Damn @Lucas_Kell leave them flatearthers be. You will never change their mind even if CCP start selling t3 battleships which will have cruiser warp speed, sig, align speed and dmg and application of Marauders.
Not even if CCP sold fully skilled chars with all skills maxed out to 5 and not even if they sold new tier of uber-officier modules with 5% more effects that only can be bought from NES.
They are playing this game and therefore it ain’t pay to win because everyone knows that pay to win is bad and they would never play such game.
You are wasting your time. Better actually undock and play the game…
You completely missed the point. I never said P2W was bad. I’m all for it. I’m not one of those people who wants Eve to be ‘fair’. What I disputed was the assertion that it automatically gives an advantage. It doesn’t.
Yeah completely disagree. This used to be a RPG, and one of the main aspects of every RPG is that you have some EXP (here SP) you accumulate by playing the game (here over time) while you get access to more and more skills. It’s like the absolute center of character development.
Putting that in a shop is completely destroying the core concept of an RPG. I don’t even know why I have to say this, it should be extremely obvious.
If there is an issue with EVE’s SP system because it’s just a slow trickle and basically time gated, that could be addressed in a multitude of ways, but keeping the nature of it (time gated) and just putting SP into a cash shop is the worst possible “solution”.
Yeah, there is good monetization. It’s called a subscription to play the game.
Is absolutely not a good monetization. It incentivizes the developers to put all the nice looking skins and outfits or whatever into the cash shop, while the stuff you get in the game look like ass to make you go buy the stuff on the shop. It makes the game worse for players who are not interested in buying skins from the shop.
Sounds like the same to me, and it’s also extremely bad.
I have absolutely nothing against catchup mechanics if the game requires them. But this isn’t some game where you have to level trough years of content and gear tiers to reach an endgame. You can master a certain corner of the game relatively quickly even without chatch-up mechanics.
But let’s put that aside for a moment and pretend like you do really need to catch up to do something meaningful in the game. Why is the first idea that you and others have to put this into a cash shop? This isn’t even funny. This may look perfectly fine for someone like you who is hooked on the game and sees it as a hobby, you probably don’t have problems dropping some additional money on it.
Do you even think about how this looks to a newer player if you tell them: “hey the game is basically free, but you have to pay a subscription to access the competitive ships and skills and on top of that drop like a grand to ‘catch-up’ to do something meaningful”. And you people who validate CCP with this shitty ideas ask yourself why the player count is dropping…
I said this for years in every “catch-up” mechanic thread that was created. If there really is such a game mechanic required, why not PUT IT INTO THE GAME?? Let the new players catch up by playing the game. How is that such a controversial or outlandish concept in the EVE community and why is demanding money from new players seen as the only option. It boggles my mind!
Completely disagree.
Good monetization is when money has absolutely no impact on gameplay. Everything else makes the game worse.
And EVE’s monetization has crossed the point of being unbearable for me years ago. That is where I stopped giving them money and as it seems many people did so as well
Yeah. I am somewhere in middle I guess, mainly because I am trying to look at this issue from developer’s point of view. But if someone is playing the game for long time, isn’t it fair that he will have some advantage over those who started yesterday?
Obviously there will always be two groups who will disagree with each other.
Veterans will see any SP/XP being sold to new players unfair because it is removing or shortening their advantage they accumulated for years of playing.
And new players who sees this veteran advantage being unfair because how are they supposed to compete?
You and I actually had quite a cordial personal chat, from which you’d have seen that there really aren’t any disagreements. Neither of us has any major problem with P2W…the only thing being disputed is whether one can assert that it automatically gives advantage. Several others here have also disputed that.
No, you do it again, you convolute two completely distinct problems.
The question of if there should be a catch-up mechanic is completely distinct from the question if this should even involve RL money.
CCP is communicating this deliberatly this way. It gives their over the top monetization efforts the positive spin of just being helpful for new players. While critics against the monetization can just be dismissed as being bitter vets who don’t want new players to “catch-up”.
But this is obviously all ■■■■■■■■.
There are many ways how to enable new players to catch up they could add to the game itself. Making it possible to gain SP from achievments, missions or other tasks.
Non of this has anything to do with selling SP in the shop.
I’m pretty sure that selling SP or packs is the worst possible catch-up mechanic there can be. It communicates a pretty clear picture what kind of game this is.
The developer point of view should be to make a game that people actually want to play and then they will pay for a good product they actually like.
What CCP is doing has nothing to do with that anymore. All they are doing now is thinking about new ways of how to press more money out of their only successful product that is still running, by abusing psychological tricks to manipulate players while looking at the behavior data they produce.
Too small an advantage, but also too large a cost. What could be more relevant to any discussion of the good or bad of P2W than adding whether it is ‘worth it’.
Consider that an Omega account works out at the equivalent of about 40m ISK a day. A Large Skill Injector that can reduce skill queue time by 9 days can be around 900m to 1bn…which is getting on towards 3 times what one pays for the Omega queue.
That 900m ISK would buy a good battleship , so one is essentially losing the value of such a ship…and all for what ? Because one was impatient and had to have some T2 weapon that gives 40 - 50 DPS more. That’s a fair deal ? No way.
He’s only losing that value if he wants to even fly a battleship. Not everyone wants to spend 900mil on something that goes BOOM, and BOOM it most definitely will go unless you never undock it.
Skill points are better to buy as they can be used with a variety of ships and modules.
Well, for good or ill the “slow gain over time of SP” is one of the things that differentiates EVE from all the other MMORPGs out there. Most of which do “all that RPG stuff” way better than CCP can imagine.
Putting instant SP and accelerators into the cash shop is fine IMO, given that it’s a reasonable amount (less than basic Alpha training amount, which essentially is free, just slow) and does little more than give you a handful of starter skills.
