Well, I shan't be resubscribing. Forty years old, back to school with 15 credits and I don't have the time to play as much as I once did. Don't see much point in even resubbing to keep training going between breaks from school with this ignorant change.
I had thought better of CCP than this.
Perhaps CCP should consult their subscriber base prior to making stupid changes like this ultimate nerf.
Thank you CCP for saving me money in the long term though, I can think of better places to spend it now.
I agree that they could do without making this change. While to most that don't play it seems like common sense to change it, it's actually a really bad idea. Since you cannot go in and CHANGE your training after your account expires, you can only finish training ONE skill while you are inactive. And since that is true, you're bound to come back after that skill is complete, when you will end up paying again for at LEAST another month.
It keeps people coming back, paying, yeah they might get a month off in some cases, but overall If I were CCP I would rather allow this then have people just quit playing. Especially with the Alts who are giving them a lot of money.
I was thinking about coming back, as I go in and out of EvE Online, and I always liked that when I had to quit for real life reasons, that my Skill kept training at least until I completed that skill. It made me want to come back. Now I'm not so sure.
While I understand that CCP is complaining that they are using the Processing Power to maintain these characters, it's not like these characters are going years and years without paying. They all have to reactivate to change skills.
I read about GTC bought with ISK, I've never seen the feature, but I guess it exists, if I were CCP I would remove THAT feature, as that only leads to lost revenue, and I wouldn't see anything wrong with them doing that. I currently run an online game, and I won't even allow that feature. While it is a really nice feature to "Give back" It encourages people to find ways to easily farm game money, or "Buy" it, and it definitely cuts revenue as many players will stop having to pay ever.
What I DO allow is for people to SELL benefits from their subscription to other players for in-game money. That way the person still has to subscribe, So the revenue is still recieved, but someone that can't afford to, or doesn't want to subscribe can still get benefits of a subscription without real cash being spent, and without my taking a loss in revenue.
Whilst this change doesnt affect me, i have 2 accounts which are always active, but an alt is very much needed for a capital ship pilot, i do no want to jump my ship to any joe's beacon... cap ships are too expensive to jump around recklessly, the one time i did use an alliance mate for a cyno i was put in a very risky situation, of which i do not wish to repeat.
But meh, the chinease server has had "ghost training" disabled since its release so
I read about GTC bought with ISK, I've never seen the feature, but I guess it exists, if I were CCP I would remove THAT feature, as that only leads to lost revenue, and I wouldn't see anything wrong with them doing that. I currently run an online game, and I won't even allow that feature. While it is a really nice feature to "Give back" It encourages people to find ways to easily farm game money, or "Buy" it, and it definitely cuts revenue as many players will stop having to pay ever.
uh... you do realise that this isnt lost revenue, as another player has to buy the GTC, to trade wit hanother player for ISK... CCP lose nothing
I don't not get why people think this is a bad idea. If your account is not active, you don't get to train. PERIOD.
It's a bad idea for a number of reasons, lots of which are covered in the Eve-online threadnaught on the subject, in the Portal section.
In Eve, training is not a process; it is a completion date/time. You effectively buy that completion date/time by acquiring the skillbook and submitting it or clicking to advance to the next level, all of which requires that you be paid up and online. What you get (got) is a completion date/time before which you cannot use the new skill level. It has never been tied to the servers being up, you being online, or your account being active all during the waiting period. In fact, it was an elegant way to implement time-based training, requiring no action whatsoever by the servers.
In fact, the cluster could fall into a sinkhole and be destroyed, and if they had a backup of the database somwhere and built the cluster again and restored the backup, and if your skill had been scheduled to "complete" sometime while the cluster was a smoking mass, when you next logged in it would have shown has having completed. The servers never had any role in advancing the training.
The nature of training step completion as an out-of-game calendar date/time meant that there was zero cost to CCP. There was nothing to update, nothing to "deliver." So they have not taken away some service they were providing for free; they have created a new mechanism to interfere with the elegant one and forcibly pause a skill as if you had right clicked it and selected pause at the moment your account expired. They have taken something away that people have enjoyed and minorly counted on for five years.
