There are two different arguments going on here: one is the “Alpha is useless you need Omega” and the other is EVE’s pricing model.
So for the Alpha point, in an Alpha account with up to 20 million useable SP you can earn:
50 million ISK/hr WH gas huffing, C1/C2 ratting or null ratting
100 million ISK/hr in Abyssals up to around Tier 4 (usually in Gila), or Incursions in battleships
200 million ISK/hr in C3-C5 ratting (Praxis/Rattlesnake etc.) or higher tier Abyssals
There are other options but it’s certainly not ‘cannon fodder’. Yes it’s somewhat grindy but then, EVE has always been grindy so that’s nothing new. You can simply grind for free, now.
The other topic is “EVE isn’t worth a premium sub price in 2022”, which is absolutely true. CCP will definitely lose players, subs and income with this price increase. It might even signal the beginning of the end for EVE (which despite the drop in numbers, we’ve not really been at before now).
You mention $500/year for 2 subs but of course if you were signing up 2 for a year it would be $300 total. If you could get the new “alt discount” to apply it would be approx. $275 for the year.
I know players who drop four times that on Star Trek Online and that game actually is free to play. But of course, those players are getting what they consider to be “fair value” for the shinies they’re buying. The issue with EVE is the charging of a premium price, while providing bad design, poor development cycles and little new content, all while taking the game in extremely questionable directions.
So Alpha is more useful than it looks once you explore it, but yes CCP absolutely went the wrong direction with game pricing. Unfortunately, incredibly stupid marketing and design isn’t a new thing at CCP either. After all, that’s how we ended up with the situation we have today.
I played STO for years as I found a money printing crafting method. The difference is when you “buy” a ship in STO that ship is yours forever, EVE not so much. One bad auto-pilot and your 15 billion isk T2 BS is just a tick on someones killsheet. Then you have clones and other not so cheap upgrades that go poof docking in Jita.
There is some hyperbole in my statement in that “alpha” players are simply attracted by CCP to feed the subs, but it isn’t strictly untrue. Can you do stuff as an Alpha? Sure, you could probably get a F2P T1 Cruiser gank squad and target low sec mission runners in posh ships but this is the definition of toxic. At least in the past it was a certainty someone had paid the subscription fee to shoot you.
Alpha in that sense is bad for both subs and the F2P. The old 14 day free trial was too short IMO and should have been 30. There are a hundred different ways CCP could have gone with their P2W model and instead decided to go the meth addict route. Subs get a massive gameplay advantage AND ingame financial AND PvP advantage which some would say is fair.
However the Alpha player has to resign themselves to 3rd class scrubs doing esoteric jobs suited to the alpha limitations, the proletariat lol. Salavging and scanning sites in trash T1 garbage. Eve is a subscription service that is also P2W, pay for skills, pay for cosmetics… I believe EVE is in pump the customer before bankruptcy model.
If you don’t want to pay for a subscription and you’ve already exhausted all the skills you can get with an alpha, yes you should be stuck where you are in regards of what you can fly and train as a max trained alpha.
But in terms of what you can do, that is only limited by your own ability to play. I guess you just aren’t that good.
Yes, I would pay a subscription if F2P wasn’t a flat out toxic model. If I pay for “a service” I don’t want F2Players muddying up the experience. If I F2P I don’t want to be nerfed into oblivion by the restrictions on said accounts if I have already paid gametime (alot) for said training. Combined subscription and F2P models are cancer in the games industry.
So my choices are,
Play Alpha where nearly 100% of the ships I currently own stay in dock.
Sell stuff to buy a vastly overpriced PLEX subscription and hope I can grind enough to buy a new one with spare time.
Pay $20 a month to a company with this type of business ethic and customer loyalty.
My need for a nostalgia hit has passed because self respect kicked in.
In this case Lin Xou, therefore, without hesitation, stay in ALPHA after having completely restructured your character in order to preserve all your assets and your previous investments at your fingertips, while building up an ALPHA-compatible fleet; you have plenty of choice; personally, I opted for Mordu. Everything else, you sell or extract, etc., in short, you restructure.
15 million skill points are more than enough to keep your hand, and have fun alongside other ALPHA players that you can also help as an experienced leader, and this from time to time, or even more if you feel like it, knowing that in ALPHA, you can set up a micro-corporation of 20 members, which is ideal for forming small training squads.
You will thus regain your financial freedom vis-à-vis CCP, and above all you will be able to continue to observe the sequence of events from the inside, following this particular form of abuse of economic dependence on the part of CCP with regard to all its customers; my little finger tells me that the consequences of this sinister business decision are far from over.
Good luck, because restructuring from OMEGA to ALPHA takes more or less time depending on your current skill level.
