@Lucas_Kell Are you paying?
Which is a definition of freemium.
1 Like
There isn’t a single definition that fits all situations. Gold ammo that cannot be obtained within the game, but only by spending extra real cash on top of the sub price ? Definitely a pay-2-win setting, in my opinion. That’s also why I responded in a swiftly closed thread about the sales of skill training packages, although they are a “single-purchase” feature but with attribute advantages that don’t exist in the game bar a few event drops. That’s why I asked “did they finally find their golden ammo ?”.
To make matters slightly more complex, the new chinese server has some new features apparently in this respect. You will have to go over on Reddit, because I’m not sure it’s allowed to post links to reddit here. Loot boxes and pay to win superships, you can’t miss it (the post is hours old). So Lukas can feel safe in the knowledge that Eve Online is p2w, but only on that other version.
I dislike freemium to an extent. I still need to form a better opinion on freemium. What are your thoughts on it? I am happy to buy games that are a 1 time buy. Honestly, I view buying games as a collection hobby. Game will be there in my steam library forever. Subscription games won’t.
EVE ofc as a freemium game. And a smaller game called Vendetta Online (simple elite dangerous style spaceship pilot MMO) That recently switched to freemium.
I doubt that. First of all the people who plan and code the plex/sp stuff aren’t the same ones who plan and code game updates. Secondly CCP has shown lots of focus on long term stuff, even to the point of knowingly pissing off people short term.
Having said that, should games REALLY try their hardest to retain 15+ year bitter vets who cry and whine about anything, at the cost of everything else?
1 Like
My personal view on this matter is that I inherently dislike paying monthly to play. Which is why I never tried WoW (and recently FF14). But then I jumped onto EVE even before they added alphas and compromised my stance. Still I am avoiding montly fee games as much as I can. I have no problem to pay considerable sum once to purchase the game if the game is worth it.
I do tolerate free to play wins with optional payments tho. Be it cosmetic or advantage, I absolutely understand that the servers needs to be paid, providing unlimited time service isn’t free (btw I am hosting a persistent campaign for Neverwinter Nights 1 Enhanced Edition myself) so when I am satisfied with the game I do purchase these. However I am no longer satisfied with neither League of Legends where I spent quite a lot of money previously nor EVE Online and as such I refuse to pay any more. Conveniently EVE has a mechanic exactly for players like me so we can grind ISK and purchase omega with ingame money without need to pay real cash. So last years of playing I was doing that. Now, not even that because many reasons.
Probably the main reason I don’t want to sub anymore is that the time-limited nature of sub is forcing me to play a lot to make use of that purchase to maximum and I don’t want games forcing me when or how much I play them. I mean, I can’t understand players who pay 20€ monthly while only playing on saturday and sunday which is 8 days of 30 they paid.
1 Like
The 900m ISK that a person spends to advance by 9 days on the skills queue is 900m ISK they then cannot spend on the ship they are advancing for. In the time vs money equation, they are actually no better off. They have actually lost the value of an entire battleship. The ‘win’ is illusory. Maybe if money spent on SP was converted into equivalent killboard loss, this would be much more apparent.
1 Like
In game, which you don’t play 
Lots of stuff small and big, UI changes, graphics changes, tutorial changes. Daily stuff you run in to if one actually undocks and plays and doesn’t use full zoomed out RTS mode. Lots of cool little things they don’t even mention in the notes but get changed anyway.
1 Like
I am not saying he is right. I am inclined to his opinion on the matter, but of course there is no real proof to back it up, just feelings.
Eitherway, regarding your argument. That is certainly true, however, lets say that EVE wasn’t selling anything but sub. Would they need to employ these developers who are right now in charge of new skins, new deals and making up new services/things to sell players? No.
Then the question is, wouldn’t they at this time have instead say 100 content developers and 100 microtransaction developers actually 200 content developers? And would the game be richer? One can’t really say, but I would like to believe it would have.
That’s not what I said and microtransactions are not necessary to make something P2W.
The thing that makes a game P2W is if you feel compelled, beyond the base cost to purchase or subscribe for the game, to pay extras in order to compete in the game.
Golden ammo would be pay to win, even if every subscribed player got a monthly free stack of golden ammo.
A good example of this is RuneScape, an MMO that did the p2w element of subscribed players versus nonsubscribed players well with the equivalent of what would in EVE be an alpha server where everyone is limited to their alpha skills.
Long ago when I was still playing that game as one of their equivalent of alpha players, they introduced ‘spin to win’ lootboxes that could contain many sorts of valuable prices, including a sizable pile of ingame currency that at the time was worth more than I had, multiple times over.
It’s clearly a p2w element aimed at making players spend more real money in order to win (you could buy more spins with real money. If you think the hypernet encourages gambling…).
But they also added ways for players to earn daily free spins, and subscribed players got more free spins.
Where am I going with this story?
Well, even if you add a pay to win element as free samples included in the subscription, like your mention of stacks of golden ammo, it’s still pay to win and in my opinion disgusting game practices.
This was one of the reasons I stopped playing that game.
that doesn’t pay the bills.
