Originally posted by Malcanis

Originally posted by BigCountry

wait a sec, eve pretty much already is free to play. join a large corp/alliance, get out in 0.0 and rat battleships for plex.

:D

 

 

 

It takes about 6-8 hours to grind yourself a £10 PLEX this way. That's a pretty horrible hourly rate. I'd rather spend 8 hours "grinding" at work and make enough to pay for a 12 month subscription.

Damn right!!! Eve Online is the only game that truly DESERVES my money earned from work. I pay it proudly, knowing that my regular payments help support this awesome game and help CCP continue to evolve it beyond anything. It is the ONLY subscription-based or cash-shop-based online game for which I can say this. I wouldn't pay a cent for any other MMO currently out, nor anything pending. The only possible exceptions to that would be World of Darkness and Dust 514, which are also from CCP, since they seem to be the only developer right now who knows what the hell they are doing when it comes to MMO game design.

Seriously, I could have paid for the subscription with my allowance from when I was 12, and you get all of the content without having to worry about it. Don't be cheap.

Originally posted by crysent

I tend to agree with others - F2P model is perfect for some games, P2P model is perfect for others.  I am not sure Eve would flourish under a F2P .

 

To be honest though I'm surprised they haven't opened a cash shop, a way for players to catch up with veterans.  

They have, kind of; the legitimate, game-legal route is: buy PLEXes from CCP -> Sell PLEX to other players for ISK -> use ISK to buy character from another player. This allows a "pay to catch up" route that doesn't hyperinflate the number of skillpoints.

Generally characters cost about what they're "worth"; they're usually sold for roughly the ISK value of about as many PLEX to buy as it did to skill them up. There's some variation, and truly high skilled characters fetch a premium, as do ones with fashionable specialisations.

So if you're willing to spend ~2 years subscriptions in one go, you can getn yourself a ~2 year old character

NO.

Originally posted by Superman0X

If EVE were to go F2P, it should follow the model established by Entropia Universe (aka Project Entropia). Simply make money what you sell, and then take a cut of this out of the market as a way to pay for costs.

Entropia Universe is not a game you can really consider to be a good financial model, personally i think its little more than a ponzi scheme, and i really don't think anyone at CCP would look at EU and think 'hey what an awesome idea, lets copy it' .. i wouldnt be at all surprised if they would consider EU in the same light i do. Not to mention Eve already is doing 1000 x better than EU could ever hope to. nuff said.

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Originally posted by Isasis
Remember what it did for LOTRO? EQ2? I can't speak for EQ2...but LOTRO was doing rather good for subscribers. It went free to play and the popularity sky rocketed AND Turbine started earning a lot more money.

 

A lesser example is Saga of Ryzom. It is a sandbox MMO, but more PvE based. It was dead. Granted, the game still hasn't really taken off...but free to play really boosted the activity in the game. Not only that, but the community is still great as well.

 

What if EVE was free to play? It already is for people with a lot of ISK...but what if it was like that for EVERYONE? They can still charge a monthly fee for added bonuses to people who pay. People could pay others with ISK to buy things in a VANITY cash shop. Don't go pay to win of course, we all saw what happened with Allods.

 

EVE would not just be a niche MMO, but the people playing AND the subscriber count would sky rocket. Why should only senior players get to play for free, anyway? That just makes it where the best and richest players remain the 1% and everyone else has to scrounge up or try to catch up to them. And CCP could have a cash shop where there are vanity items or small bonuses, to entice people to pay. Maybe free players have limits or "debuffs" so to speak, so they don't have everything a pay to play player does.

 

Anyway, before flaming...and I know EVE is doing rather well...but think how much better it could do.

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It won't work.

Lotro, EQ2, all those games are F2P by virtue of locking a lot of content behind paywalls.

What do you suppose EVE should lock behind paywalls? low sec and no sec systems? That would only encourage even more overpopulation of high sec systems. Skills? That would only encourage people to simply not learn any advanced skills since they're not necessary to progress. An isk or inventory cap? That would only serve to frustrate players, nothing else - EVE inventories don't need to be capped like in other mmo's because of how the system works anyway.

Selling ships and ammo for real money? That would go over well... /sarcasm

Selling skillpoints for real money? Prepare for a huge shitstorm.

EVE doesn't work like other MMO's. Unless it can survive purely by selling clothes for your avatars (which i really doubt) it simply can't go F2P. There's nothing you can do to make the game F2P without thoroughly breaking it.

On a sidenote, paying for the game with PLEX isn't the same as playing the game for free. Where do you think those PLEX come from? Someone else has to have bought them with real money before they can be sold ingame, which means that someone somewhere paid for the subscription. This is how it's possible to play eve "for free".

Basically, people who use PLEX to play EVE simply make other people pay their subscription for them.

No, EVE is really not the kind of game that lends itself well to the F2P model.

Keep Eve the way it is, its community is already plagued by a bunch of college natural selection Eve does not need anymore of its type ingame.

EVE shouldn't do anything that upsets their core player base enough to make them leave.  It is a niche game, and those players are the heart of it.  

If SOE would have understood that the core community is what makes a sandbox game great, SWG would have done much better than it did.  Without them, the game will whither and die.

Free to play is for games that failed to deliver and are going broke or they're made free at the very start because the developers wanna nickel and dime your ass to death.

EVE does not suck enough to start changing the payment model.

Originally posted by MindTrigger

EVE shouldn't do anything that upsets their core player base enough to make them leave.  It is a niche game, and those players are the heart of it.  

If SOE would have understood that the core community is what makes a sandbox game great, SWG would have done much better than it did.  Without them, the game will whither and die.

Agree dont rock the boat, make what you got happy then grow from thier.    SOE Smedley even said he was willing to loose what they had and shake the dice for imagined younger players.    SWG went from complex and rewarding to dumb and trivial.   I used to love to craft then the developers started making items for sale for the card game.    Thats what happens when you get a "pay for it", in a sandbox mmo.

It essentially already is. You do the free trial and get enough money in game to buy plex. And you're done.

The strategy CCP has been following for 8 years is working.  The game is slowly growing.  That is an amazing accomplishment considering the sub based mmorpg's of the past 5 years start out of the gate with huge numbers then after the second or third month fall off a cliff.

If it's not broken, don't fix it.

Originally posted by Garvon3

It essentially already is. You do the free trial and get enough money in game to buy plex. And you're done.

Yeah, but how do you do it!?

Originally posted by Komandor

Originally posted by Garvon3

It essentially already is. You do the free trial and get enough money in game to buy plex. And you're done.

Yeah, but how do you do it!?

That part is kind of up to you...

Originally posted by GTwander

No way.

It's one of the *few* games out there where the barrier to entry prevents total abuse. If it was F2P, you'd see a LOT more multiboxers fleeting by themsevles. I mean people still do it atm, but at 15$ a month per account, well, it's more in the realm of 'pathetic', rather than 'smart'.

I can probably name off a dozen things that free accounts could do that would absolutely ruin the game. If you ever played it, then you can too, so I won't even bother.

I agree with you as well.