For the few, rather than the many

Communications Center General Discussion
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Stealth plexaretooexpensive thread detected.

Proof, ignoring his follow-up comments:

It’s a game. The point is to play and enjoy, not to grind like it’s a job so you can leech off of others who pay your sub for you. If you can’t afford the money, or the time, then try a different game. We’re all kind of sick of farmers, leechers and people who want things for free or with the least effort possible. We already suffer from demanding princesses with limited cognitive potential. An Eternal September of the scale it would cause if the game was THAT cheap, plexwise, would completely wreck it.

Quality players > Quantity players.

This thread is a fraud.

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22

I think the OP is looking at things in the wrong light.

2 years ago, the OP would not have been able to even come back to eve without buying at least a month subscription. Now, he can log in as an alpha and see what eve has to offer.

Why not join a large nul group with your alpha and see what they have to offer? Every fleet needs tackle and if the OP is such a skilled vet, he has all the skills to fly a simple T1 tackle frig. So join a nil group. You won’t risk much. If you enjoy it, them see what you can do to earn your plex with that nul group and go from.l there.

I just find it funny how it’s all I can’t do this or fly that for free. May be instead the focus should be on what can I do to rebuild my connections and enjoy eve without paying, then decide if resubbing is worth it. As it stands, the OP has a lot of patch notes to read.

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Well, unlike you, I paid for EVE monthly with RL money for 5 years. So excuse me, if I tell you to stfu. I funded the game you play now, man. Show a little respect.

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Yeah, true. I might invest the time to join Brave Newbies or EVE-uni, to get back in the action. But as its been said before, I need to research quite a bit, to even know how to do it all again lol. But yeah, I was actually ready to do it, but got pretty discouraged, when I heard about the new Plex-stuff :frowning:

We´ll see. Just seem weird to me, how it all works, is all. And cant for the life of me understand, why they dont go all in, on making the game attract and keep new people playing. Because so far, it really dosent seem like they have.

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I’ve been playing longer than you, and never plexed my accounts. I have a job and don’t waste my time grinding.

Anyhow, please everyone, respect this man for he has always paid for his accounts!

Respect!

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26

Yes.
There is a lot of paths you can take as alpha to make isk with one account.
One character salvaging for specific groups in null can get rich pretty quickly.
If you have a bit more time, you can even hunt combat signatures in highsec and combat anomalies (for escalations), a bit more rng loot but every now and then you can find Pith C-type invulnerability field, c-type adaptive nano membranes, sentient drone modules, nexus chips, ded prop mods, etc.
Some alphas are doing null and wh exploration for a few hours per week, with great success.
As omega, another option is PI in wormholes with 3 characters (again, one account).
Trading is also a source of income, although to scale it you will need omega skills too.

There are a lot of other possibilities.

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It’s not so hard. It’s also not so easy. It’s probably just about right.

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Well, in that case, you should be more sympathetic to my situation. But I guess I forgot how many morons EVE also has lol. I think you get the point. Just becuase something is very easy for you, and youve been playing longer, it dosent mean youre right about anything. THe universe dosent evolve around your sacred orifice, sir.

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Oh, and learn to ignore the obivous trolls. When you follow some threads here you see a pattern in their replies, just ignore them.

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30

Thx for the tips, man. Ill give it a gander on the wiki, do a little research (dagnabbit!).
But some of what you propose, cant be done easily in T1 gear (alpha-clone), or without spending weeks finding people who would trust me enough to make me salvage for them etc. So yeah, good ideas, but still dosent solve the issue of time. I can maybe play max. a couple of hours a day, 4-5 days a week. So yeah, not really a lot, in EVE-terms lol.

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Heh, yeah. Been away too long from EVE lol… (Initiating L3 Troll-filter - Filter Engaged)

CRAP! I need to sub for Troll-filter?! :wink:

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You’re thinking of this wrong.

Pre-alpha clones, you had to buy a 1 month sub to re-log in to your account to begin with. You could then plex your accounts in game… but unless you were on a trial account you had to start with real money.

So… there’s two things to look at it. First… what you have to do your first time to get to 1.5b isk to do the initial sub (not even possible pre-alpha).

Second… after your first month is paid for… what you can do going forward to continue paying 1.5b isk a month using OMEGA skills to keep your character at Omega.

Now, as a returning player (similar to what I was a year ago), you have huge advantages over a new toon in this regard. But here is a very basic formula that would work for almost anyone.

