Vokan was right, the reason these threads pop up is so that people can reaffirm each others convictions that eve is not pay2win and pat each other on the back for being better than those people that play those other pay2win games
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And it works every time 
That’s right. EVE players who pay their subscription
are way better than those others who play pay2win games.
To reduce the wall of text, allow me to edit your OP, to make the situation clearer.
Nope. The amount of investment has nothing to do with fairness.
Nope. He didn’t do the work.
That’s a fairly accurate definition of pay2win.
However … skill point injectors clearly offer something that is not achievable via normal grind: someone paid the cash for the empty injectors (or the cash to pay the plex to get the injectors, lol). Same thing with sp packets offered on top of other deals (plex, some omega time packets, etc). “Golden ammo” is an extreme example of p2w, one we do not have. But sticking to the definition EvE would be p2w. However, what others (and sometimes myself) allude to is that player skill and experience trumps skill points - because of all sorts of reasons that try to circumvent the definition and because we’re not always rational, but emotional about the game that we want to keep clean.
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Yeah right? Nothing is more immersive than a round of surprise PvP
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It’s really a kinda magic. Maybe together we should rock Eve and leave the whiners to the Grind Rhapsody.
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Maybe if you played the game instead of the forum, you wouldn’t need to pay money to maintain a level of wealth conducive with a decent quality of life gameplay. At least that works for me.
Or just buy your gold ammo and go nutz. vOv
Mr Epeen 
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Sure you can!
It’s called pulling ■■■■ out of you ass and pretending it’s its credible information.
In fact, one could go as far as adding it to Wikipedia, then citing that as “evidence” and saying “See! It must be true, because it’s on Wikipedia!”
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Dude, we play EVE.
I thinks it’s safe to assume we all have some sort of head trauma…
Who says I can’t do both ? In both cases…one of the most active people.
haha I think that more proper analogy would be a drug dealer selling good stuff at first and then, once he has enough clients he starts dilute it with flour.
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Nah. I wouldn’t say EvE.
I’d say it’s more applicable for those that engage on the EvE forums…
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Oh yes. For a ‘mere’ 1bn ISK a noob can knock an entire…erm, 9 days…off the 20 year advantage some players have over him. That’s kinda like being sentenced to 19 years and 355 days and thinking ’ phew…I’m glad the judge didn’t give me 20 years ’
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% Exactly that!
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And that’s why, like I wrote, an emotional reaction and “reason” for not calling EvE p2w is exactly that: an emotional reaction that tries to circumvent the definition of p2w. It doesn’t matter if it’s “only 9 days for 1B” to do the test on the definition.
You can’t buy experience, of course (and that’s why EvE is not p2w, we tell ourselves during less rational moments, and we are wrong).
A rookie may buy the feeling that one can catch up somehow with people who have invested years and years into developing their playstyle and pilots, who tried the game’s many different aspects. That, at least, is an illusion to separate the foolish from their cash. The whole catching up argument/wish is misplaced - the only way to catch up is by removing the older accounts…
You can also buy yourself all the way into a ship class and what not. You can buy yourself into multiboxing, where you clearly have an advantage over someone who does not. In the hands of an experienced veteran, SP becomes powerful when recombined with an extra account, etc. And that is definitely a p2w aspect.
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@Wadiest_Yong It’s not about catching up. As you’ve correctly stated, a noob will never catch up with veterans who have played for 10, 15 or 20 years. That’s an illusion.
What I’m arguing on is: there is nothing wrong with being able to buy PLEX or SP Injectors to progress faster and so far I have read nothing to change my mind.
The P2W argument is silly, especially about EVE.
I’m not spending money on EVE to win, I’m spending it to bypass the grind. And as I and Altara have said before, if the grind was the only way to progress we wouldn’t play it.
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It doesn’t matter how you define ‘unicorn’ if they are having negligible actual impact on the world as a whole. Arguments about definition are essentially just attempts to distract from the real elephant in the room…the totally un-level playing field that noobs enter.
I think ‘catching up’ is probably the wrong way of expressing it. No noob is sitting there wondering why he’s not the new Mittani after his first week. Most week old noobs simply have no idea how far behind they are and are still at the ’ look at me, everyone, I’m in a Venture !’ stage of the game. But…soon after that you start to see the sort of comments I’ve seen in corp chat and in Rookie help where they can’t believe the slow progress and slow income. That, rather than ganking, is why so many leave.
Of course, there is always a flurry of ’ go do level 4 missions’ and so on, but I’ve seen even experienced players comment how they do those missions yet still find it not enough, and they have to buy PLEX, skill injectors, etc. So it’s not ‘catching up’…rather it is negating the sense of going nowhere fast.
I’m now flying a lot of big and powerful ships, but I am mindful of the fact that it has taken me 2 years to get there. The agonising wait is all the more evident when one gets a second Omega, as I have, and 6 months in that account is still not flying many of the ships I take for granted in this account. I do not blame players for simply not having that kind of patience. And therein lies the true basis of ‘catching up’. There are people…and I’m one of them…who simply could not be bothered with the game if there is too much waiting.
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Only yesterday I had a supreme example of why ‘pay to win’ exists. I’d shifted the skills queue to one of my noob Omega alts who had fallen behind a bit. “Lets go to Jita and buy some Standard augments to speed up the skills training’” I thought. Great idea ! So off I saunter to Jita, buy 3 implants for 60m ISK total. I hit ‘plug in’ on the first implant…only to be told I can’t plug it in unless I am trained to Cybernetics Level IV. So…2.5 days training at slow speed in order to activate implants to speed up the training…lol ! Time for a small skill injector.
That’s exactly the sort of things that justify Cash2Progress. If I want to do an activity I want to do it now, not tomorrow. Tomorrow I may not be able to play, I may have a meeting and come out of it completely disgusted: not the right mental state to play EVE. Or I may simply not be in the mood to take risks with my assets.
I took a deep look at the Hecate early on and knew that was the ship for me. Then I saw how long it was going to take to train into it plus the modules to make it all work and almost spewed my coffee all over the place. When I saw how much time I could shave off with injectors and Omega-speed training the choice was easy to make. Did I think “oh no, that’s P2W”? Hell no. I thought “*Phew! Thank god for Pay2Progress!”
Players want to PLAY EVE, not WAIT EVE.
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Personally I love my Heavy Pulse Laser Gnosis fitting…which can deliver 650 DPS with overheating. It does exceedingly well in PvE, where it is really handy being able to switch between Conflag and Scorch instantly for extended range. It decimates NPCs in most systems. It’s all T2, and is 27 days training including sensor boosters, tracking computer, tracking enhancer, T2 Heavy Pulse Laser etc. A very nifty fitting.
So…I simply want another character in the same account to be able to fly it. I’m not gonna take over the universe in it. To do the training I have to either do multiple account training ( which is a ‘pay 2 win’ package ) or take the skills queue off a main that already has a bunch of urgent skills requirements. Well…I don’t want my main in the account to go without training for 27 days, so ‘pay 2 progress’ definitely is the best option for the second char training.
It’s as simple as that. I am not ‘winning’ anything. As they are both chars in the same account I can only fly one of them at a time anyway. I think giving actual examples of ‘pay to win’ is the best way to de-fang the issue.
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it turns out altara who was defending the skillsystem previously is actually a swiper trying to bypass it with the credit card, lul
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