I confess I never even knew about "ghost training" until this announcement.  I've had two accounts for 5 years and paid every day of both of them.  Silly me.

Now I'm wondering, if these supposed legions of 5-alt cheapskates cancel en masse... will I be able to get into Jita again?

People also got pissed off with ccp changing their game time cards options. They removed the 30 day one so they could jack up the price and hide it in a 60 day one. I like what ccp have done with eve, and their vision of the game, but man do they mess up big when it comes to dealing with the subscribers. The list that comes off the top of my head is,

-developer gives a corpmate bpo's i.e. dev cheats. The guy didn't even get the sack.

-remvoing 30 day gtc's

-jacking up prices

-removing ghost training feature

Yeah, they need to work on their customer relations. Not quite soe yet, but they're getting there.

I guess sacking the guy who actually makes the databse go round is a good option, rather than taking away his gaming rights.

It's their company and if they want to change the GTC they should in all reasonable views be able to dont you think?
 

What prices are you speaking about?

Ghost Training is a scam and if you dont pay for the game you shouldnt be able to train.

yes they need to work on their customer relations. I suggest that they have player reps..... Oh Wait? they do that already.

Fail!

Per Mopar63’s last post,

How could you make such false claims?

Example01:
Mopar63 “…any hard core player I know, in fact 90% of the players I know have more than one account in EVERY MMO.”

That’s just plain false. I don’t know how else to put it. That’s just false. Anybody, anywhere in gaming, without knowing anything about Eve in particular, knows that this is false.

Example02:
“Also correct me if I am wrong, can a WoW or Everquest player actually use in game currency to pay for the account?”

Interesting. Anybody, anywhere, can smell this must be a bit more complicated, but let’s explain it to them.

CCP uses part of their player base as gold farmers.

Here’s how the system works.

CCP makes available GTCs, game time cards, for 35 dollars per 60 days game time.

CCP makes a section of their official forum where players with game currency can match up with other players who have GTCs.

One player uses gold to buy the GTC and is happy because he might not have a credit card and might prefer to ‘work’ off the game time by gold farming.

The other player is happy because he paid 35 dollars and just got a bunch of game gold.

Is this really a big benefit to the players themselves?

Well, it’s nice and convenient for some people, and I’m happy for them, but look at the bottom line.

CCP gets 35 dollars per 60 days, that’s 17.50 per month, more than any other mmo, and far more than the cost of an mmo if you buy extended periods with a credit card.

Mopar63 and other players write about paying for game time with game gold because they’re so deep buried in denial that they start to believe that the game gold really gets them the game time as if no real money was involved.

News flash Mopar63. CCP uses GTCs and fosters currency trade because thereby in the end, it costs the players more money to play.

  I still haven't figured out why CCP has such a large problem with this.

   The amount of actual processing power it takes to advance the training on a character that isn't paying, isn't that much.

  Some seem to think the person can login, play, or change their training while "Ghosting."  When that's simply not the case.   The person ghosts, for say 20 days, then they know their skill is about to be completed, so they RE-SUBSCRIBE for a month.. Change their training, and may or may not play for that month.

  A lot of them it appears don't even play.  So for EvE That should be a GREAT deal.   If someone buys webhosting and doesn't use that webhosting, but pays.  Or even takes a month off, comes back and pays,  that's a good deal.   Hardly any processing power, but still getting money.

 They aren't DELETING accounts so talking about how much space they take up is irrelavent.  Only the amount of power it takes to update the skill (One skill at a time anyways)

  This is really a dumb excuse from CCP.     They would make more money allowing it to continue, then stopping it.  As most of the people will just stop playing Alts.  While I doubt a lot of them will give up completely on EvE ,  I can see the Alt Number drop a lot.   And while some people think this won't matter because CCP Wasn't getting money from them in anyways,  they WERE getting money from them.  Maybe not once a month, but definitely every time a skill was completed.

yeah i think the whole thing is a pile of Bs....anyone with any server/pc skills at all could see that this change doesnt affect performance in any way.

its called nickel and diming......this change in conjunction with the game card limitation are bad choices.

Originally posted by DavidLemke

 

<snip>

Big picture: CCP are a bunch of scam artists who have a great racket going. They have to work much LESS, and provide much LESS than other mmos, while charging their players MORE. Removing ghost training was just another move farther in that direction.

