Just returned to Eve after 2 years away and was unpleasantly surprised by new subscription price. I will not tell you a story about average monthly income here in Russia (45-55K) and about how long you can live here for 1K RUR (2 weeks), but it makes Eve unavailable for a good amount of people, who dont have 3-4-5 hours a day to farm ISK. Not the worst people for sure. But, as we say here “troubles of indians do not bother sheriff”, so lets get to the topic.
There is a great option to make Eve subscription available again even for the people who can not pay the full price. You can make something like “half Omega” for a half price. For example - some people can do without T3, invention, triglavian and edencom stuff and even T2, but will be more than happy to have access to mining barges and planetary interaction. Yep it looks like this new Expert system, but those systems are way more expensive than a regular subscription.
So what do you think? Eve is a great support for… mental health.
You can play for free as an Alpha clone (restricted ships and skills, some content limits). This option was developed specifically to handle players who play infrequently or need to get back into the groove/learn the game initially - enough access to learn or reacquaint yourself with the content, not so much that RMTers can bot the market into oblivion.
Beyond that, there are apparently shorter sub timeframes available via Steam? I don’t know the details as I don’t use Steam.
Actually bot masters do not pay for Omega with real money because their “gameplay” works 24/7 by itself and generates PLEX’es with ease. There are many ways to use bots here, but dont you think someone who wanna make real money “from” the game will spend real money “on” the game? Thats absurd.
Nowhere did I say RMTers buy Omega subs with real money. I said Alpha accounts have restrictions to reduce bot abuse potential. Literally, the ability for Alpha accounts to do level 4 missions was removed because of the income potential and abuse by RMT botting accounts.
There are already multiple gateways to play, there has to be a reasonable investment of either time or money from the player for use of the service, and they are pretty much inline with most other mmorpg’s. There has to be a balance that brings benefit to both sides, and I feel Alpha already brings that. To do a ‘half omega’ with added skills, would probably lead to a lot of people dropping from ‘full’ omega alltogether that are happy in a smaller bubble of EVE, and id expect would hurt the game more than help it.
While im not dismissing a persons individual circumstances, I understand for some there are impossible situations and this isnt directed at them, its hard to not go down the route of thought that if someone is in that bad of a position in life, spending time playing EVE probably isnt the best idea to begin with.
I’ve paid for the game, even when i’ve been on a extended break from it. don’t ask me why…Alpha was created for those that wanted a taste of EVE, without the cost of EVE so you already have your EVE experience. There are plenty of Youtube videos on Plexing your account if you are unable to pay cash to go Omega but we don’t need yet another tier of Cap Pilot. Training Alphas is enough.
Yeah, it seems Expert systems could have been a solution but instead looks more like a cash grab according to some people. I don’t know enough about it to judge.
I cannot see CCP making the effort for half-Omega. I could maybe see microtransactions where you pay cash for individual skills, but that would be a nightmare for the user unless a special interface were set up to renew the whole skill set. CCP won’t go through that effort easily, even though it might be a spectacular cash fountain.
That comment is about as internationally aware as a turtle.
If you are not Russian, don’t live in Russia, and never been to Russia maybe you should not think you know the economic situation in Russia, cause you don’t.
The main reason for the update is that the change in currency conversion over the last few years has created an imbalance between the pricing in Rubles compared with the rest of the world. This has resulted in the abuse of current price differences, which has had a negative impact, both in and out of game.