Hi again Matthias; you sound quite resentful. I hope it’s not getting in the way of your forming cogent and persuasive arguments.
In fact, I was one of those who shelled out £60 for TESO. Unfortunately, the combat mechanics were so terrible at that time (2014), I quickly shelved the game and put it down as a bad job. Fast forward about 3 years; I reinstalled the game and found it to be - a blast! I don’t mind the presence of micro-transactions (or any reasonable commerce) if there is good content to be had in the game. There will always be complaints, but I think TESO is in a good place quite honestly.
One of EVE’s problems (compared with TESO, for example) is that there are no ‘world’ expansions; entirely new areas of space with a compelling narrative theme. You don’t have to change the mechanics at all, just get some great ideas. Of course, this comes at a cost, and it must be paid for, but I’m sure most people don’t mind paying for their jollies. Some people hate to pay for anything at all, I’m well aware.
Anyway, you should calm down, miner; all that rage and frustration is surely not good for you?!
But teso failed commercially because of its high cost not because of gameplay. The gameplay was pretty much ripped straight from skyrim and well bethsdas notoriously clunk combat is another discussion altogether. It was extremely well received but it was unanimously disdained for charging a monthly fee on top of an in store sticker price. It was a terrible decision that they paid for. Mmos have been falling out of style for years now and rather than offer more content at lower prices than another game devs nowadays want to nickle and dime diminishing playerbases for the few whales that are left rather than grow the player base and expand. The prior is detrimental. That’s factual on teso, you can go back and look at reviews and initial news stories. The back lash was from cost.
I’m admittedly poor and not in the best place and I simply won’t pay 15$ a month for any game. I wouldn’t be back in game if not for the alpha program to give me a chance to go straight to buying game time with isk but I’m the first to admit it shouldnt exist and Eve should either be a disc you pay for once and have everything free after or pay a small monthly fee for and have everything unlocked after.
Those are the only two models that work and are proven. I could justify 5$ for the one character on my account I use. 15 for 3 without also offering 10 for 2 or 5 for 1 is a mistake I pointed out years ago.
Ccp would get way more subs than the money they’d lose by offering cheaper subs or an outright 60$ purchase.
microtransactions, dlc, disck locked content, patches, ore orders, etc, etc are all cancerous anti consumer practices and theyre destroying gaming.
Hopefully gamers start responding like they have with battlefront to rectify these practices.
(Well also see ea soon back on top as most hated company in America)
Also I don’t mine, at least not this time around. I was a highsec miner/mission runner years ago around apocrypha.
Studies of microtransactions show that like 95% of IRL purchases come from 5% of the player base. I’m sure that’s not the exact number, but its extremely close. F2P games therefore go out of their way to court these “whales” as they’re called.
I personally have only come across a few people who buy plex with irl cash to trade for isk. The interesting thing about these transactions is that often the player who has this sudden influx of wealth is poorly suited to defending it. They make mistakes, and those who can capitalize on those mistakes profit. Handsomely. I recently stole a Sotiyo(valued at around 25 bil) from someone who got one bought with IRL cash… AS A GIFT FROM SOMEONE ELSE.
Think about that. There are players who will drop hundreds of dollars to buy bling, or sometimes even to gift people stuff for birthdays or whatever. These players are vanishingly rare, however. The real source of all this isk is incursions and carrier ratting in null. Not to mention the rampant botting as well.
To tie this all together. People who spend IRL cash for isk are rare, and they’d buy it from illicit sites anyway. CCP just found a way to turn that market into a benefit for the rest of us.
You’re thinking about this all wrong. If people spend tons of irl money for an edge, that’s just transferring tons of isk to one person, who likely doesn’t yet have the skills and foresight to defend it. Gank them. Scam them. Hunt them. Ransom them. Find them, and take their dirty isk for yourself. You have a problem with it? Go hunt them down.
Personally I don’t have a problem with it. Many of the people I’ve fleeced have been very nice. Some of them I offered help and knowledge to. But all of them are loot pinatas waiting for someone to give them a good whack.
Thanks Matthias. I thought I should just offer a personal alternative view (the ‘miner’ reference was light-hearted). Of course, I didn’t stick around long enough for the introduction by Bethesda of a monthly sub, on top of the (then) astronomically high purchase price. I just wanted to prolong the enjoyment I’d had from Skyrim itself. Wonderful game.
I get where you’re coming from. For some folks, $15 for unfettered access to a game just isn’t manageable. But it has always been the case that income dictates your choices. Unfortunately that has spilled over into necessities, not just leisure pursuits. Politics aside, I believe game production companies could do more to attract and retain a broader range of people, and still remain profitable. Where are the philanthropists these days, eh?
Thanks again for raising these important matters. I would have raised them myself if I thought it would help - but I took an arrow in the knee…
Not sure why you feel the need to be insulting but ok. The gap im referring to is in that if I learn how to PVE I still have to wait a ton of time before I can fly the ships that I want. Everyone acts like there is some huge mastery involved with knowing how to fit and fly the cruiser and battleship classes. Sure PVP has a tougher learning curve but currently it takes too long to be able to “level up”.