  1. Get a t1 exploration ship (say a Heron/Probe/Magnate/whatever the gallente have).
  2. Spend about 30-50 hours scanning relic sites (or relic and data if you accept more hits from data sites with less return).
  3. Sell the stuff. After putting in this many hours, you’ll have enough for your first Omega sub.
  4. Train your main and your two alts for PI (plus ability to fly epithal). This will take you a bit, but you’ll end up with 3 toons able to make a fair amount of passive income. Even the worst null-sec space should bring in a minimum of 1-1.5b a month in PI income.
  5. The first couple of months (while training PI) you’ll still have to make a bit of isk elsewhere. I’d recommend you join a null-sec entity that will buy your PI (saving you time to realize PI income) and let you rat/mine to make up the difference while your’e getting your PI set up. By the time all three toons are set… you’ll probably be very close to making all you need for plexing from mostly passive income sources.

It really isn’t super hard. I prefer to keep that PI isk… so I pay real money. But a big part of the reason plex costs so much is that you can use accounts to make skill injectors and do PI on all the toons of an account… which cost PLEX but make the owner a solid amount of isk in a mostly passive manner. Those accounts don’t skill up… but they can provide isk for the 2-3 accounts someone does actively play with and can provide cynos and cloaked camping benefits for the guy who is farming them for isk.

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I’d suggest you learn what a the stats show. They are concurrent users. People don’t usually play 24/7, so some log off and others log in. I believe Hillmar said at Vegas that Eve was increasing their player count again as well .

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Yeah, I hear ye. But I still think you are making it sound quite a bit more easy than it is. Youre talking about setting up three toons (i can hardly manage 1 at this point lol), spending 30-50 hours doing things I dont know how to do (I havent scanned in 3 yrs lol and I know its not exactly easy. Especially not with Alpha-only gear. The corp Im CEO of, had 20+ POCOs to earn from, but I think they got taken a while back, so theyre gone. I got good PI skills trained, but again: It takes a weekend at least, to re-set it all again, and thats just on one account.

SO the problem with it all, is still that I have to spend more time playing EVE, than I do on my RL job lol. And only after weeks of getting up to speed, then I can maybe pay my first Plex. I can speed that up a bit, by buying plex for RL money, but then Id have to pay for it, which was kind of the point. Ive paid for this game, MANY times over. THats why Im being stubborn about it. And now I have to pay AGAIN, to just get the possibility to get into a position, where I can earn my keep, relatively easy.
And dont forget. Ill have to keep doing it, or I wont be able to keep logged in. Which is hard for me to promise, with RL filling up the hours.

I get that it all sounds easy peasy for you guys. Its alright. But it just dosent seem that way for me. And plainly, not for many others, that tried the game out, some time. You dont have to defend the system, just because you excel in living with it. Its alright to be critical without flaming. Im just mildly curious about EVE again, but cant seem to get myself sold over by all the new stuff. Not at all, in fact. I might keel over for while, and try it, but I cant really see myself doing it the time needed, to make it fun for me. Grinding is VERY MUCH passé for me, so I need to keep that ■■■■ to a minimum.

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Yeah that’s fair cop, as i said “i could be mistaken”.

I mean i was checking if it was time to pick at your comment, not picking directly :slight_smile:

Hardly my fault your comments have more holes than a North Korean with an opinion is it?

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36

So maybe eve isn’t the game for you. Granted, any other MMO will still be a grind fest. And if it is free to play, the grind will be worse.

So what are you looking for in a game?

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I think you may have some rose tinted glasses on OP. Even when plex cost 550m it was STIL not easy. Or even feasible for a new player to earn that in a month.

In fact when I started (right around that time) I was told it wasn’t even something you should think about until after a year or more.
These days a month old player could do it with some determination and a bit of luck.

One thing that has never changed though. Is that trying to grind yourself a plex every month has never been a good goal to set. Yes it’s a point you can reach. But by the time you get there it’s not going to be work anymore.

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Wotan, I came back after a 9 year hiatus last year when Alpha’s were first introduced. I had no memory of ever using the scanner back then… and if I did it probably looked a lot different. I had ships fitted that weren’t even legal anymore because the number of high/med/low slots had changed. PI didn’t even exist when I played before.

I play maybe 1 hour a day on average… probably less.

In 10 months (starting in early December with 2 accounts), playing about 30 hours a month… I’ve made around 40-50b isk. It was probably less up front (setting up PI planets does take time) and accelerated in February when I went to null (even though I had to RE-set up PI when I made the move). that’s 30b worth of plex time to make 40-50b in isk (it’s a rough estimate because I’m not sure how much I had in assets when I first re-subbed).