It should be noted that Eve was very cleverly designed to maximize the addictive nature, to bring people back if they did allow their accounts to expire. By guaranteeing that char, skills and possessions would not disappear for at least six months and by having designed the skill training in such a way that skill steps "in progress" automatically "completed" whether or not your account remained active, they created an almost irresistable lure to get back into the game. That wasn't accidental, and it was very effective. Anyone anticipating an account expiration would always try to set something training, although all but the most advanced cap ship level pilots rarely had anything really good to train while inactive and could rarely coordinate it to take good advantage of the feature. But that completion, particularly if it opened up access to a new ship or fitting, was a powerful draw to re-enter the game and use the new skill. New goodies are a big attraction to keep people playing and keep them coming back. But the excitement of having a new skill is no more. A powerful incentive to reactivate a sub is gone. In game management terms that is just plain stupid.
As for using the feature to train highly skilled chars or to "farm" chars... you'd have to try it to understand how silly that is. I have over 32 million skill points from 2-1/2 years in the game and there have only been about three skills long enough to get some mileage out of unsubbed training, and those were already trained while I was subbed and playing. I've heard that capital ships have a number of very long training steps, but that isn't even within sight from where I am. Nor are cap ships useful anywhere but in lawless space. And if those guys training for them got some use out of this feature, more power to them. I wouldn't want to train a 55-day skill while sitting on my hands, paying a sub, waiting for the skill to complete.
Char farming using unsubbed training is a bad joke. All the training of new chars is in very short steps. Very little can be gained by training while not actively subscribed. The people who claim this was some kind of magic trick being used by the Chinese character farmers have obviously never tried to use it, much less paid any attention to early training steps in Eve.
I am one of those reducing what I pay to CCP. I have nine accounts and have canceled all of them. "Cancel" in Eve, of course, just means that the account won't autorenew at the next renewal date. There is actually no way to cancel game time already paid for. None of mine will now autorenew. Three have expired, one more expires tomorrow, and the rest expire from late Sep thorugh about the middle of Nov. I have two that are involved in corp and alliance management, and I will reactivate those from time to time for no more than 30 days at a time. The others I will cycle through, never having all nine active at the same time as I have had recently.
Voting with your wallet is the only really effective way to show your displeasure with a vendor of any type. From the 4600+ posts in 157+ pages in the threadnaught, I'd say it's pretty obvious I'm not the only one actively reducing Eve expenditures to punish CCP for a monumentally damaging decision and for lying about it. If they lose an average of 5,000 active accounts, that is about $900,000 in one year. I suspect they will lose many more than that, because the core players all have multiple accounts and huge numbers of them have stated they will consolidate chars into fewer accounts and/or simply terminate some or all of their accounts.
This is about as bad as the New Coca Cola debacle. How anyone at Coca Cola or now, at CCP, could be this utterly stupid is beyond me.
... Someone told the CEO that if they take it away they'll make X million more dollars a year and he said do it. ...
Yup, that's probably what happened. The really sad thing about this is that anyone with any real knowledge of the game and how people play it would have known up front that this move wouldn't make more money, it would lose money. The lying, deceitful, PR-spin way they did this, and without much notice, amplifies the injury with grevous insult and will result in even greater losses.
This was a feature for 5+ years. It was a key part of the lure that attracted lapsed people to reactivate their accounts. This change could only have been made in the mistaken thinking that it would force people to keep their accounts active all the time. Bzzzt! Wrong! What it does is reduce the incentive of lapsed players to reactivate, and gives multi-account players a powerful reason to consolidate their best characters into fewer accounts and/or simply stop using one or more accounts.
If they did this out of greed, to get more money, it's a monumental fail and they will lose money. You can bet they are already nervously watching their cancelation and re-up stats.
Since this is by no means the first time CCP has pissed me off royally, this has pushed me over the edge. I no longer look forward to Eve; I no longer look forward to reactivating a lapsed account; I no longer look forward to planning a long series of training steps to get to fly some shiny new ship.
this is wrong... one or maybe even the biggest mistake of ccp... the community is like rabblerabble the forums... i just hope for ccp they will not do it otherwise they will lose a lot of subscriptions ... including they pissed off their customers
I think the point is, they already "lost" you as a paying subsciber on that account. Don't pay, don't play. Now, the reason EVE subscriptions are so high, is that many many people have multiple accounts. If you are saying this will make them cancel their OTHER accounts as well, that would be a more intelligent argument.
Inactive client is not necessarily lost client. I wanted to resubscribe to Eve this fall, but not anymore. Why? Because I have a very busy real life, I have no time to spend 3 months in a row to play Eve, and I dont want to pay 3 months for nothing just so that my skill can get trained.
