The current set of Alpha skills will allow you to earn enough in game to PLEX your account. You can, if patient and willing to invest the time in the game, progress to flying a Titan without ever paying CCP a cent in real world money.
If you are impatient, you can buy skill injectors, PLEX and paid subscription to fly the Titan today. Your choice.
Edit: if you take the long road, you’ll actually have the player skill to fly the ship properly when you get the character skill.
You can pay all the money in the world, it won’t make you win against me, because nothing I want to achieve can be undone by you or anything you have paid for.
Since you cant inject actual player skills, it cannot be pay to win.
We have several examples of people making an account, injecting bad ass ships and getting their asses kicked. because they thought it was the same “best in slot” system as every other MMO out there.
You can inject every single skills in the game, that doesnt make you a good player at all.
Hadn’t seen that trailer before, thanks for the link!
The way I see it, I could be the one that thought I was ‘paying to win’ when I used money to become the owner of the Citadel in that trailer. How wrong would I be?
I could also be one of the pilots in the fleet destroying that same Citadel, without spending a penny, and therefore be winning against somebody who ‘paid to win’.
Just goes to show that the concept of being the winner is extremely relative in EVE and not at all guaranteed by paying money.
No, it’s pay for fun - and it’s not even granted it’s your fun.
If you buy some plex to reach great skills and fly a shiny new big ship, you have fun to fly around in something cool and the gankers you meet have the killboard fun (kinda win-win). In this very forum there’s plenty of stories of brand new battleship captains who wonder why they’ve lost their precious new ship although they had spent hundreds of Millions of ISK for ship and fitting.
You get that when you biomass your character. In the end all of us are winners, some (i’m playing to have fun, not to win) just take a bit longer to get there.
You have always been able to buy characters for PLEX in the forum market, the introduction of skill injectors doesn’t change anything really. It simply means players can do it on a smaller scale and buff their own existing characters.
The game is extremely P2W now. The biggest factor is plex + multiboxing. You can basically complete all the tasks that normally require a fleet, while solo.
IMHO the skill injectors are a secondary evil. Its both good and bad. Bad for the reasons stated, but also good. For example if not for the extractors and injectors I would have not come back to the game due to years required to train to do what I want to do. Instead I drained my mining / indy accounts, only keep my hauler at around half skill, just enough to move my own stuff around when I want to, and poured those skillpoints into my combat toons and converted leftovers into plex. Even with that, I still have to train for maybe 2 years or so simply because of diminishing returns on skill injectors once you hit a ceirtain amount of skillpoints. So the injectors have their ups / downs.
All of the money in the world won’t make you better at EvE, in PvP or any other activity. I’ve seen enough in my time spent playing to state confidently that player skill > skillpoints, ships, modules, and isk in 90% of scenarios.
The game was more p2w back when off grid boosting was still a thing. If you could afford a booster alt, you could get insane bonuses to your kitey bs ships and be an eleet peeveepee-r. That’s mostly gone now.
Plexing and multiboxing aren’t exactly pay2win inclined mechanics anyway. The point of running massive highsec ice mining fleets or an sp farm is to not pay for the game. Instead, those players pay with their souls.
Here’s the story of a 3 week old character who has probably invested a couple thousand real dollars in Eve. He is, presumably, enjoying himself but, I don’t think most of us would think he’s “winning” the game.