The method we use to reward people for making something that we enjoy is to give them money.  If you don't want to compensate them for their hard work by giving them money then I have no choice but to argue that you are greedy and a scammer, as is any person who uses a product but doesn't feel the need to reward the one who provides the product.

i agree with most of that what was said in this topic. just to write my point of view .. this is just a long term billing strategy, doesnt matter how they are trying to hide it .. first step was canceling 30d and 90d GTC with introducing 60d which nearly doubled subs price .. then Power of 2 which ended week before the original announcement .. and of course announcing new expansion just few days earlier

i dont think its coincidence.

was ghost training fair ? as someone already mentioned, it was a feature, that means something i paid for by buying the game and paying for it ! everyone can do it, its their choice if they used it or not ...

another thing that is hard to believe .. none of dev red the player guide ever ? for 4 years not a single dev red the player guide ? oh common ... how that can be possible ?

to the profit question, also in the interview the dev is taking about getting players back to play .. but .. thats not an issue here .. the players that play iregulary are not stable income, thay play a month, then un-sub for two, etc. now they will consider if doubled price for account (if they want to skill char wile un-sub)  its worth it .. i guess not .. or they will just not skill and keep playing without ghost training .. lets make it 50/50 so ccp its not loosing much

main income lost are alt accounts, i had two alt accounts and i know that ppl are training them because they need them .. lets say that in avarage you can have advanced alt in 6 months that means 3 months sub / 3 months un-sub (planning the skills to fit this isnt that easy though) .. after  6 months player WILL pay full time sub because he needs the alt and why not use it when its there, but its still an alt account so its played much less than main. some of you may say that thats not true, that alt accounts are often un-subed .. well they are not , 50/50 worst scenerio:) now most players will cancel their alt accounts because they are not worth the money or the doubled initial money investment (6 moths instead of 3)

i cant see how ccp thought about it, if they just guessed or have new guy that "had an idea" ..

Perhaps CCP need to look at why Ghost training was used.  So many of the playerbase do not like to spend a month playing watching a 30 day skill tick over.  If there were no 30+ day skills no one would use Ghost training period.  CCP should drop all skills to 20 days max, i have a 30 mill char so yes it would affect me negatively but a healthier game is more important.

How long this game has been out they should of depreciated some of the skills (reducing their rank and time) by now to flatten out the skill base , instead new players face this treadmill they will never catch up.  Just name one technology or new skill that after a few years is not common place.  Each expansion as they introduce more skills figure out what the highest level 5 skills fully trained accross the player base and then reduce the training time on them for the new players.

I also find CCP Are the stingiest company in terms of skills (XP).  SOE ,  DDO etc have all had bonus periods where a weekend or time line poeple who resubbed or were actively subbed get a bonus to XP or loot drops or something.  CCP has not once that I know ever offered some accelerated skill training days to give current subscribers a reward or entice new poeple back.

I can only hope as STO, Jumpgate etc come out that CCP is further relegated to a niche MMO as they really dont give two hoots about the players as a whole.

First of all: I think the question is simpler than this. CCP advertised a feature, and people knew what Ghost Training means when they invested money in a 2nd or a 3rd account. Something they can't finance without this advertised feature. What about their investment and that deal? Noone could say they don't want to pay for the game, since they tend to pay for multiple accounts most of the time.

One for their main char, and  at least one alt where they use Ghost Training. So noone speaks about people who don't pay for a game they play.

Secound: I have to note a few important things about why Ghost Training was important:

• I doubt that supporting a 2nd account that is inactive most of the time is as exensive for CCP as a main is.
• In most games with similar subscribtion fees you have an option to have 2-3 "high level characters" on same account, without extra investment. With the current system  in Eve Online it isn't possible. This is why 2nd accounts with "some discount" was important and fair
• Long skill trainings with no visible advancement can make eve online somewhat boring at times, this feature have ofset some problems related to this, why would you pay for a game when there is nothing meaningfull to do for MONTHS because they didn't put content in?

If we see it it isn't simple from a fairness or a cost vs value perspective.

Also why I think CCP should have known that it was an advertised feature and not a bug

• Time based advancement is good thing, unless your skill training ends at night, in a downtime, etc and has to switch skills for it. To aleviate some problems Skill Queues was requested, and more often than not Ghost Training was named as a reason against Skill Queues.
• When you feel something might be a bug, you usually check your documentation to see what would be the normal behavior. 
• And if you change one behavior once in one server but intentionaly leave it active for all others that isn't a bug. Since you kept that behavior intentionally. Patch notes, difference between code based for the 2 editions (they can see that in sorce code) is a clear sign of this.