I play games casually, 1 months here, one month there. A bit of WoW, a bit of Eve, a bit of something else. With the ability to train a skill in Eve while my account is not paying I was not being over-competetive because I could only train one skill, I would have to resubscribe again to train another. So I have no clue what all that whine "wha, they arent paying they shouldn't be training!" is all about.
I haven't played Eve in like a year now. Did I level all my skills to max by now? No, I leveled the longest skill (2 months) and then it stopped. So the other 10 months I wasn't leveling anything at all. What CCP is doing now is taking that tiny bit of goodness that a casual player like myself had. Since I cannot spend 5 months playing and/or paying to raise one skill, there is no point for people like me to go back to Eve. I wasn't a lost client before, just a very very casual one. But now I am a lost client. I wouldn't have bothered to post here if this move would affect a certain group positively. All this does is affect a small casual group negatively. Noone is getting the benefit out of this, well, except for some whiny kids who want to have an extra mil of points advantage.
Meh, I should be gratefull for CCP for forcing my hand, I have 1 option less to pick from a list of games to play when my current subscribtion expires.
"This practice upsets the balance of the game, and capsuleers who actively put their money into our wallets will no longer be unfairly affected by those few who have not."
Damit CCP. I like your game and your game is uniqe. After what you are doing I could no longer play your game. This is one of the major feature why I like to play your game. I sorry to see you go like that.
I'm sure that ccp won't read this but still... I am a VERY casual player of EVE Online - one of the main things that I liked about the game was that I could train a long 15 or 30 day skill and next time I subscribed then presto wow, something new to play with!
hence, I was actualy encouraged to re-subscribe.. some times I'll admit I even just subscribed to set a skill to train! what a hood they had there with that eh?
but alas they want to take that knifty feature out, I don't argue that they have every right to do so! it's there game, and what other MMO's let you increase the skill and power of your avatar while logged out? not many that's for sure. (I'm not counting 'rested' that's just not the same.)
Soooo, while I dont' feel like they are in the wrong not to do it, I will say that they would have been better off not having done it in the first place, than to try to yank it away now, as it's something that I have liked and utalized over the years.
so, I hope your happy with the $$'s that you got from me before, I highly doubt that I'll be re-suscribing again now and yes, it's 100% do to this change. of no more shadow training.
Comments
Well, I shan't be resubscribing. Forty years old, back to school with 15 credits and I don't have the time to play as much as I once did. Don't see much point in even resubbing to keep training going between breaks from school with this ignorant change.
I had thought better of CCP than this.
Perhaps CCP should consult their subscriber base prior to making stupid changes like this ultimate nerf.
Thank you CCP for saving me money in the long term though, I can think of better places to spend it now.
I agree that they could do without making this change. While to most that don't play it seems like common sense to change it, it's actually a really bad idea. Since you cannot go in and CHANGE your training after your account expires, you can only finish training ONE skill while you are inactive. And since that is true, you're bound to come back after that skill is complete, when you will end up paying again for at LEAST another month.
It keeps people coming back, paying, yeah they might get a month off in some cases, but overall If I were CCP I would rather allow this then have people just quit playing. Especially with the Alts who are giving them a lot of money.
I was thinking about coming back, as I go in and out of EvE Online, and I always liked that when I had to quit for real life reasons, that my Skill kept training at least until I completed that skill. It made me want to come back. Now I'm not so sure.
While I understand that CCP is complaining that they are using the Processing Power to maintain these characters, it's not like these characters are going years and years without paying. They all have to reactivate to change skills.
I read about GTC bought with ISK, I've never seen the feature, but I guess it exists, if I were CCP I would remove THAT feature, as that only leads to lost revenue, and I wouldn't see anything wrong with them doing that. I currently run an online game, and I won't even allow that feature. While it is a really nice feature to "Give back" It encourages people to find ways to easily farm game money, or "Buy" it, and it definitely cuts revenue as many players will stop having to pay ever.
What I DO allow is for people to SELL benefits from their subscription to other players for in-game money. That way the person still has to subscribe, So the revenue is still recieved, but someone that can't afford to, or doesn't want to subscribe can still get benefits of a subscription without real cash being spent, and without my taking a loss in revenue.