A gaming company can choose to devote all their effort into making a super complicated MMO with raging customers who demand to be entertained even after 15 years, while getting fckall income. They can also choose to make gacha mobile games that take no effort and don’t require catering to crying vets, making bazillions. That’s the current state of the gaming market, why would people invest time, effort and money into a product that pays them massively LESS while requiring more and prolonged effort.
So IF a company chooses to actually play on hard mode and make/maintain an MMO they need to be incentivized to do so, ie more than just subs. that’s just the reality and I’m completely fine with that.
HOW they do it depends and should it come at the expense of updates of course not. But lets be honest here, CCP isn’t slow on content&changes updates because one dev made an SP sale add, it’s because they are (again) focussing their resources on another game.
1 Like
We don’t need feature content, we need fixes. We need people actually undocking and doing stuff. Not folks who only look at the industry/PI/market window, those can pretty much get lost. FW for most people is just farming isk so when they do change it expect that to be reduced massively. Be careful what you wish for.
They have graphical artists anyway that create the looks for new ships, structures and the likes. If they spend a couple of hours each month creating ship skins to sell, that’s a lot of value from a developer they have anyway.
A game like EVE has a lot of overhead and I really doubt that CCP would be better off financially without their few employees that are in charge of new skins, sales and services if that also means no sales from skins and services. I mean, if they would be better off, why would those jobs be around?
Yes. But we mainly need gameplay improvements. More convenient ways of doing things, better UIs (there is and was some work on that, but there are still abominations like Journal which is updating once per 5 minutes even if you remove offer directly from that UI).
There are thousands of such suggestions from players on this forum in respective thread, but I saw very few of them being implemented. (Well none of those I know about / none that I liked, but I will be generous here and assume that CCP surely implemented some of them that I just don’t know about).
This is what I personally except from CCP to deliver. I don’t need new content because players and their interactions are the main content, the rest is padding anyway that will always get old and boring eventually it is just a matter of time.
1 Like
One of the reasons I discourage players, especially new players, from grinding ISK for their Omega is that they will be spending a lot of time each month for the privilege of grinding again next month and will burn out because the game is forcing you to spend so much time playing the game to accomplish very little.
(It’s different for long term players though, if they do not have to spend days just to get Omega for the next month.)
The good part about a subscription is that you pay and unlock the entire game and are free to spend your time ingame however you want to that month. Even if that is 8 days a month.
Sure, paying a subscription is a recurring cost, but for an MMO I think that’s fair. Unlike single player games, MMOs have a server, game and playerbase to maintain.
Yeah absolutely. That is one of the other reasons I am not plexing my account(s) anymore. Especially with new PLEX prices that grinding is even longer. I do have ingame money to plex few months, but knowing that my money will eventually run dry would be forcing me to grind ISK which I don’t want to do anymore either.
Fortunately alpha is enough for me and I found a ways to squeeze it to maximum benefits so I can do at least some stuff. I mean, if you aren’t focused on maximizing your profit then you don’t have to care how much ISK is that activity that you just want to do. I do lvl 3 distribution missions a lot recently and I enjoy that despite it is 0 profit activity. Especially like the trips into lowsec.
1 Like
Nice strawman, again.
There’s a massive overproduction happening, mostly from people with a zillion alts who produce because they can. We had scarcity for a reason, we have to tell newbies they can’t really profit from production for a reason.
All those age old alts with people who just consume, produce and bloat the market, those can get lost. Those also tend to be the most whiney folks of them all who when they get their grubby hands on a newbie will indoctrinate them to do more production all while “teaching” them nonsense.
Those fckers need to go, the game is full of them. They’re literally NPC. That makes room for new folks who might not do the “why am I not entertained after 15 years of choosing boredom” clowns.
As a sidenote, anyone who feels EVE needs “content” is playing the wrong game. Go find some rollercoaster MMO, possibly one where they do have cat ears.
WE are the content, if you feel there’s a lack of content then you’re probably not putting in any effort to find or BE content.
only since 2004.
And again, straw man. I’m not saying ALL of the producers, that’s just you doing your normal routine to create a straw man to then argue against it ad nauseam.
It’s not that I don’t understand it, it’s that it’s terrible. We’ve tried the pandering to carebears for long enough and all you get is crying and demanding easier and easier. We don’t need more people ogling market and industry windows, especially not alts. They don’t create content and really just suck everything dry until it’s boring to the point when those folks cry for “content” and when presented with massive buffs to mining STILL can’t stop making a 3k reply threadnaught about how terrible it is because one thing isn’t also buffed. Tired of those fucks, tired of talkers, not doers. Like you.
With that, not going to continue.
The intention of scarcity was to temporarily reduce the influx of new materials below the rate at which they were consumed, in order to reduce the massive stockpiles players had gathered. Stockpiles, which were created in a time when gathering of materials was a lot easier due to overbuffed Rorquals.
Scarcity was meant to reduce the impact of stockpiles of older players and quite literally was meant to create a more level playing field for newer players and improve the economy for the future of EVE.
While scarcity was not without it’s own problems, I don’t see how it did the opposite. (Except during scarcity itself of course, which was a temporary measure).
Could you explain how scarcity didn’t help newbies?
1 Like