You are right I don’t have any hard numbers to support that. What I can say is I can see in the market still supports free to play/one time purchase games. CCP has to compete with all the other subscription services out there. I am inferring that since CCP created the alpha system there are more people in EVE today vs if they just stuck to omega. I believe it’s pretty reasonable the Alpha free to play system drew in many more people who eventually subscribed vs just being omega.
I try to be balanced in my assessments of CCP. I have seen many things where I disliked CCP for doing. The mining changes really forced to change my playstyle.
I believe WoW is not on the level of complexity EVE faces on a day-to-day basis of keeping the server running. However, I would like to be proved wrong.
Comes back to your first point there is no data that we can see how many alpha/omega players there are. Naturally I still assume it should be more omega players in eve as you can’t multibox alphas.
The decline of EVE is similar in a way to SWG. IN SWG, you had a living breathing universe, players strived to one day become jedi.
Sony dumbed down the game and made jedi a starting class, similar to CCP selling PLEX from the store and allowing you to buy years worth of skill points,dumbing down requirment for ships, new players being able to pretty much hop straight into battleships.
Its hard to prove anything really. Bottom line though is when you put the burden of maintaining the game on the players who pay and give a free ride to Alpha’s I think that is a mistake. I wish instead they would have offered a free Alpha account to anyone with an Omega account. 1 Omega account = 1 free Alpha account so the more Omega accounts the more Alpha accounts but only for people who are actually paying for the game. It would potentially cut some of the costs of the people who pay for the game and reward them for being loyal subscribers. Giving people something for nothing in my view is a horrible idea.
I mean that could have been what they were doing and I still wouldn’t have liked it. Using microtransactions instead of subs in my view is ruining many MMO’s and again, it shows these companies only care about the bottom line because it is ruining the games.
I have not played for three months and i can see that loads of people have left since the price increase…
My accounts are still valid but i have not upgraded them to Omega, i may come back but i have not really decided yet! I thought the Fanfest was very poor!
Yes to this. I would love a “add-on” option for training speed increase. I am aware I can buy skill injectors/extractors etc. That is not the same.
Charge me an extra 5 bucks a month and give me double/triple the training speed. It would leave the price still attainable for those on a budget and offer those not on a budget the option.
But yeah go to your NEOCOM, down to ships, and then ship tree. Then click on the different pirate factions and you can see what ships they have. And yes they have dreads, supers, and titans. So it isn’t like some far-off statement that it couldn’t be possible.
That is effectively what is happening, players are leaving as it’s not the game for them.
Question is, is that good business sense? If their target market alienates a good proportion of their customers, are they targeting too small a niche? Do they need to cast their net wider by offering a wider range of content?
All well and good having the #1 stellar, cut-throat and pvp-centric hardcore MMO with a perfectly balanced economy, but if that translates to 10k PCU, you’ve got to ask whether the players advocating for that are cutting off their noses to spite their face!
The niche is gamers with nice big fat bank balances.
The amount of plex being bought by credit card warriors will have told them that they can milk us some more.