Whilst this change doesnt affect me, i have 2 accounts which are always active, but an alt is very much needed for a capital ship pilot, i do no want to jump my ship to any joe's beacon... cap ships are too expensive to jump around recklessly, the one time i did use an alliance mate for a cyno i was put in a very risky situation, of which i do not wish to repeat.
But meh, the chinease server has had "ghost training" disabled since its release so
uh... you do realise that this isnt lost revenue, as another player has to buy the GTC, to trade wit hanother player for ISK... CCP lose nothing
It's a bad idea for a number of reasons, lots of which are covered in the Eve-online threadnaught on the subject, in the Portal section.
In Eve, training is not a process; it is a completion date/time. You effectively buy that completion date/time by acquiring the skillbook and submitting it or clicking to advance to the next level, all of which requires that you be paid up and online. What you get (got) is a completion date/time before which you cannot use the new skill level. It has never been tied to the servers being up, you being online, or your account being active all during the waiting period. In fact, it was an elegant way to implement time-based training, requiring no action whatsoever by the servers.
In fact, the cluster could fall into a sinkhole and be destroyed, and if they had a backup of the database somwhere and built the cluster again and restored the backup, and if your skill had been scheduled to "complete" sometime while the cluster was a smoking mass, when you next logged in it would have shown has having completed. The servers never had any role in advancing the training.
The nature of training step completion as an out-of-game calendar date/time meant that there was zero cost to CCP. There was nothing to update, nothing to "deliver." So they have not taken away some service they were providing for free; they have created a new mechanism to interfere with the elegant one and forcibly pause a skill as if you had right clicked it and selected pause at the moment your account expired. They have taken something away that people have enjoyed and minorly counted on for five years.
It should be noted that Eve was very cleverly designed to maximize the addictive nature, to bring people back if they did allow their accounts to expire. By guaranteeing that char, skills and possessions would not disappear for at least six months and by having designed the skill training in such a way that skill steps "in progress" automatically "completed" whether or not your account remained active, they created an almost irresistable lure to get back into the game. That wasn't accidental, and it was very effective. Anyone anticipating an account expiration would always try to set something training, although all but the most advanced cap ship level pilots rarely had anything really good to train while inactive and could rarely coordinate it to take good advantage of the feature. But that completion, particularly if it opened up access to a new ship or fitting, was a powerful draw to re-enter the game and use the new skill. New goodies are a big attraction to keep people playing and keep them coming back. But the excitement of having a new skill is no more. A powerful incentive to reactivate a sub is gone. In game management terms that is just plain stupid.
As for using the feature to train highly skilled chars or to "farm" chars... you'd have to try it to understand how silly that is. I have over 32 million skill points from 2-1/2 years in the game and there have only been about three skills long enough to get some mileage out of unsubbed training, and those were already trained while I was subbed and playing. I've heard that capital ships have a number of very long training steps, but that isn't even within sight from where I am. Nor are cap ships useful anywhere but in lawless space. And if those guys training for them got some use out of this feature, more power to them. I wouldn't want to train a 55-day skill while sitting on my hands, paying a sub, waiting for the skill to complete.
Char farming using unsubbed training is a bad joke. All the training of new chars is in very short steps. Very little can be gained by training while not actively subscribed. The people who claim this was some kind of magic trick being used by the Chinese character farmers have obviously never tried to use it, much less paid any attention to early training steps in Eve.
I am one of those reducing what I pay to CCP. I have nine accounts and have canceled all of them. "Cancel" in Eve, of course, just means that the account won't autorenew at the next renewal date. There is actually no way to cancel game time already paid for. None of mine will now autorenew. Three have expired, one more expires tomorrow, and the rest expire from late Sep thorugh about the middle of Nov. I have two that are involved in corp and alliance management, and I will reactivate those from time to time for no more than 30 days at a time. The others I will cycle through, never having all nine active at the same time as I have had recently.
Voting with your wallet is the only really effective way to show your displeasure with a vendor of any type. From the 4600+ posts in 157+ pages in the threadnaught, I'd say it's pretty obvious I'm not the only one actively reducing Eve expenditures to punish CCP for a monumentally damaging decision and for lying about it. If they lose an average of 5,000 active accounts, that is about $900,000 in one year. I suspect they will lose many more than that, because the core players all have multiple accounts and huge numbers of them have stated they will consolidate chars into fewer accounts and/or simply terminate some or all of their accounts.