I have to say not checking anything would look amateurish. And it happened now not in 2004. Right?

Third: I think most wouldn't mind removing ghost training if it would be done with proper timely warning, they wouldn't say it is a bugfix when they had every reason to know it was a feature, and they would try to balance out the change with either allowing training for all characters on your account and / or give working skill queues in same patch and / or reduce the time required to "max out a character" from like 24 years to "industry standard" of max 2-3 years so people doesn't need Ghost Training and / or there would be real content added to the game to provide fun for times when you train long skills, etc.

But as you see it isn't balanced with this way, but balanced with lies, offensive behavior, etc. 

i dont care they took it out, and i dont care it was in the game.

I dont understand why they feel the need to change this though, nobody complained about it and it wasnt gamebreaking/gamechanging. TBH this is just a horrible change not because of the change itself, but because of the drama a change like this will cause.

ghost training is garbage.  In what other game can you cancel your account and still level up?  How is it fair for someone who doesn't pay to skill up ? Its not...the 10,000 people that are mad about this are not very reliable customers so F them.  

Originally posted by Raver

Perhaps CCP need to look at why Ghost training was used.  So many of the playerbase do not like to spend a month playing watching a 30 day skill tick over.  If there were no 30+ day skills no one would use Ghost training period.  CCP should drop all skills to 20 days max, i have a 30 mill char so yes it would affect me negatively but a healthier game is more important.

How long this game has been out they should of depreciated some of the skills (reducing their rank and time) by now to flatten out the skill base , instead new players face this treadmill they will never catch up.  Just name one technology or new skill that after a few years is not common place.  Each expansion as they introduce more skills figure out what the highest level 5 skills fully trained accross the player base and then reduce the training time on them for the new players.

I also find CCP Are the stingiest company in terms of skills (XP).  SOE ,  DDO etc have all had bonus periods where a weekend or time line poeple who resubbed or were actively subbed get a bonus to XP or loot drops or something.  CCP has not once that I know ever offered some accelerated skill training days to give current subscribers a reward or entice new poeple back.

I can only hope as STO, Jumpgate etc come out that CCP is further relegated to a niche MMO as they really dont give two hoots about the players as a whole.

 

whiner.

Originally posted by DavidLemke

In Eve, you don’t pay for content the same way you do in other mmos. Eve only takes up 3 gigs on your hard drive after over 5 years of play. The last big expansion, Empyrean Age, only amounted to 39mbs. Yeah, that’s right, 39mb. The biggest expansion they had was the release of tech2 gear and ships, and those ships almost all had hulls which were duplicates of old tech1 hulls.

 

about  90% of the post is complete crap but this part is like wtf . How can you possibly whine that a game takes less space ??? Thats how you measure how good the expansion is?! seriously wtf

And whats this , you are saying that the expansions don't have enough content , dude , did you actually played eve ?! or you just logged in once a month to change the skill. Eve has , on average , the most rich content wise expansions that i've seen , not to mention that they are more often and free(here be happy i've said that they are free)

If you compare eve how it was 5 years ago  to what it is now is like comparing Wolfenstein to crysis. The diffrence is enormous , it 's like comparing 2 diffrent games

Lets take only the last expansion Empyrean Age, wich is actually a small expansion compared to the others , what did it do ? it introduced factional warfare , a new region ,4 new faction cruisers and a few other stuff, that dosen't look like much , but if you see what factional warfare is you will understand why it is big enough for a expansion

here check the patch notes  , if thats not big enough i don't know what is

Back at the matter at hand wich is ghost training,or training when your account is inactive. Almost everyone did it at a point.But not that many abused it , like leaving the account unpaid 1 month and training to lvl 5 a skill or training capital skils. Now i can't say i agree with it myself but i;m not really crying after it either , it's more of a "meh " thing, for me at least. 

Originally posted by britzban

ghost training is garbage.  In what other game can you cancel your account and still level up?  How is it fair for someone who doesn't pay to skill up ? Its not...the 10,000 people that are mad about this are not very reliable customers so F them.  

Wrong.