I’m not arguing that a fresh toon should be just as proficient as a 1 year old toon. I’m simply saying that even after a person is comfortable with learning how to fly a ship, they still have to spend months learning individual skills that gate them from getting better gear. Thus the gap.
If 2 players are equally competent with pvp combat, but one player has tier 2 gear and the other has tier 1, as well as skills that give passive bonuses, then the player with better gear will win every time. Plex will allow an account to close that gap, by being able to purchase the skill injectors needed.
Put simply the amount of time your character needs to learn skills is not the same amount of time that you personally need practicing them.
Yes it did. And travelling between cities started by walking and on horses, now we have cars. Sometimes change is good.
If it is irrelevant, then why are we talking about it? Obviously it is relevant, because it has changed things, if it didn’t change things you wouldn’t have to worry about it, or complain about it.
I’m not following this “charge people twice” line of thinking. Eve now has different ways that a person can pay for the same thing, and they have different things that they sell in different ways, but I don’t see any charging twice for the same thing to anyone.
Let’s look at an metaphor of a gym (a traditional subscription based business). The gym first opens as a subscription business (like Eve, before PLEX, before Clone States). People like the gym, and the gym is nice to them, it even gives its members from free T-shirts and towels (like SKINs and in-game apparel). But then they decide that they should sell these, instead of just giving them away, after all paying a subscription doesn’t entitle you to anything outside of the subscription/membership (selling SKINs, etc. in the NES). The gym then wants to expand so they start offering a program where members can invite their friends for a short time for free, and they can even buy memberships for other people through a complex in-gym trading system (trial accounts and in-game PLEXing). Then the gym worked out a system that could let members work out more than 24 hours/day (I’m not sure how this would actually work), but they charged extra for it, because it’s more than the membership, which is 24 hours/day (skill injectors). This still didn’t give them the membership numbers they wanted so they let anyone in the gym, but only let them use certain equipment for free, they hoped these new “members” would buy full memberships to use all the equipment (Clone States). As they looked at these new “members” they saw that many of them didn’t want to buy large memberships, so they gave them access to more equipment and offered 1-day memberships (Daily Alpha Injectors).
So, what exactly are they charging twice for? The things in addition to the membership that you aren’t entitled to for free? (SKINs, clothing, injectors, etc.) Or a different way to pay memberships? (PLEXing, DAI, etc.)
Is that the argument here? You had to do it so everyone should have to do it? You realize that is why updates and balancing to games are done. At the end of the day if something is not fun, or too grindy or doesn’t make sense then it needs to be changed.
The current model takes too long. And it isn’t even skill related like everyone loves to say. What life lesson am I learning by not being able to use a modulated strip miner? what am I learning from not being able to a hauler with a bigger cargo capacity?
Yes. They offered a legitimate means of buying ISK that does not depend on creating ISK out of thin air. Also to reduce the illegal RMT activity. It is actually rather ingenious. Further, the actual transactions make both parties better off. Yet here you come some person looking at the transaction who feels upset by it…are you always such a busybody worried about what others are doing?
In EvE: you train Catalyst and hybrid guns and after 1 week blow industrials fo 10 years veterans.
Or if you want more “real” example: skilling up t1 frigate with t2 guns takes about month maximum. After that it does not matter how long you play the game - skills you collect do not affect performance of your ship. So nothing really different here unless “winning” for you is to have all the ships and guns at LvL5.
But in Dec/Jan change, Alphas will not only have much wider access to skills/hulls, but also the daily injector, which means they simply buy PLEX ingame with isk until they reach 20mil SP, no matter how long it takes.
They dont need to pay CCP a cent to do that.
That is a huge change, and something none of us ever had.
We either had to sub, or buy someones PLEX inorder to play, every month.
Alphas now/soon dont need to do any of that.
i recently tried out the space flight world of tank being f2p and that is putting a lot of game internal advertisement on buying an account which on the outlook reads way more p2w than plex.
If they are buying PLEX with ISK then somebody had to buy PLEX for RL currency.
The cost of the daily injectors for a month is 600 PLEX, 20% than the sub PLEX which is over 30% more than paying for one month of a sub. To use a daily injector the Alpha would have to buy about $24 worth of PLEX…and those PLEX were sold by CCP to somebody who put them on the market.
There are already masses of PLEX ingame, that have been paid for but never sunk.
Unfortunately, they are largely with-held from the market, except at a trickle.
I know the math.
The point I was making which you willfully ignored, is that Alphas dont have to sub, or buy PLEX. They can just earn isk ingame and buy one daily injector at a time for the set price of 20PLEX.
Post-change, there is less incentive than ever for a free player to ever actually spend money on CCP.
You are learning patience. You know that valuable real world skill you need because the real world isn’t constant instant gratification. It’s the same patience that will help you with any children you may have and survive relative or work drama because you can be patient and wait till things cool down. It’s the same patience that helps you realize that waiting is ok and the get rich quick scheme is probably a trap.