This is about as bad as the New Coca Cola debacle. How anyone at Coca Cola or now, at CCP, could be this utterly stupid is beyond me.
Yup, that's probably what happened. The really sad thing about this is that anyone with any real knowledge of the game and how people play it would have known up front that this move wouldn't make more money, it would lose money. The lying, deceitful, PR-spin way they did this, and without much notice, amplifies the injury with grevous insult and will result in even greater losses.
This was a feature for 5+ years. It was a key part of the lure that attracted lapsed people to reactivate their accounts. This change could only have been made in the mistaken thinking that it would force people to keep their accounts active all the time. Bzzzt! Wrong! What it does is reduce the incentive of lapsed players to reactivate, and gives multi-account players a powerful reason to consolidate their best characters into fewer accounts and/or simply stop using one or more accounts.
If they did this out of greed, to get more money, it's a monumental fail and they will lose money. You can bet they are already nervously watching their cancelation and re-up stats.
Since this is by no means the first time CCP has pissed me off royally, this has pushed me over the edge. I no longer look forward to Eve; I no longer look forward to reactivating a lapsed account; I no longer look forward to planning a long series of training steps to get to fly some shiny new ship.
I think the point is, they already "lost" you as a paying subsciber on that account. Don't pay, don't play. Now, the reason EVE subscriptions are so high, is that many many people have multiple accounts. If you are saying this will make them cancel their OTHER accounts as well, that would be a more intelligent argument.
Inactive client is not necessarily lost client. I wanted to resubscribe to Eve this fall, but not anymore. Why? Because I have a very busy real life, I have no time to spend 3 months in a row to play Eve, and I dont want to pay 3 months for nothing just so that my skill can get trained.
I play games casually, 1 months here, one month there. A bit of WoW, a bit of Eve, a bit of something else. With the ability to train a skill in Eve while my account is not paying I was not being over-competetive because I could only train one skill, I would have to resubscribe again to train another. So I have no clue what all that whine "wha, they arent paying they shouldn't be training!" is all about.
I haven't played Eve in like a year now. Did I level all my skills to max by now? No, I leveled the longest skill (2 months) and then it stopped. So the other 10 months I wasn't leveling anything at all. What CCP is doing now is taking that tiny bit of goodness that a casual player like myself had. Since I cannot spend 5 months playing and/or paying to raise one skill, there is no point for people like me to go back to Eve. I wasn't a lost client before, just a very very casual one. But now I am a lost client. I wouldn't have bothered to post here if this move would affect a certain group positively. All this does is affect a small casual group negatively. Noone is getting the benefit out of this, well, except for some whiny kids who want to have an extra mil of points advantage.
Meh, I should be gratefull for CCP for forcing my hand, I have 1 option less to pick from a list of games to play when my current subscribtion expires.
I am the type of player where I like to do everything and anything from time to time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor - pre-WW2 genocide.
It's a bad idea for a number of reasons, lots of which are covered in the Eve-online threadnaught on the subject, in the Portal section.
I couldn't have said better.
I am the type of player where I like to do everything and anything from time to time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor - pre-WW2 genocide.
FIXED
I am the type of player where I like to do everything and anything from time to time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor - pre-WW2 genocide.
Damit CCP. I like your game and your game is uniqe. After what you are doing I could no longer play your game. This is one of the major feature why I like to play your game. I sorry to see you go like that.
I'm sure that ccp won't read this but still... I am a VERY casual player of EVE Online - one of the main things that I liked about the game was that I could train a long 15 or 30 day skill and next time I subscribed then presto wow, something new to play with!
hence, I was actualy encouraged to re-subscribe.. some times I'll admit I even just subscribed to set a skill to train! what a hood they had there with that eh?
but alas they want to take that knifty feature out, I don't argue that they have every right to do so! it's there game, and what other MMO's let you increase the skill and power of your avatar while logged out? not many that's for sure. (I'm not counting 'rested' that's just not the same.)
Soooo, while I dont' feel like they are in the wrong not to do it, I will say that they would have been better off not having done it in the first place, than to try to yank it away now, as it's something that I have liked and utalized over the years.
so, I hope your happy with the $$'s that you got from me before, I highly doubt that I'll be re-suscribing again now and yes, it's 100% do to this change. of no more shadow training.
Wade Hone -out.
Thank you,
zWolf -out.