I’m not a grinder. I occasionally mine or do anoms or missions… but more because that’s what I feel like doing at that moment, not because I need the isk. I enjoy exploration in wormholes where combat is always possible. I enjoy Faction Warfare. I enjoy station trading. I’ve found people willing to pay me to research BPO’s for them for isk. I’ve done a little manufacturing. I’ve also had some losses (on this toon recently I lost a 1.5b isk rattlesnake due to impatience and poor decisions). The only thing I do that I would consider “grinding” is the time I spend on PI… because the sole purpose of that is to get isk. But it’s maybe 2-3 hours a month total for 2-3b isk (1-1.5b per account). The rest, while it may bring in isk, is me simply doing what I feel like doing.

PI is a pain to set up… but the level of income it gives you makes Plexing pretty easy.

And again, forget the “alpha only gear” thought process. You only stay alpha until you have enough to pay for a month of omega time. If that takes you a week, a month or 3 months… it doesn’t really matter. Once you go omega you should be able to set yourself up well enough for isk you never have to go back (unless you just don’t feel like playing anymore).

1 Like
39

Good question. What I expect of ANY game, is at least a standing chance, to actually casually play the game to a relative high degree, without having to pay a RL equivalent of many games, or having to grind 80-90% of the playtime, to just keep playing.
THe Alpha-clone expansion planned, where you can use BCs and BSs, might help a bit towards that end, but even then, its still hard to grind L4 missions, in all out tier 1 stuff. Itll take long to finish the missions, and Id have to also salvage the missions too, to make it worth while. Back in the day, I earned about 100 mill an hour, running incursions (top fitted bling ships), or running the storyline missions once each month etc. Even if I pay for the first plex, the mechanics of the game still changed so much, that those L4 Storylines will be very hard to complete (especially the hard ones). Im not risking my top-fitted Kronos, and risk losing it, because Im rusty about the mechanics etc.

So while I agree that all the opportunities exist in EVE, they arent exactly as easy to get into, as some of you claim. And at the very least, itll take some weeks to be ready to fly relatively as I used to, and I would have lost a minimum of 15+EU or 1.5 bill isk doing it.

@Bjorn Tyrson: Yes, it WASNT much easier back then. But that dosent exconerate how it is now. Its not really an arguement, that because something always was hard, it has to be so still.

In general, Id love if the game were more: Easier the newer you are, and harder the older you get-sort of feel. Right now, its the exact opposite, where the ones least able to make it, gets the hardest jobs, and all the persistent veterans, are snoozing their way through the game, setting up buy/sell-orders and feeling superior in Local lol.
If the game-economy is completely run or determined by players, the game has a lethal DNA that will eventually kill it off, is my point. And since the game hasnt really grown, other than in patches and bigger alliances, Id say that prioritizing a huge change to the core-game, where people can play for free, would be quite healthy. Also on an economic scale. Imagine 1 mill players, rather than 25.000 players.

But I guess maybe the server cluster just cant grow bigger, so thats why they keep the game from growing.

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Wow…
Even at my peak time, back in the day, earning 20 bn was just impossible for me lol. And it certainly took more than an hour for me to even earn a measely 1bn. I never focused much on the moneygame in EVE, so I never got on the bandwagon, doing the really good anomalies og trading. I was more of an EM-specialist in PvP, with the Alliance, and before that, was CEO of COA. So yeah, I handled the EM-Fleet-commanding, diplo and recruitment-stuff. And some politics and such. SO I never got into how to earn a lot, because I never had to earn. I paid for plex with RL money or got Plex gifted by donators.

Now that Im old and decrepit, I cant get into Alliance-leadership-stuff again. Unless it comes later on, when im back at full speed. Which is unlikely, because yeah, none of the old contacts are active anymore. Took my years to build up that network.
So yeah, I see what youre saying. And I might slowly just alpha my way back, by playing an hour here and there. And at some point, that might light the EVE-spark once more. But all that dosnt help me now. It dosnt make me able to fun now. I tried fitting my old dusty Comet, and it literally took me 30 min to even get the T2 stuff replaced with Alpha-mods lol… Just looking at the bloody jumble of open windows, and trading numbers, system names etc. is just daunting lol… (shudders).Just wish it was like sliding into an old but still warm glove. Instead its like waking up in an OCD-nightmare, where everything seems like an insurmountable wall of text and info.