1. Don't know the exact skill layout of alphas, can't comment.

2. Make a Gallente alpha, problem solved.

3. Nope nope nope nope nope nope. I know you want free stuff, but CCP needs to keep the shinys just out of reach so that people have an incentive to actually subscribe. They kind of need the sub money...

4. They cannot fly pirate ships. Why? See point 3. More free stuff for alphas = less incentive = less money = bad. It's not hard.

People these days are used to handholding and instant gratification and most can't deal without it. EVE is the exact opposite to that.

It's just not a game for everyone and that's not a bug, that's a feature. I have no interest in playing WoW with spaceships.


And my on-topic reply: If anything, alphas need more restrictions. If CCP goes along and gives them more stuff, they'll keep asking for more stuff and it won't stop. Alpha players are cannon fodder at best. They're supposed to try the game in their own time and then sub if they like it. If they don't, they can leave. If they expect more stuff without paying for it, they can **** off and spread their pathetic mentality somewhere else.

Do you feel you're not currently getting your $0/month from the game?

You seem to be under the impression that alphas are supposed to be effective. They aren't. They're supposed to be an opportunity to try the game and learn the mechanics without being scared off by a financial commitment. If veteran players are choosing to use alpha accounts for anything then that's a problem, and if it can be fixed without hindering the new player experience then it should be fixed. And from that point of view battleships, pirate cruisers, etc, are all expensive endgame ships that new players have no ability to use. The only people who would benefit would be veteran players who want to save $15/month and still get to fly the same stuff.

Not really. $15/month is a trivial cost for most players who can afford the computer/internet/etc to play EVE at all. The actual situation is a pretty binary split between people who are kind of interested in playing EVE but not enough to commit financially to it and people who know they like EVE and are willing to pay. Once you cross that barrier of paying for the game at all I don't think there's a meaningful difference between $10/month and $15/month.

Giving alphas more options doesn't help this because the people who are legitimately using alpha clones (newbies learning the game, and potential customers checking it out) don't have the skill points or ISK to make use of those options. If you get to the point where you can realistically use omega-level skills/ships/etc then you're no longer in that initial trial period and you should be paying your $15/month. The constant flood of "make alphas better" proposals is not about improving the learning experience for new customers, it's about existing customers trying to find a way to play for free without sacrificing anything, especially with hordes of alt accounts.

Or you could just use some common sense and understand that EVE's cost per hour is incredibly low compared to other hobbies. $15 barely buys you a meal out at a cheap restaurant, a movie ticket with no snacks/drinks, etc, and you get way more hours of entertainment out of it. 18-45 year old men regularly throw much larger amounts of money at having fun, even without getting into the really expensive hobbies. EVE's biggest problem is not that it's an expensive hobby, it's that it's a niche-market game that doesn't compromise its core identity in favor of mass appeal. You either love it or you hate it, and most people hate it.

The idea that EVE is overpriced at $15/month simply does not match reality. The industry standard for MMO subscriptions is $15/month, and that hasn't kept other games from being immensely popular and profitable. The issue with EVE is not that $15/month is too much, it's that it has a much smaller target market and most of the people who love WoW and similar games wouldn't touch EVE even if omega clones were free.


{citation needed}

I don't know about you, but I definitely consider cost per hour in deciding if entertainment is worth it, and I certainly don't consider the hours spent having fun to be some kind of additional cost.

That has nothing to do with the cost of the game, it's about people who can't find a healthy balance between their hobby and the rest of their life, or even people who become addicted to a game. Crossing the line from fun into obsession has nothing to do with alpha clones or the price of the game.

{citation needed}

A quick search turns up this article suggesting that disposable income peaks around 35-45 and doesn't get down to the level of the early 20s until after retirement age. And this matches the intuitive understanding of the situation, where 18-25 year olds have no family expenses but also have the lowest level jobs. After all, there's a reason why the really expensive hobbies tend to be full of older people who have advanced to high-end jobs and no longer have young kids to take care of.