In Eve Online the average account age is like 7 months. That is, you pay for 7 months and nothing more. To have a maxed out character you would need several years. Something like 24 years!

This speaks about reliability of average customers.

About people who have multiple accounts and stay for far longer than 7 months are reliable customers with and without Ghost Training.

No, Eve is not a ‘content’ game.

I’m not saying that I measure the value of an expansion by size alone. I never even really cared much or took notice until lately when I saw how small the last ‘expansion’ was and started digging.

I am saying that you can puff up patch notes like you can puff up a resume, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that 39 megabytes of expansion, no matter what the notes say, doesn’t amount to much. The Empyrean Age notes LOOK like a heck of a lot, but they sure do NOT amount to much. How much ‘content’ can you really pack into 39mb? That’s the size of a few Youtube videos. Seriously, wtf. This is part of the denial you find in the Eve community.

The pve content of Eve is paper thin, shallow as a puddle.
 

You know why everyone in Eve is so familiar with missions like 'Worlds Collide" and "Recon" parts 1, 2, and 3, and Angel Extravaganza? Players have done those missions and the other few pve things to do, a gazillion times,. because there just isn't much around.

In a nutshell ... Ghost training did not deter anyone from playing, but it did  bring in revenue on a cyclic basis.  most of the ghost trainers I know have accounts running that they normally play, but periodically re-sub their ghost train character to bring up their skills ... OR they take turns playing one account, or the other.  In the end this will cause a loss of revnue for CCP.  They just lost money imo.

BTW ... I just canceled my account today.

Am I the only one who wants them to COMPLETELY revamp the current experience system. The game does not accurately protray the amount of time people play (which for some of us, is ALOT) in comparison to the trickle of experience given to the skills we gain.

CCP is making handfulls because they are artificially spreading their leveling system, and sure the hardcore 5 year old players would have to get use to fact that hardcore newbies could catch up in a year, but I don't think it's fair that the amount of experience should be  DIRECTLY attributed to the amount  I've payed CCP in subscriptions.

Maybe you guys should find a better way of making money in game.

That solves everything, I promise.

Wow some people must just choose to be ignorant. The main reason why CCP finally plugged this whole was because they were seeing a huge upswing in the amount of characters created and trained using ghost training for the SOLE purpose of selling those characters for isk. Until now the ghost training wasn't a problem, now it is so they fixed it. End of story.

Also, you claim that when buying 60 day GTC's it means that CCP is getting $17.50/month in sub money. That is patently false. First of all it costs them some small amount to print and distribute the GTC's if in physical  form and secondly since they are being sold through a 3rd party retailer there is some markup in order for the retailer to make some profit, otherwise it wouldn't make sense to sell the GTC's in the first place.

Also comparing the monthly cost of paying with EVE GTC's vs paying any other MMO or EVE via credit card isn't really an accurate comparison either. An accurate comparison would be to compare GTC prices accross MMO's, in which case EVE GTC's are slightly more expensive than US timecodes (about $5) and slightly cheaper than EU timecodes (about $10) which likely stems from the fact that EVE doesn't have separate US/EU servers.

Also the part about there being less in EVE patches because they are so small is just plain assinine and idiotic. First of all the things that take up the most space in ANY game are art assets. Textures, shaders, etc. about 90% of any games data needs will be taken up by art assets, so unless they need to add some new model or other art asset into a patch all that's left over is code changes. Code is inherently pretty compact (especially if coded well) and as it is essentially all character data it can be compressed heavily, resulting in much smaller patch sizes. Oh but you didn't think the EVE patches were uncompressed....nah nobody's that stupid. Also the third thing you have to realize is the eve client is just a dumb client. Pretty much just art assets and some underlying code to go along with it. All the important stuff is handled on the server. So once again there's less stuff you need to be distributing with the client.

I expect with the ambulation expansion the size of the client will at least double, if not more. Also I imagine since the midas expansion will include the Orca model and some further trinity upgrades it will likely be over 100 mb at least for the premium version.

Originally posted by steviepunk

I think this was pretty poorly handled by CCP, however while I do see the point I believe that they'll end up losing more than they gain.  I'd suspect that most of the accounts being ghost trained are 'alt' accounts rather than primary accounts - there is no point ghost training with your primary account since you then can't actually play the game, while ghost training an alt account means you can play with your main while you ghost train your alt until it does what you want it to do.

