Kismeteer
BGG
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Posted - 2008.10.16 18:23:00 -
[1]
Greetings,
I'm just your normal dual account player. I'm not hardcore, I've been playing like three years now. I don't do the ghost training as I can afford to run two accounts for this period of time. (I don't want to think about how much money it was so far.)
I realize that people are gaming the system with ghost training. It's true. The people who constantly enable and disable accounts so they can 'dodge' paying for not doing anything, but getting something out of it can be aggravating. However, I believe you are going about it the wrong way.
You want to punish the people who are exploiting the system. The ones who are activating their account long enough to get some free training. Then, they reactivate it to get some more later. They are obviously just building characters to sell for money, or to give to a macroer, or something not great.
But you hurt someone else: Our friends who quit for awhile. Every single person on this message board has a friend, in game or real life, who quit eve because it was just too hard. They lose a big ship, they have a bug hurt them, they get concorded, they have all their resources trapped by a cagey opponent, and they quit for awhile. They are not saying 'I'm done' and disintegrating their characters, but just setting a long skill train and discontinuing paying.
Now these people, they might come back. They might be excited when they come back because they have cruiser V, or Battleship V, or Advanced weapon upgrade V. These are long skills, and massively open up your possibilities when you come back. And when they do, they reconnect with us, the usual players, who have been playing all this time, waiting for them to come back.
I have such a friend. His name is jacass66. He's in the military, went to some not-so-great places in service of his country, was in severe danger there, and he kept coming back. He had a reason to! Just think, by the time he got back from Iraq or Afghanistan, he had Carrier V! Imagine how much damage he could do now!
But, with the death of ghost training, he doesn't have a reason to come back. His character is the same. When he left, he had the exact same character and resources, and no modivation to get back to the grind. And who does that hurt?
Me. I have one less person to see every couple months, blow the crap out of some people, hang out with, and then not see for another couple months. You reduce the population of active players inadvertently, giving less pvp targets, less reason to get your skills up, and less reason to even log on. Because seriously, all the fun in this game is player driven.
Without players, eve dies. So give the players what they want.
Thanks.
Kismeteer
(sorry jac, don't yell at me if you see this.) |