Subscribe and get access to everything.

Don't subscribe. Don't complain about something for nothing.

Honestly, I have no idea what you're going on about with 90% of this, but it has nothing to do with alpha clones or subscription costs. MMO addiction is a sad thing, but most players are not in that situation.



What's your point? Discretionary income is discretionary income, and your original claim was that younger people have more discretionary income. You don't suddenly have less of it in total just because you decide to allocate it to something other than a video game.

And of course talking about things like buying houses only highlights my point about EVE being a trivial cost. Compared to the cost of a $300,000 house, $20,000 car, etc, $15/month is so tiny it doesn't even matter in budget calculations. If you're in a position where you're buying houses as an investment then you're going to give that $15/month about as much concern as whether or not you can afford to put three toppings on your pizza instead of two. That is, you're going to buy the cheap thing based on whether or not you want it, without paying attention to the cost.



This doesn't say what you seem to think it does. In fact, it explicitly refutes the idea that MMOs are dominated by younger players and argues that they have a diverse market with lots of older players. And it has nothing to do with your disposable income claim that I asked for sources for.



WTF? Are you completely incapable of maintaining a consistent argument without constantly moving the goalposts? Your original claim was that "18-25 year old males have the highest disposable income", not that the average age is around that range. In fact, there's a very obvious explanation here: $15 a month is cheap regardless of age, but younger players tend to have more time available. Both the 19 year old college student and the 30 year old with a successful career have more than enough discretionary income available to play an MMO, but the 30 year old is more likely to have kids or similar time commitments that make playing an MMO less appealing regardless of the subscription price.



No, it's an entirely reasonable idea for many demographics. The simple fact is that, for purchases that are sufficiently cheap, we don't even look at the price tag. If you're making $100k/year as a single adult you normally don't bother looking at the prices on the menu when you go out for dinner. Unless something is vastly out of proportion to the rest of the menu you're just going to order whatever you feel like eating at the moment, and you're not going to care at all about that $1-2 difference in price between the various options.

A similar principle applies to EVE. If you've got enough money to pay for a nice computer, fast internet, etc, to be able to play EVE at all you're probably in a position where $15/month is a very small percentage of your discretionary income and a small cost relative to your other entertainment purchases. Whether EVE costs $10/month or $15/month is going to be much less important to you than whether or not you're interested in playing EVE at all.

Her/His attitude is just fine, not long ago there was a nullsec entity that kept highsec mercs and their allies mostly at bay for quite a spell......using yep you guessed it Alpha accounts.

Now imagine their Hurricane fleet doctrines used in that way? lunacy.

Not everyone lives in a first world country. 15$ a month can be a lot of money to certain demographics.



People that don't pay have no rights to any expectations. It's that simple. Developing and running the game costs money and CCP is a for-profit company, not a charity.
The absolutely last thing we want and need is the infestation of the common "free to play" crowd. Free to play games are more often than not littered with artificial time gates and paywalls and hide their enormous costs behind microtransactions.

There's a small subset of players that never buy anything in those games, but they usually burn out fast and move on to the next "free to play" game, where the cycle repeats.
Then there's the subset of players who safe their money for quite a while to then waste it on said game for "that one boost" that's going to help them so much. Not.
And then you have the kind of player that's buying microtransaction after microtransaction and is effectively paying up to hundreds of Euros each month for their pathetic money-milking game.

The developers of Free to Play games don't care about the health of their game. All they're concerned with is pumping out more micro-transactions to lure the dumb with and milk them just a little more, again and again, until they finished their next "free to play" game to start the cycle anew.

EVE isn't a free-to-play game, it's a subscription-based game. CCP need only concern themselves with the players paying a subscription, not the ones that want to enjoy the game without paying for it. If they make any balance changes to alphas, then those have only to happen to avoid abuse by omega players, not to give the dumb, entitled free-to-play crowd more stuff.

