally, and it will affect Eve majorly and in a bad way unfortunately They Made a HUGE MISTAKE, So Much That, I dont even Know What To Think Anymore. Inflation Everywhere in The World And Now to Our Fun As Well, Looks Like We Will be Getting out more and enjoying the Sun. Or Find a New Game, Star Citizen is looking awfully awesome at this point⌠Sigh CCP Dug Their GRAVEâŚ
New Edenâs market is so volatile right now as just last week skill extractors were selling for 408 now selling for 432. Thatâs 240m jump per 10 stack and the conversion from isk to plex is still under 4m
Some folks on reddit have suggested that PLEX and extractors are in high demand from Russians who can only sub by extracting SP. that would also explain why injectors are not increasing along with extractors as they are being dumped on the market.
Iâm not smart enough to know if this is true, but it sounds plausible. Itâs destroying the value of SP farming at the moment, which sucks for those of us who just sell SP to get an omega discount on characters that we use.
the truth is that the subscription price has increased, while the game does not offer anything new to spend SP or other price changes in ISK farm places, so SP in the game is in low demand.
therefore, when the price of PLEX increased significantly, it became unprofitable to pay for the subscription through the sale of SP accumulated for the month, now you need to pay another 1 billion ISK to buy a omega.
I waiting with interest how this will all end. most likely there will be big discounts on the purchase of PLEX very soon:). but I also see that many of my friends are not ready to spend so much ISK on the purchase of omega and are considering the option of either leaving the game or playing casual on alpha without spending on omega, sp.
There is a design which would help reduce multi boxing, if resource acquisition was a bit more like explo i.e. you had to scan down ore sigs and rather than allowing you to farm the resource for x hours with y ships, it provided a single large ish drop of resources such that you can still acquire enough resources to build a ship in say 2 hours, but it means scanning down and farming 10-15 sigs with a single account.
Relic site hunting is engaging and fun and you canât really multi box it.
The above model is the design Albion Online uses where you canât multi box farm resources because youâre travelling all around the black zone searching for resource nodes which you can mine/skin etc in a few mins at most.
Itâs the fact anoms/belts are just a sit-and-wait farm mechanic which makes n+1 the meta. I ran 4 perfectly skilled rorq pilots, loved it, but I did it because of the CCP design, not in spite of it. This isnât the players fault and thatâs what you arenât really grasping.
I think if Eve was being designed now, they might go down the above path, but at this stage, with an average of 3 accounts per customer it would be economic suicide.
Skill injectors now sell at about 700 M, pretty close to the all time high at the start of may. Sales volume is only slightly lower than normal, so I donât think thatâs quite it.
Players are still buying injectors at relatively high prices, surprisingly.
The looming trouble for the farmers is that the extractor prices rose with the price of PLEX, so they cannot continue to profit from the price increase, unless they bought a lot of extractors well in advance (though I reckon a lot of the bigger players did get many extractors in bulk sales when the sale was still on).
The winners are the guys who continually hoarded PLEX long before the announcement. Starting an SP farm now would be a bad idea though.
Maybe weâll also get to see a real decline in demand for SPs and injectors in the future, as CCP has kicked away most of the economic ladders over the past few years (no point in skilling into ships you canât afford - CCP effectively killing their own business model), but Iâm not seeing those results just right now.
Could this also include what is happening as per what @Delvin_Sek informed us with though? It is happening on a much larger scale as more players are extracting from alts eg, pilot alts under 50m.
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This is more general discussion rather than feedback as my observation is certainly not what CCP can actually see.
the events of February-March of course influenced, but from all the schedules it can be seen that the crisis began from April 20-24, and this is the date of the announcement of the subscription increase. players simply chose that the price was high and decided to pay in PLEX. Yes, and events, Capsuleer Day with tons of free SP, ISK, changing entrance awards, also contributed to the depreciation of SP, increase in the price of PLEX