It’s also an okay idea to have new players “earn” SP by doing things in-game, especially things that will lead them into more interesting gameplay. But if you head too heavily in that direction, you end up with “every other MMO” syndrome where someone with no life gets an advantage just by playing 10 hours a day. Which is also okay, but it’s not magically “way better” than dropping $200 to buy Omega time and get 2 million instant SP as a perk.
Heck, they’ve been giving 1 million SP away free for ages now, not hearing a lot of complaints about that.
And if that was enough to support the game it would be fine. But it hasn’t been for over a decade. Gaming market has changed, time to adapt and move on.
Presumably by “you” you mean “some other player”, rather than the person you’re replying to. Who is literally one of the “least hooked on EVE” people on these forums.
Yes, I’ve posted literally hundreds of messages saying how poorly designed this is. That said, given the setup of EVE there’s only so much they can monetize. So either CCP finds ways to increase income or the game dies even faster than it already is.
I probably should have put “good monetization” into the context of “least offensive ways to monetize the game in the hope that CCP may eventually put some of the income to actual good use”. Or maybe “monetization that represents the lesser of several evils”.
Let’s all agree that the first and best way CCP should have structured their business model is “first, produce a great game that sells itself on the merit of its quality and value delivered”.
But given they’ve been failing on that since 2011 or so, other alternatives need to be considered.
EVE crossed that line as soon as they started selling MCT and designing the game such that multiboxing and multi-accounts was a major advantage. In theory, “money should have no impact” is fine, but there are very few games that can approach it.
Well, many people have stopped giving them money, that’s for sure. And stopped playing as well. There’s no real way to draw a link between those facts and “EVE’s monetization” as a cause.
For me, I stopped sending CCP money when I decided they were no longer developing EVE as a core commitment, but just as a cash cow to fund other projects. I know other players that quit due to lack of new content, some over stagnant and broken features such as FW, some who quit because they felt botting and multi-boxing was out of control. A couple who quit either due to wardecs or ganking.
I’m sure some players have quit in protest of higher monetization but personally I’ve encountered very few of those.
In the majority of games, new players don’t directly compete against higher-skilled veterans. EVE doesn’t have that separation.
Literally even in the starter systems, new players are competing against vets whose skills give them an advantage in every single aspect of the game - combat, mining, production, trading, exploration.
You can log into any starter systems at any time and see Orcas, marauders, T3Ds, assault frigates. Vet players are shipping in quantities of supplies and setting up trades. Try to do some exploration and some vet is there in an Astero or Helios doing it before you.
Of course not in every case, but there’s no separation. And the amount of SP purchasable doesn’t even amount to 3 months of training time. Yes, some vets will freak because they believed and expected that paying a sub for years would give them an advantage - just look at Karak hunting weak ships in high sec in a Sleipnir, for example.
They need to put it in perspective - anybody who thinks a few million SP is going to give some player a significant edge is really stretching.
No, they nuked their core player base years before they started those. That’s the thing that pretty much invalidates your whole premise.
You keep trying to make the point that monetization somehow travels through time to affect the game before CCP added it and even before players join (“it attracts lazy players that demand instant gratification which drives even more developments that erode the sandbox nature of the game.”)
CCP’s monetization attempts have generally been desperation moves to keep the cash flowing after they’ve lost players. The fact that they keep screwing up and losing even more players is due to bad design and bad execution on CCP’s part, not generally to the monetization itself.
WTH are you even talking about… If someone want’s to grind stuff for 10 hours in a game then he earned that IN GAME. Some players value to be able to do this, some don’t and may do other stuff instead, but it’s actually playing the game. Adding then an option to just drop $200 isn’t even remotely the same. It has nothing to do with the game anymore and it completely devalues the achievement of that other player, because everyone will now assume they just bought it.
I somehow have to assume you lost completely all perspective of what a computer game actually is if you can’t even see that anymore.
There are multiple games in the top 10 MMORPG that are full subscription games
Yeah they did indeed! They are completely infected with corporations that use every bit of data they have from their placer behavior and every psychological trick in the books to add layers on layers of monetization of their once successful franchises and existing games to make an insane amount of money.
That’s a development that is indeed happening and changing the market and it is not beneficial for the games and the players who still hang on to them or buy this garbage.
And yes, I indeed have moved on, because while most (not all) of the popular franchises are completely lost to this unfortunate development, there are still games that are actually good, value the player and don’t partake in this schemes.
Probably not what you had in mind when you wrote this lines. Sounds like you just bend over instead and accept this.
No I mean you. A person who has a healthy distance to a game wouldn’t write a post like this and praise SP slaes in the cash shop.
It’s not the design that is the problem. It’s what they are doing that is the problem. Do you think if they just would package this differently it would deceive new players into not perceiving it as a pay2win (or pay for advantage if that other word offends you) mechanic? It would still be the same.
Yeah, the players need to consider alternatives.
If the bread your baker sells starts to taste like ■■■■ and they instead of fixing how they make bread focus on leeching money from you any other way they can, would you still defend that to? “somehow they have to make money. let’s think about ways how we can sell that shitty bread anyway”.
No, I haven’t ‘misunderstood’ anything. You just don’t want to admit that P2W doesn’t necessarily confer any advantage…and are trying to use some ‘definition’ of P2W to deflect any argument at all.
Sigh…I simply can’t be bothered spending another 4 billion posts arguing with someone who says P2W isn’t ‘winning’ but is ‘advantage’…and who simply cannot grasp that there may not always be any ‘advantage’. I’ve just discovered a new dictionary definition for ‘futile’.
** Three frigates why not make available for Faction War?
Eidolon Battleship Visitant Industial Yoiul Cruiser Can’t find info on these other than the Festivals so there has to be content waiting to be delivered in their design someplace.