How does allowing people to play for free drive off new players anymore than the pre-alpha situation where people couldn't play at all without subscribing?

Also, lots of people use think of the children arguments, but very few (near none) are able to actually show any factual basis for their claims. Is that the same here? How does play a limited version of EVE for free, or the full experience via subscription, drive away new players?

Interesting reading this thread, there is an assumption that is not supported with any data (that CCP have and we don't) that alpha players are of no financial benefit to CCP whatsoever.

That is not just a weak assumption, it is unlikely to be true.

subscriptions are just ONE way CCP get money.

never seen a month old player in a blingy ship?

That aside, CCP appears to have found an imaginative way to bring players in that is more effective than trials. For all of our sakes, we should hope it is a success and those players hang around filling space, and sometimes giving CCP money.

I agree the skill restrictions are not perfect, and CCP may well add one time purchases of Beta, Gamma, etc with different restrictions players can grow into without paying a subscription.

Alternatively, New space may have more opportunities for them (there is a thread in this forum about exactly that) or an alteration in the PVE becomes available to make it more alpha friendly. Not Every alpha wants to be tackle or bait in PVP. There is little practical progression for alphas in PVP. Not everyone is a CCP rise or has his abilities and knowledge of the game.

The most natural space for new Alphas starting is poisioned ground due to wardecs, not because they kill worthless ships, but because they actively discourage new players joining together, and when the only sane alternative is Null, that is a step too far for many.
It is hardly surprising many do not hang around to be seen as what in THEIR eyes is to be a victim. Talk to a few, and you will be horrified.

NO ONE chooses to play a game to be a victim.

We kill many in WH, usually reimburse them, and talk about their experiences, most are not salty, just very disillusioned by their other experiences, they do not mind being killed in the main, but many have experienced having joined corps and being farmed, and so are now flying alone and somewhat lost, having vowed never to have that experience again.
They are the tough ones, most don't get that far.

The greedy Asshats even wardec signal cartel, what the hell is THAT about. Once you do that EVERY excuse and justification for wardecs is in the dumpster.

So yes, Alphas need more that is practical to do, without Omegas choosing alpha state as a free option with no downside.

There is a balance to be reached, and complaints it is a slippery slope are simply assuming CCP are incompetent and suicidal.

That is clearly not the case.

[quote=hog butter]
Oh FFS, yes, people have a budget, but you keep missing the point. When an item takes up an incredibly small percentage of your budget small differences in its price are less important than whether you want to buy it at all. If you're at a restaurant the difference between a $10 meal and an $11 meal is, assuming you have a decent income, trivial compared to the question of whether you want the chicken or the fish. You're going to buy the meal you want to eat at that moment, and not waste time worrying about the small difference in price.

And yes, EVE is that kind of small purchase. For example, all of my other hobbies are way more expensive than EVE. Airplane rentals cost $75/hour, which puts the $15 cost of my EVE account at about the same price as doing the pre-flight checks and taxiing out to the runway. Miniatures games (40k, X-Wing) cost $15-50 for a single model kit, up to $1-200 or more. New camera lenses cost $2-300 or more. Those are major purchases that dominate my budget considerations. Keeping my EVE account is just a minor rounding error in comparison. If I want to play it I keep it active, if I'm not interested anymore I cancel the subscription. Dropping the price from $15 to $10 would make absolutely no difference in that decision.

What? That's not what I meant at all, of course up-selling and such exist. What I mean by "binary spending" is that the primary question in choosing whether or not to subscribe to EVE is whether or not you enjoy playing EVE. If you enjoy EVE you pay for a full subscription, and the difference between $15/month and $10/month is negligible. If you don't enjoy EVE very much you don't pay for a subscription, even if the price was only $5/month (and you probably don't even play an alpha clone for very long).