Once done, you will be surprised by the level of autonomy, both material and financial, that you will have acquired while continuing to play the game you love.
Wrong choice, alpha toons lack navigation and cap skills to fly mordu ships effectively. Runing mwd, point and scram will cap you out before you manage to kill anything and not to mention an mwd frig can out run you. Your only option is to out gun them or out tank them so its either serpentis or gurista, serpentis works best if you can manage to fit them properly.
All pirate ships require perfect skills to fully utilize their bonuses
I’ve been playing a lot longer than this character has been alive. I originally started in 2009 if my memory serves me right. Over the years I’ve taken breaks from the game. But I think this is the only time I have ever actually considered leaving and not returning. At one point, I had 32 accounts going, lived in a C-3, and was pretty nuts over EVE. Over the years, those accounts have slowly been reduced, and the characters biomassed. I transferred my main to a friend recently, and now am only running this account, and my 2ndary main from way back, and both of them are now unsubbed as I truly can’t afford the subbs. I am disabled and on a fixed income, and so a price increase, hits me pretty hard. As it stands just prior to the price increase, I could ‘just’ manage subbing 2 accounts if I was creative. Now, I can only afford to do one, and honestly I don’t see any reason to actually do it. TLDR: CCP basically just priced me out of the game.
If you have never experienced america’s idea of disability insurance, I live on $800.00 a month. My current bills not counting eve, are 790 a month. That includes food, and no, I am not piggy. I weigh 130lbs sopping wet, and the leukemia trying to eat my soul, doesn’t help with that, though it often does help me not want or be able to eat.
Eve is a great game, and I’d love to continue playing it, but I refuse to play it as alpha. So, while I can afford 1 sub, I’mma have to take a hard pass for now. NO you can’t have my stuff. I don’t support leeches.
For anyone in your boat who’s willing to provide proof of disability (CCP would manage this privately to ensure that this data doesn’t become public), CCP should reduce subscription prices considerably, at least for the first couple of accounts. I see local businesses doing the same thing for disabled/elderly/military vets, and it would also make for some good PR.
Additionally, it would be a decent idea for creating a community PLEX donation pool for these players similar to PLEX for Good, which would be paid out dividend-style to help cover a portion of the remainder.
I think that people who are crying about a minor price increase are entitled whiners, but I also understand that some people have financial problems that are completely outside of their own doing, and everybody deserves a chance to play video games.
It does suck. But it’s just life. I love eve, even when it pisses me off. And I truly hate having to step away from the game. But, when I can afford to, I will def be resubbed. I just hate playing an alpha account. I’d far rather have all my skills/ships available. It’s worth it to me not to sub vs going alpha.
edit I’d def be happy to send CCP a copy of my disability record. They’d prolly wonder how I am still alive (I often wonder that myself). XD. Have a great day.
Be certain that your message does not go unnoticed! I understand you perfectly! And that’s how CCP is miserably misguided with its - b u l l s h i t - business plans!
Don’t worry about pro-CCP lollipops…
I add here a question that the CSM17 should also discuss very seriously:
Is it acceptable/tolerable that a customer who has subscribed, even for a month, for OMEGA status, finds himself abruptly downgraded to ALPHA status when his subscription expires, thus losing all the hard-won advantages during of this subscription period?
The answer to this question is of course: NO!
Because any player should be able to continue to have the right to use what he has already acquired; it would be neither an ALPHA status nor an OMEGA status, let’s say rather an ALPHA+ status, that is to say an intermediate status reflecting the fact that this player has already contributed financially to the development of CCP and that he can therefore continue to use everything he has acquired!
If CCP was really an honest company, it would have done so without hesitation from the start! But CCP did not! So better late than never, as we say back home…
Hellew, dudes (and ladies). This is my first post, but I plan to stay, so I had to start from somewhere.
I see ppl at this thread debating about who’s right, which is almost always lost of time and nerves. It happens often at forums simply because more than one side is right. Focus on essence, essence is never a personal matter.
So I’d like to humbly suggest debatting about:
how could a game exist without money, or even grow and improve (short debate, for obvious reasons)?
I see some players agreed 20 something is too much to pay, but they would gladly pay 10 something. How many new players to bring, so all of us could pay 10 after the goal achived?
how to make those new players stay at least until they actualy wish to pay for play?
Pay for or plex in game 1 month omega. Skill extract at the end of the month to buy next months plex. You’ll probably need to earn a couple of hundred mill to bridge the difference between the plex and the proceeds of the skill extraction, but it is very possible if you are omega anyway.
You are dense. Let me spell it out for you. EVE is a SUBSCRIPTION game. Meaning when you don’t keep up with your sub, you lose all gains. In the case of eve, you revert to alpha, which allows you to keep playong, unlike before there was alpha/omega if you dropped your sub you lost all access.