Tourists vs. Residents, and the costs of playing EVE as Omega

Communications Center General Discussion
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Please read the whole text before yelling…

I’ve seen a lot of very loud people complaining and even raging about the new monthly price of $/€20 per month… And while I agree with the sentiment that I won’t be paying that, but in my case that doesn’t mean I’ll be leaving EVE, I’ll just pay a lot less per month…

And hence my title: Tourists vs. Residents, the loudmouths complaining about a $/€20/month subscription are behaving like Tourists, the unwanted kind… IF you’re paying from month to month, ready to leave at any time, you’re always paying a BIG premium, not just in EVE, but in RL as well. If you don’t get that or understand that, you need to learn a bit more about economics and risks. Then there’s us Residents who are used to paying per year, significantly less then the high $/€15/month that the Tourists are used to. With the new pricing structure on subscriptions, a lot of Residents will be just moving to a two year subscription and only see ~3% increase in price instead of the 33% that a single month sees. Just like renting or buying a house, a long term commitment has a huge amount of financial benefits…

Now that said, how much of a difference is there? Well, I usually wait till there is a 15% off promotion on Omega, I buy a year or in the future two years… Via an authorized reseller you can pretty much get an addition 3% discount, previously that would have been $9/month or €7,65-€8,55 per month depending on the dollar vs. euro exchange ratio. Currently that would be about €8,63, around 43% of the full €20 euro price or 45% of the full $20 dollar price…

The ‘problem’ with that is multi fold: #1 it requires patience and game time till the actual sale, #2 you’re subscribed for the whole two years, #3 you need to have a whole pile of RL money ready when the sale happens…

You could maybe fix that by using PLEX to buy your game time, but PLEX is relatively expensive. Even if you buy the largest 20.000 PLEX package at a 15% discount (plus authorized reseller discount), it’s still 13.40 per 500 PLEX or month of Omega. At the cheaper packages it’s even more expensive then just paying moth to month…

So how is a newbro supposed to get a taste of Omega? Well… If you run an Alpha for a while, that has never been on Omega before, chances are that you’ll eventually get a personal promotion, there are three. The most common (60% of the offers) is the 3 months of Omega for 50% off (€24/$24), which translates to €8/$8 per month. Good deal, do IT! Don’t forget to cancel the subscription right away or you’re stuck paying €48/$48 per three months into perpetuity (a lot less of a good deal!)… The two others are two months and the destroyer pack, a LOT less interesting imho!

OR you take advantage of a sale… Like the current 2-for-1 sale on alpha injectors and skill extractors…
I’m not repeating all the math here, but the alpha injectors and the lowest tier of skill extractors are just not worth your time imho.

For those that don’t have much cash:
5+5 Skill Extractors for €25/$25, that is 10 Skill Extractors. The sell price of a skill extractor is ~420M isk, if you have Accounting 5 and sell in Perimeter, that’s ~400M isk. 400M x 10 = 4B for €25/$25
If you do not have Accounting 5 and/or can’t sell in Perimeter, you can always sell to this fellow at 385M:

PLEX is currently being sold for ~3.75M/PLEX, that is ~1.875B isk per month of Omega. With that 4B you made with selling those 10 Skill Extractors, you can finance 2 months of Omega time in EVE, whenever you want to use it! And depending on your skills, you might have some isk left over…

That’s suddenly no longer spending $270/€270 for an optimally priced subscription, put $/€12,50 per month for two months! Used whenever you want, you can even Omega two accounts at the same time and dualbox Abyssals to your hearts content! :wink:

The most interesting deal though is 10+10 Skill Extractors for €45/$45, that is 20 Skill Extractors. That is 8B isk or 4 months of Omega via PLEX. 6x45=270 or 24 months of Omega when you want, how you want. Or even more if you want to PLEX for a whole year (5500 PLEX) or wait for the sale (15% discount).

Personally I find the flexibility of PLEX very desirable, as it gives me way more flexibility then with a two year subscription on my four primary accounts. I can now PLEX alts if/when I want. I can even sell PLEX for investment in other activities.

A few notes: You can only buy 8 of the same packs before all the promotions gray out. But each account can do this 8 times. Each pack you have to buy separately, if you do 10 such buys in a short amount of time, the thing blocks you on the 11th buy for two hours.

Warning: Others might have the same idea, the price of Extractors might fall, the price of PLEX might rise. Promotion is till the 30th of May.

So in conclusion, your Omega never has to cost you anywhere near the lamented $20/€20 per month, if you’re smart, you can even play cheaper then previously… Just save your money for promotions and do some math!

