Ah yes let’s remove tutorial also. Newbies can figure things out themselves. 
Welp that was my daily laugh.
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How about you stop inventing spurious issues that even most of the people you claim to represent couldn’t care less about.
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So on day one, you just paid cash to play this game, without any trial period, or even knowing you would enjoy playing? You must light your cigars with hundred dollar bills as well. There are several good reasons this game went free to play. Today the minority are willing to spend money supporting the game with their finances. I applaud those who are willing to make a charitable effort.
An alpha might never become an omega and still support the game through the purchase of Plex. I never discriminate between omega and alpha and thus, when I do advise any player, I do so from an alpha point of view.
From what I can perceive based the forum alone, their is nothing but disgust shown toward the alpha (so-called freebie players) who may or may not be paying out cash. How can anyone but CCP know who pays cash? As far as I know, some of the omega claim they get their Plex from the market and use it to keep their omega status. Am I suppose to disrespect them because they don’t pay cash for their omega accounts?
I refuse to show any contempt for players based on paid or free status.
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I don’t know about Wes, but Alpha didn’t exist when I started playing. I had a sub from day one.
—Gadget paid her way.
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I played for a few days and subbed. No alpha clones on 2011.
@John_Rochard the problem with alphas and the contempt a lot of folks have, is they’ve wanted and gotten their way of dumbing down EVE. EVE has always been a harsh game, i was taught that within my first week.
Alpha is meant to be an extended permanent trial session. So naturally a lot of the game is locked behind omega. As a trial user, there were skills and ships you couldnt train into without subbing.
The fact alphas want more without wanting to sub and fully support ccp and eve is where we get contempt.
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Before alpha we had trial time, normally just 14 days but sometimes it was a little bit more. Me personally I used 3 14-day trials to get an idea (so different accounts and characters) to then just jump in and commit.
Back then you didn’t start with 400k SP like you do now, it was pretty much 50K with almost no skills at all (this is where the magic 14 thing came up: you started with almost all skills at 1 or 2 tops, if you even had them at all. These days is not the case anymore, quite a few start at 4 and others at 2-3. Back then magic 14 was relevant).
We also “had to” train learning skills. Our attributes were about 10 lower than they are now and there were 10 skills total (2 per attrib) which would take about 2 MONTHS of training before you would actually train something for real for the first time, and that’s if you weren’t really tryharding and max them out.
Over the years it all changed a bit back and forth so people who started at different times might have had a slightly different experience but on the whole it’s pretty much the same. When alpha state was introduced (2016 iirc) that all changed and now it’s much easier to give the game a try and not feel pressured into committing to something you don’t understand.
Different time, different mindset. In some ways I long back to the old EVE, in others it was terrible.
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2011: bought the EvE Online Commissioned Officer Edition box (!) with the dvd and activation keys. It came with a 30 day free period, which one could not call a trial because the eve account HAD to be linked with a CC and payment plan and a first payment was made IMMEDIATELY. So, for the price of roughly a month omega you had a nice little box, a few mementos, 30 days of cerebral accelerator, and two months game time - a very good deal. Yes, we took decisions back then, compared games, read reviews, and did not pretend that 15 euros or dollars was a lot of money for sixty days of entertainment.
Same with any MMO in the early 2000s, same with any standalone game in the 80s and 90s. You bought the game, nice box, nice jewel case, nice manual, sometimes nice additional trinkets (e.g. collector editions of the three GW1 games are prized possessions).
Game publishers back then were actually true to their word in their advertizing about the game.
Trial periods ? You don’t get them at restaurants or cinemas or car dealerships. I don’t see why you would need trial periods for a game. Don’t like it ? Stop paying. End of story.
Tough statement. The casual payments made by free to play players are more expensive and more volatile than any a omega customer ever makes. There’s a reason why one has to look deeper for the omega subscription deals, away from the constant, flashy offers for alpha this and that. The minority you speak of are actually right: it’s cheaper to be omega, and it provides ccp with a guaranteed income. Do you really believe that publishers do the new generations a favor by whipping up this “free to play” model while charging them extra ? You don’t need to be a financial whizz to keep track of what you actually spend. Buying on impulse is perhaps great with today’s younger customers, and boy, do the sellers love that one !! So enjoy the free-to-play mantra and illusion.
It’s more the vocal alphas coming and going, complaining loudly about anything and everything (especially about the so-called paywall), demanding even more privileges, that makes them look like less than desirable in chat channels and media like this forum.
Alphas are privileged guests - they can play for a long time without paying a single cent - a very significant privilege by any standard ! Guests also have rules of conduct while they enjoy their temporary privilege of not paying for a product. Ignorance of basic transactions in a commercial product is not an excuse.
And that is the right position, until a guest starts to sell the furniture in your house.
