http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=896003
Honestly, I do support this one. Here’s the scoop. If you have a skill that would take over 30 days to train, people would stop the subscription so that they would not have to pay for that month while the skill trained. This change would stop the skill from training if you didn’t have an active subscription.
Now, my feelings are best reflected in the followup dev blog:
http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=592
It’s blatantly abusing the system and it’s not fair to players like myself that continue to pay to play. Why should someone be able to advance their character and not pay for the subscription and others do. Granted, I do understand the logic of not wanting to pay for an alt that is training a 60 day skill, but it’s not fair to those people who have to pay to train their skills that are under 30 days to train.
What CCP needs to do is bring back what they had originally with training on characters. There was a time where you could have all three of your character slots training. Either that or the split queue system, where you have all 3 training but at 30 percent the speed or 2 training at 50 percent the speed.
October 13th, 2008 at 9:54 pm
I agree with you, I think it’s a bit of a joke that people are whining about having to pay to advance in EVE. They’re fine to pay when they have their skill but would rather not pay whilst their character gets better for free?
They can’t expect CCP to actively promote a way to advance and NOT pay them their subscription fee.
October 13th, 2008 at 10:59 pm
It’s hard not to notice that this comes at the same time Iceland has had its three largest banks nationalized, and hard economic times are hitting the world. I wonder how CCP’s balance sheets are looking, if they’re only now taking action against “essentially supporting and maintaining a large number of customers that weren’t paying us regular subscriptions”.
October 14th, 2008 at 5:28 am
True, the timing is interesting. Something people seem to forget is that with GTC’s accounting for a good portion of the player base, not all of the 200,000+ subscribers are actually paying customers. CCP has not addressed this issue until they “saw a surge in this behavior”. I wonder how many of those accounts that were doing this were isk farmers.
October 14th, 2008 at 7:19 am
Ga’Len, even if someone buys their GTC with isk, they’re buying it from someone who handed over cold hard cash for it. X active players still equals X subs being paid, even if they’re being paid for by someone other than the account holder
October 14th, 2008 at 10:56 am
Bel Amar, that’s not exactly true.
GTC’s are a way that someone can play EVE without having to use real world money. We had a few members in our corp who never paid for their accounts using real money, they always used GTC’s they bought with in game isk. Some of them stopped playing when the GTC prices went up, they simply could not generate enough in game isk to pay for the code.
Granted, when you buy a GTC code, you are giving more money to the GTC sellers, not all of which are owned by CCP. Let’s not forget the real isse. The issue was people not paying for their character to advance. It was a bug that as of late, more and more people started to exploit.
If only in game isk could be use to pay rent, buy food, etc…
October 15th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
What the hell did they expect, a free ride? No thank you very much.
The only thing one could say against CCP on this is that CCP took a bit to long to shutdown this loop hole. But they definitely did the right thing.
November 7th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Ga’len, what Bel Amar said IS exactly true. If you buy a GTC with isk then someone had to buy that time with cash. Should I draw you some easy to read diagrams to explain how?
On the issue, what worries me here is that CCP are looking at their own pockets when they should be looking at player experience also. I don’t think there is a player out there who isn’t fed up with 30 minute skills or skills that end while you are away from the PC. Although CCP may not realise it, some of us have lives and jobs and the skill training system need to be looked at to accommodate for that. Essentially time and money is effectively lost if I can’t get home in time to change one of those skills with the inconvinient training time. Times are tough, but CCP shouldn’t disregard its loyal fans and players and make it easier for them to play in difficult times.