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But of course I plan to save money. When my six-month Omega buyout last time runs out in a month or so, I’ll be returning to Alpha status - the reality of where I started playing EVE Online. It will be harder without the convenience offered by Omega status, but oh well, I’ll manage. As soon as CCP offers something actually interesting and worthwhile, I’ll go back to being an Omega, but for now… the last two years have been a lot of disappointment from CCP. And piling up economic problems for many players due to the brutal realities of the world. In other words, for many - including myself - the current costs of Omega and other offerings have become so high that their priority in the household budget has been drastically reduced.

So mate, buy 2 years of Omega without hesitation. Thank you for maintaining the EVE Online servers out of your abundant pocket. Everyone will be happy - you, because you made a great deal and saved cash, and I will continue to be able to play EVE and not spend any cash. We’ll both be roaming New Eden, at least until CCP pulls the plug.

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Your ‘risk’ analysis seems to conveniently leave out that you might pay a 2 year subscription and the game doesn’t survive that long.

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People have been saying that for the past 19 years…

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That is not a risk it is philanthropy.

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A good review of the various economic parameters regarding paying for Omega time under the new regime. Thank you.

I should point out however that the majority of people I’ve spoken to regarding the price increases, aren’t complaining like “loudmouthed tourists” who don’t understand local economics. They tend to fall into 3 categories:

  1. People who feel that EVE is delivering less gaming value to them, not more - particularly over the past 3 years or so. And thus no price increase is justified.

  2. People who expected some sort of news or developments from Fanfest that would justify the price increase, but who feel nothing of the sort was delivered.

  3. People who were barely hanging onto their subs hoping things would improve, but can’t justify spending even more on a game that’s being developed in such a haphazard fashion.

There are also some people who feel that either EVE won’t last much longer, and/or that their interest in EVE won’t last, and so are unwilling to spend significantly and jump through hoops in order to get ‘a better deal’.

For myself at this point I’ll Plex when I feel like/have the time for playing EVE, and the rest of the time my $$ will go to games that have a better grip on the development process.

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These people are not grounded to reality. Inflation is a fact of life and prices rising due to inflation are not justified by offsetting value.

When i fuel my car, or buy beef the fuel is not “improved” and the steak is not “better”, they just cost more.

I agree with your post though. Those people are out there and they think that way.

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I see this word used in all your three points. I agree, there are people out there that feel that way. I still feel that these people should learn more about economics! Prices are not set by cost or actual value, they are set to what the market can bear. If you feel that something else gives you more value and that you enjoy as much or more, while competing for the same time, by all means go for it!

Even my oldest character of 17.5 years only has ~140M SP, so that has certainly not been subscribed for all those 17.5 years! I remember times where my secondary was subscribed and my main wasn’t. And years long ‘vacations’ from EVE.

EVE not being around for much longer is laughable though, even if this subscription price increase backfires. CCP or more specifically Black Pearl can cut a LOT of CCP off before just keeping on the servers with basic support becomes problematic. Black Pearl paid a LOT of RL money for CCP and they won’t be letting it go to waste by shutting down the biggest IP.

CCP was not the first in the market to raise prices for their subscription, nor will it be the last. The first was NQ (Dual Universe) with a 43% increase. Then CCP, then Jagex (Runescape) with a 20% price increase. And only the first is really in trouble, and that has nothing to do with their price increase… All had hissyfit threads on their forums ranting about the price increase, meanwhile life goes on…

What was the stat again at Fanfest 57% of the player base was new in the last four years… That seems bad to a LOT of people, but there are other luxury hobby companies that follow a similar trend. A large part of their customer base has a ‘customer expectancy’ of three years (Games Workshop), GW has been around for 47 years using this formula and after many, many price increases, is doing it’s best years. Not just in revenue, but also in profit.

But I digress, the point of the matter is that if your main complaint is that it now costs $20/€20 per month, you’ve been educated. You can play EVE as an Omega for a LOT less than that price, even just a couple of months instead of a year(s) long subscription. So if that complaint goes away, what exactly is left to complain about? If you previously paid $15/€15 and you can now pay even less per month than that, even if the game quality has gone ‘down’ in your opinion, you’re paying less, 15%-25% less…

But that of course assumes that the game quality has gone down, I disagree. What I suspect is that the game loop of certain people has been impacted and those people can’t deal well with change. Imho EVE was a bad fit for them in the first place, because EVE changes constantly and that is what makes it ‘fresh’ for so long. And not every change is an improvement, but it does force you to adapt/learn again.

For me, I’ve enjoyed what CCP has done! I really liked the Trig stuff, I liked the Abyssal stuff, I liked the addition of lvl 0 and lvl 6 Abyssals, I liked the Dr. Who event, etc. Have changes during these periods f-ed me over? Absolutely! Did I curse a lot, you bet! WTF did my Rakovene go! What do you mean you nerved Orca mining!?!? Many ships/isk lost due to those changes. Doing many different things, playing other games as well (Dual Universe for example).