Out of this, I think there will more more alt accounts permanently expired than will become full active (ie. user paying for every month)

Also, aside from Capital skills, most skills will only be around 30 days of training, so it's not like you can leave an account for 6 months and get 6 months worth of training on it.

 

What bothers me is the lack of explaination as to how this will actually be implemented.   If I have a character training a 30 days skill, then after 20 days my account expires (I forgot to buy a time code) for a couple of days, then when I finally get a time code and log in again, will my 20 days of training be lost, or saved?  Will my skill still be training in the time between me applying the time code to my account and when I actually log back in to the game?

Bad implementation of this 'fix' could end up causing even more problems.

What is an "alt account?"  I have nine accounts and they are co-equal.  Maybe some people treat a second or third account as subordinate, but I use all of them.  The alts are the other two chars on each account, which almost always get next to no training because to train those would necessitate pausing training on the principal char of the three that every account can have.

I believe they will lose far more than they gain by this change.

Most skills are not 30 days.  Below the level of Capital skills, relatively few skills are even as long as 30 days.  Most are minutes, hours, and some are days long.  Objectives to fly certain ships and use certain fittings determine the course of most training, and it's unusual to have a 30-day training step conveniently available to train if for any reason you need to let an account expire.

To answer your question, if your account expires 20 days into training a 30-day step, your training will now be forcibly paused, and no, it will not automatically resume when you reactivate the account.   You will have to log in and resume the training.

Since the training step is really only a completion date/time, this change requires CCP to cause the servers to do additional work to forcibly pause your training when your account expires.  The natural way for this to work is the way it has been working for 5 years -- the completion date/time outside the game is set the instant you initiate the trainin step and nothing -- not servers being up or down, not you being online or offline, not even your account being active or expired -- affected the completion date/time.  There was nothing being delivered for free by CCP to users making use of this feature.  The training completion was bought and paid for at the time the step was begun.  The wait until "completion" was a wait until an out-of-game date and time.

Originally posted by cynshane

Ghost Training is a scam and if you dont pay for the game you shouldnt be able to train.

Unsubscribed training was a feature, in the game for 5+ years.  It was documented and was referred to many times by CCP personnel in their own Forums.  You have sufficient basis to know this, or to have read about it, that your claim that it is a scam is transparently disingenuous.

Since "training" in Eve involves no game play whatsoever after initiating a training step and is instead merely the calculation of a "completion" date and time outside the game, CCP was giving nothing away, providing no service for free, and in fact they used this feature as a strong incentive to get people to reactivate idle accounts.  That incentive is now gone and reactivations will accordingly drop.  The manner in which they handled it angered many more people, and so additional accounts are being dropped or not reactivated.

Does CCP pay you to be their apologist?

Originally posted by JackStyles

   The amount of actual processing power it takes to advance the training on a character that isn't paying, isn't that much.

Actually it is zero.  There is no processing whatsoever necessary for the unsubscribed training feature.  Think of the training as a post-it note on the wall.  The note says that after such-and-such date and time the training step will be usable by the subscriber.  Only, of course, if he/she reactivates the account, but it's just a date/time after which the skill will be usable.  It takes no more work for the servers than it would for you to have a post-it note stuck on your wall.

Originally posted by Enerla

• Time based advancement is good thing, unless your skill training ends at night, in a downtime, etc and has to switch skills for it. To aleviate some problems Skill Queues was requested, and more often than not Ghost Training was named as a reason against Skill Queues.

It would be very easy for CCP to have both unsubscribed training and a training queue.  The obvious way, and one that would tend to fall out automatically from a simple and straightforward implementation, would be for the training queue to only work for active accounts.  An expired account would "finish" the current training step but not start the next one in the queue.  An active account would automatically start the next training step in the queue after the current one completes.  That would also preserve the principle that inactive accounts get no attention from the servers while active ones do.  Unsubscribed training imposes no server load whatsoever while a training queue would require that the server start up the next training step whether or not the user is online at the time.

i have a solution if you dont want to pay for a main and alt account.. Buy isk.. lol.. most places you can buy 1 billion for under $30USD. then buy 2x60 day GTC, one for main, and one for alt.. you now can play both, train both, and all for under the price of CCP's listed monthly cost.. sure it is against their rules... but if they can make and change rules and guidelines as they see fit, aswell already allowing for purchases with isk.. i say why not.