Uh, what? You don't need a large income for $5/month to be irrelevant. That's literally the difference between "should I have another beer with dinner" one night a month. IOW, the kind of decision you make on impulse without any budget planning because it's too small to have any meaningful impact in your overall financial situation. Yeah, I'm sure there are a few people with very tight budgets who care about those small expenses, but I am extremely skeptical that those people make up any significant percentage of the players of an online-only game which requires a decent PC and fast internet to play.

And, again, you can post all the walls of text that you want, but you aren't going to change the reality of the situation here: that $15/month is the standard subscription price for online games, a genre that continues to make huge amounts of money from huge amounts of customers. CCP is not some special snowflake charging way more than the industry average, nor is EVE magically immune to the same market considerations as other games.

You didn't seem to answer my question. Are you not getting your $0/mo out of the game right now? It's a yes/no question. Super simple to answer.

Should have submitted a support ticket.

Wait,. Wait. How is no access to the heavy drones "point of imbalance" ? No alpha clone has acces to heavy drones regardless of faction so where do you see inbalance?

I agree that alpha clone should not have a skills restricted per faction.

Give all alpha clones the same skills. Fixes 1,2,4.

However if this is done, something needs to be done w+¡th skill extractors. Currently each faction alpha clone get around 5mil SP when fully trained and the skill limit to extract SP is 5.5milion. Unlocking all skills across facrions will increase the total SP alpha clone can get and therefore skill extractors needs to be handled somehow. Or do they??? Alpha skill set cannot be extracted unless character is omega. And train current 5mil SP takes 5 months already. Idk...

Except more omega->alpha transitions means less money, less dev time, less patches, and game servers eventually shutting down. Why is it so hard for certain people to understand that businesses need to make money, and dangling around most of the cool stuff just out of reach is the damn point since it's an incredibly effective marketing tactic. "I want free this, give me free that, but I will never, ever pay you for it." How entitled is that?

Now, you'll probably respond with "But Marika, we're only asking for small QoL stuff." Except you, well, aren't? The ideas floating around this thread seem to mention giving alphas access to everything except maybe capitals. Now I do not want to argue a slippery slope here, but most ideas mentioned here would be totally gamebreaking and make many people downgrade, because why pay if you can get the stuff for free.

Yeah...you didn't really answer my question. You just kinda said you feel entitled to a game for free. That's a little sad.

I didn't spend "so much money" on anything. I pay out of pocket for multiple accounts. I spend more money on a single round of golf that takes three hours than I do for a month's worth of entertainment with EVE. How on earth can a company survive if people like you want to have it all without paying a dime? If the cost of EVE is too much for you, you should stop playing video games and try to find a better job.

I'm sorry $0.35 per day is too expensive for your budget.

How on earth can a company survive if people like you want to have it all without paying a dime? If the cost of EVE is too much for you, you should stop playing video games and try to find a better job.

Because pay to play has been healthy for other games? It's a death knoll. Again, I'm sorry you can't afford $0.35 per day. I have the names of a few decent corporate recruiters that can help you find a decent job.

You seem to think unlimited entertainment for $0.35 per day isn't valuable. Yes, one of us doesn't understand value. Stop whining.

You decided to go with ad hominem attacks? A daring debate choice.

Sure, people in finance know that they keep more money when they get things for free. You have lots of money, great. Sub the game.

I'm still wondering where the "GM" in the thread title is, and why alpha accounts deserve to be more than a teaser for the omega accounts that CCP needs to stay alive.

Personally, I think more navy faction ships in the frigate, destroyer and cruiser level would be useful for Alpha's.

Their current skill ceiling is roughly correct. They just have access to reletively few ships. Navy Faction ships don't require multiple racial ship skills to fly which means everyone benefits from more ships with unique styles of fitting and flying.

Navy ships are a bad idea because navy ships are not something that new players have access to. A genuine newbie trying to learn the game is not going to have enough ISK to buy a faction ship, and certainly won't have the skills to make good use of a ship that expensive. The only people who benefit from that change would be veteran players trying to find a way to play for free without sacrificing performance, and those people should be paying for omega accounts.