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well i will say again
in my region we earn less money but digital stuff is dirty cheap
most of the business except CCP adjust the prices to the actual reality of the market
games , music , movies …
we have it all , Netflix , Disney, uber , apple ,hbo , steam etc etc
for example i pay aprox 3 dollars a month for apple music
in comparison EVE is ludicrously expensive

for the price of EVE alone you can have a streaming service , music and buy some games on sale every mont , i agree that EVE is a premium product but its not even close in terms of bang for the buck

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If I’m paying for 2 years of EVE and it happens that EVE dies within that time, my main concern will be that EVE died, not that a fraction of my subscription money goes wasted.

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I’m worried that people think $0.66 a day is a lot of money.

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Wow!

Hey! Well here is a very pretty last desperate attempt at mass propaganda and communication of influence ad nauseam!

What’s more from yet another whelk IQ who claims to master mathematics to circumvent the problem caused by this inflation of +33% against a background of abuse of economic dependence!

Big deal ! Really !

I also love (I laugh out loud as I write this) the new form of CCP advertising resulting from it:

"Buy two years of subscription to EvE Online directly, or resell extractors, etc. in game!

Blablabla !

By making mathematically literally far-fetched calculations, you will get everything at a hyper-competitive price! Also, don’t wait! And, never mind the state of the New Eden market after such a mess!

Only account what is good for you!"

The joke ! Laughing!

When I told you that some on this forum literally take all players, even veterans, for simple hams!

When we reach such a level of contempt, it necessarily means that we are no longer really very far from the state of clinical death of the game itself!

Also, let’s keep our pennies and stay tuned!

A veteran who is both lucid and discontented!

Ully Loom

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in my region there are families that live with 200 dollars a month
thats how much a working man makes earning minimum wage
not a uncommon thing

i can understand that for example one can earn 1000 dollars a week working in a simple job in the US

that said BIG business loooves to earn 3, 4 , 5 bucks a month here because we are a 200 million people market and that is a good change

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I really don’t see your point. I don’t recreationally do things that cost me more than I can afford. I respect that you wanna play EVE but a man needs to stay grounded in reality and the short answer is simple.

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my point is that netflix , apple , hbo , uber etc etc etc its cheaper here than in the US because the companies knows how much we earn and want a piece of our pie
CCP apear to prefer that we log in as alpha and pay 0 instead of charging 4, or 5 dollars like everybody else collecting a good amount of money

edit:
its simple , sell plex for the original price because it cant deregulate the game economy , sell gametime for a reduced price that make sense in the regional market
our pie is close to the size of canada pie , bigger than Australia or Spain pie , a nice pie
we live in cities , not in mud huts , uga buga

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Man, what a world do we live in when simple division and addition operations is ‘far-fetched calculations’.

If someone who used to buy 1-year deals now buys 2-year deals the price increase is 3%

That isn’t so hard, is it?

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Yea I agree with this, game time should be according to the region but plex at its defualt.

In my country south africa the avg salary is the same as the us minimum wage. And our minimum wage is 5x lower than that.

Yet our monthly fees for eve online is the same as the us even thou we earn on avg 5x less?

But OP you do make some good points.

For me now I have 2 options either I pay for a year or 2 to min/max and spend a big portion of my salary for it or I just farm in eve at 300mil/h for a few hours and plex my way which means no money for CCP, but if CCP made it region based then its a no brainer to rather just do the monthly subscription.

Edit: I can see why this isn’t a thing as people will abuse it with VPN’s and 50 skill extracted chars buying 2 yearly plans on discount at the countries discounted price then extracting for crap tons of skill injectors. (Looking at you Cable uta)

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For what reason did you write this huge sales pitch? What’s the point?

Anyway, the real value for money is Alpha status. It’s free and you potentially only lose out on a couple percent of performance bonuses compared to Omega, up to T1 battle cruisers. Now that was mighty generous of CCP Seagull. If you want more and faster training, Alpha injectors are a better deal than Omega too (especially with the recent 2 for 1 discount).

Most things that require Omega are a massive grind to earn in game and typically stuff you want to dual box with a scout alt as well. One Omega sub is no Omega effectively. Basic T1 ships don’t have that problem. This is what players need to hear.

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Apple Music is $3 for a student or $6 for a non-student, so in the ‘best’ case scenario that is a 50% discount for you. Even with the discount pricing I showed you, that is still an equivalent of $22.50/$25 per month, but that is still cheaper then the $30 you paid previously.

It just might mean that EVE is not for you and your region beyond Alpha or paying for Omega via Plex. I also have other hobbies that become very expensive with shipping, taxes, import fees. Sometimes I pay for it anyway, other times it just isn’t worth it. A product can easily become twice as expensive with the higher shipping fees of the last decade…

Sometimes you just have to accept a product just isn’t priced/marketed or just plain available in your region.

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I heard about the reason for this, a lot of the ships where only moving goods one way and going back empty so they increased the crap out of the prices to accommodate for it.