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What? Yeah, the same way I order food at a restaurant without getting a free sample, or the same way I buy a movie ticket before I get to watch half the movie. The same way I grew up buying a subscription to every mmo I wanted to play. That’s how all of them used to work. Worse case, I was out 15$ for something that wasn’t as fun as I thought. But I gave it the full experience to see if it was for me. I don’t know why you would possibly extrapolate that to having disdain for alpha players though. Or lighting hundred dollar bills on fire. You’re an interesting duck.
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Sure…I have nothing but contempt for freebie people who whine while as a paying player I subsidise their whining. Freebie people are getting what they have paid for, and if they are not happy with that…then pay !
Sure everyone knows the new alpha player who basically complains about everything and never pays one red cent. But so far, I don’t see the people here addressing the omega player who grinds out kills and gets their omega “free” just by playing the game and buying plex from the market. How can anyone group ALL alphas into the same basket either? For all we know, there are many alphas spending more on plex and selling it to the “free” omega for ISK. It wouldn’t make sense for such a player to complain about a pay wall, but they still get the hurt and backlash from the community at large.
I am not here to showboat, I am just trying to raise community awareness. If the casual alpha player, who buys plex leaves, the game suffers from revenue loss. When a game loses revenues, all the players suffer poor support, bad updates, and possible shutdown. Showing a shred of respect for each other is a great place to start. I know my neighbor will eventually buy plex. They spend money on other games. Assuming they continue to play here, they will pay the rent, but I seriously doubt they will ever buy into omega.
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No one’s doing that. So far every response had a qualifier showing that the posters were talking about a specific portion of Alpha players.
–Gadget saves her strawmen for the fall season
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The game is already suffering revenue losses from them not being Omega. The fact that they might buy PLEX is purely incidental, as there are Omegas ( like myself ) who pay subscription and buy PLEX.
I am one of the veterans in Rookie chat. Practically every time when a newbro asks “do I have to buy omega etc etc” the answer is “it depends on you”. Maybe your friends are playing different times than I do, maybe they are overly sensitive, maybe I am ignoring that out of 10 answers “you can play as alpha” one is “no you have to be omega” and they pick up that one specific answer and ignore 9 others.
I have never seen anyone saying git gud or anything similar in rookie chat (apart from very clearly joking way usually towards well known veterans). Rookie chat still understands that we need to help newbies to shoot/scam them later, and that EVE is too harsh to descend to Mortal Online’s levels of trampling newbies and making fun of their questions.
People can play as alphas. However, people should also pay for their bread. As alphas, they are paying with their time, as omegas, they are paying with their money. Different people give those two things different priorities.
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That has definitely been my experience in there as well.
Please get rid of the alpha omega system. everyone should be equal
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This is Eve Online, where showing respect for each other involves sending 100 million ISK to your local ISK doubler.
Rookie Chat is not the place to find respect. The advice there is of dubious quality. One guy in there only spams „It depends“ to every question and blows up the chat if anyone tries to ignore him to actually give a newbie useful and actionable advice, because his answer is „more correct“. Another gets mad in chat if you type the same answer faster than he does, because they „thought of it first“. Yet another always wants to say something so no matter the answer will give useless detailed elaboration that the newbie didn’t ask for and doesn’t care about, filling the chat with useless paragraphs of spam ignored by everyone else, because „they want to prove they know a lot“.
It’s full of egos.
Rookies are better off finding good groups of players that are specifically tailored to educating newbies. Not the tax-harvesting blobs like Silent Co or Scan Stakan.
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Isn’t that wonderful ? I find that charming and in touch with the game itself, it makes the channel human and not chatGPT-like, including that one ISD who spams too many unrelated links, lol.
Sometimes you see a few “helpers” engage in rookie help pvp, and usually they get called out by others to drop it and move on. It’s very rare that it gets out of hand and toxic (at least during EU hours). It’s very possible that some helpers are there to be pedantic - but that mostly annoys other helpers, not so much the rookie who gets pointers to fix his acute problems. Who cares ?! Not the rookie who has experienced channels in other games. From what the rookies say, at least our quirky Rookie Help channel is friendly and helpful by comparison, and sometimes even genuine fun. Just like EvE Online.
Anyway, I still disagree with the OP that it’s a venue where omega status is pushed. As to the difference between alpha and omega, and “respect”, that’s a subject that has nothing to do with the help channel, and everything with attracting new customers in CCP’s inimitable ways.
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What makes you think those are any better and don’t have similar issues?
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Gets rookies into scenarios where they are likely to make longer term friends, fleet up, or actually do stuff in game together.
Rookie chat is short term Q&A, which serves a different purpose, and unlikely to provide the „hook“ that makes newbies actually stay.
Sure but that relies on the group actually being good at this (most aren’t), giving rookies room to find their own way instead of being pushed into a direction (most don’t, if only for doctrine fits). Also you avoid the main issue you mentioned (and why I replied): people being problematic.