Imagine you could play eve for free but you couldn't:

• Train skills without having paid a subscription or redeemed plex
• Recieve full amounts of any free aurum that CCP gives away
• Run more than one client

Would this help increase the playerbase or retain players without negatively effecting the game and/or CCPs revenue or would it cause more problems than its worth?

Sounds like a botters dream.

nvm, read it wrong

It would effectively extend trial accounts indefinately, but it would also allow people to continue playing for free when they couldn't feed their habit due to lack of time and/or interest. 14 Days isn't always long enough to get into the game nor is it always sufficient time for people to figure out if they're actually into the game or not and could release some of the pressure as you want your free time disappearing.



yes this is the biggest problem - although restricting how many clients these accounts could run would alieviate this a little it may not be enough.

Any ideas on this?

Imagine you could play eve for free but you couldn't:

• Train skills without having paid a subscription or redeemed plex
• Recieve full amounts of any free aurum that CCP gives away
• Run more than one client

Would this help increase the playerbase or retain players without negatively effecting the game and/or CCPs revenue or would it cause more problems than its worth?

I can already play Eve for free and don't have to do any of that ****. So why the hypothetical?

It would just allow bots to play without even paying. One bot makes enough ISK to purchase a mission ready character, buys the character and continues to bot. A proxy is used or some other program (that will be figured out) to run multiple "free" accounts all farming ISK. Sounds like a bad idea to me. CCP is a business, it's not in their best interest to give away free server resources to people that want to play but not enough to pay.

The upside is that real people might use that time to farm for ISK to buy PLEX. However, 30 days is plenty of time to farm out a PLEX, so just do it while your account is active.

Because the game could then be advertised as Free-To-Play, technically. A marketing coup like this would increase the playerbase significantly. That would solve the dipping numbers problem I'm seeing... but that's just my read on this. It would likely increase revenue for CCP at the same time = more RL ISK to develop the game...

Yeah you must be on to something. WoW gained negative nine hundred thousand players when it went f2p. Eve would be great if 900000 players left.

Those players who are interested in WIS (and those that use eve as a chat client like me) could play without paying but they'd still be likely to buy items from the Nex Store to balance the loss of subscription... although I don't think theres enough actual walking around yet to make this likely.

lol

Do you have a link to this data? I thought it was because wow is getting old and Rift is P-Cool?

You'd pay to play dress-up Barbie in a 3d chatroom, but you won't/can't pay for the subscription to actually play the game?

Advertising Eve as f2p would certainly drive a way a lot of customers. CCP dont need another one of those.

Imagine you could play eve for free but you couldn't:

• Train skills without having paid a subscription or redeemed plex
• Recieve full amounts of any free aurum that CCP gives away
• Run more than one client

Would this help increase the playerbase or retain players without negatively effecting the game and/or CCPs revenue or would it cause more problems than its worth?

Playing for "Free" with plex is not techincally playing for free as it costs your time, much like "free" ore.

I'm playing EVE for free with no restrictions whatsoever. I prefer that to being restricted.

I have lots of plex, thats what I use. This idea is about getting new players and retaining old ones that are disillusioned with the game and/or don't have time to seriously play anymore.

hmm.. this effectively turns skill training into a microtransaction :| may the gods have mercy on my soul.

Finally! Someone at CCP had the nerve to create a forum alt to send up the F2P test balloon to see how the players react.

Hilmar: give this man a raise and get the devs on this ASAP.

The transition to SOE ownership is moving right on schedule.

I'd agree that allowing this would be the botter's dream come true... train a toon to do what you need him to do, then let the sub drop, and bot him to pieces. It would only make botting and RMT more profitable.

I think what would be a much better idea (and I mentioned this in another thread) would be that people could log into their accounts, but wouldn't be able to train, UNDOCK, or engage in ISK transactions without a paid sub. They could travel between stations with clones, but not physically undock in a ship.

However, once Incarna rolls out station environments, they would be able to wander the stations, engage in the establishments, etc. Aurum could be the currency for use in stations exclusively. If they're willing to use the MT system to buy AUR, then they could do their business in stations without that affecting the space portion of the game. If they wish to cash in PLEX for game time, then they'd be able to undock and do anything other pilots could do. In a way, this would be more realistic than Eve is now. After all, not everyone in the universe is necessarily a starship pilot.

I think it would attract some new players, and eventually, they would get into the game, because through the social interaction, they would learn of all the cool stuff going on outside of stations. Another thing it could do is allow for members who've dropped their subs to stay in touch with the game and possibly entice them to subscribe again at some point.

The potential down side is that this being a new medium for cashflow, CCP would start diverting more resources towards the WiS aspect of Eve. Unless they added new team members dedicated to this task, the FiS portion would probably suffer as a result, as CCP would try milking the new cash cow for all it's worth.

This is sort of like my idea: a Plex or one subscription gives you a pool of skill points you draw upon when training. Training proceeds as now, the points are just drawn from the pool.

And to add a new thing: Allow more than one of your three characters to draw from the pool at the same time.

Edit: About the bot issue: CCP just needs to step up their bot detection efforts and ban them. Its does not matter how much a feature is a "botters dream" if as soon as you activate the bot code every single one of your accounts gets banned, and those bans are against you, the person, and count as strikes against all your accounts, including any new ones you set up or acquire.

Imagine if you could freely do the following:

* Train up characters to certain skill levels with a subscription and then play them for free (was that a cheer I heard from the botters and people wanting to pad out their fleets)
* Use the free Aurum on multiple characters to flood the market with items from the Nex store
* Run multiple clients on different accounts because it's so hard to setup a different IP address for each


Brilliiant!!! We need to get to work on this straight away ... I'll bring the shovel and the bugle to play the last post for EVE.

Would this help increase the playerbase or retain players without negatively effecting the game and/or CCPs revenue or would it cause more problems than its worth?

nice post, but there is surely a way to make this benefit ships in space aswell without effecting botting.

On another note, this idea doesn't really detract away from PLEX as people almost always want to get what everyone else does and the hope is that these new players will either get time to earn plex or want to subscribe; unless you have an extremely well skilled character there are always more things to train :P I'd infact expect an increase to Plex purchases sometime after this play method was introduced.