What Eve community? The point is the guy used to come back and pay CCP money. Now he isn't. He is not alone if this thread is anything to by and a lot of people who made use of this "bug" (my baskside) aren't coming back then that is less money for CCP. Believe it or not the game doesn't cost nothing to make.
No you're right it doesn't, but the fraction of the 10,000 reported ghost training user's that will actually quit is largly insignificant for the overall population. An MMO only needs about 60-70000 subscribers to be profitable, even if ccp were to lose the full 10,000 they're still in no danger of running out of money. And honestly the game can do without the alt armies some people have. it was getting rediculous.
Makes you wonder why Eve has the buddy program doesn't it.....
There's nothing wrong with having alts. In fact the game sort of demands it with the way skill training is set up, so your "alt armies" complaint is specious reasoning at best. Also, you're implying that these are active accounts which means they aren't ghost training.
Seems to me the only arguments people really have against ghost training are these:
1. "I don't use it so no one else should". ie. indignant jealousy.
2. "They're getting something for nothing". Which is specious at best because they still have to buy access to make use of anything trained in ghost mode. ie. it actually encourages people to come back.
3. The are blinded by their love of the game and feel it's their "duty" to defend anything CCP does. ie. misguided loyalty aka kissing their ass. It's not even an argument.
CCP had their reasons and that reason was money. The way that they went about it is poor in the extreme - two days notice is pitiful. They should have at least given people a months notice or allowed whatever they were ghost training to finish. And then to add insult to injury they tried to claim it was a bug. Which is just a flat out lie like their "streamlining" of prices which to anyone who isn't an idiot knows was simply a politicians way of saying "we've put the prices up but we have so little respect for our paying customers that we're going to call it anything but a price rise".
This is what has angered me the most about CCP - their lack of respect for the people who pay their wages.
CCP are their own worst enemies on this matter. Its not the stopping of ghost training that has people quitting in droves but the manner on how they done it.
Fair enough CCP is a company and as such like to make money. They started this whole debaucle by introducing the 60day GTC's to 'streamline' the payment and removing the 30day and 90day GTC options, but they bumped up the price of the 60day GTC which was 16% a markup. Then adding insult to everyone they basically said 'adapt or die' buy time using credit cards.
Everyone did adapt to it, more people started ghost training acounts, CCP saw this and spat its dummy out saying its not fair, so put a stop to it.
Its not the reason why they stopped it, its the manner of how they did it by insulting the intelligence of the player community saying it was a 'bug', but was clearly stated on their website and in manuals it was a 'feature'. Now them saying they didn't know it was a feature is more lies, I can quote from the forums written by CCP employees as saying u can train inactive accounts.
So more lies about u 'didn't know' it was listed as a feature even their own staff have said it was possible to train on inactive accounts.
As a company would you trust them? This interview just screams more lies to the community and i for 1 don't trust a company that doesn't know what the left hand is doing from its right.
when i quit 3-4 months ago I had started training Mini BS 5, I didnt realize that it would keep training, lol I could almost hop in a carrier today I guess
I don't know how accurate a guage this is but since Ghost Training was removed, the price of GTCs has gone up to 550 Mill ISK, implying that demand is outstripping supply. Now why would the demand and volume for GTCs have suddenly gone up? Go figure but as people have to buy those GTCs for RM before they can sell them, I'm sure CCP aren't complaining about the revenue from extra sales.
The rise in GTC prices for ISK is quite simple: the same people who are pissed about the unsubscribed training nerf and the lies and PR spin are the ones who bought GTCs for RL money and sold them in game. They are supplying fewer GTCs, so prices are rising. How do I know? Easy... I am one of those. When I lost a Raven Navy Issue with faction fittings (>1 billion ISK) in a mission due to some silly mistake or surprise, I resorted to selling GTCs in game to replace it. When I wanted to set up a large research POS (several hundred million ISK) with two Advanced Labs (150 mil ea) and six Mobile Labs (90 mil each) I broke down and sold GTCs in game to raise some of the ISK.
Since the unsubscribed training nerf and lies and PR spin I have not sold a single GTC in game. I have found that in a lot of aspects of life my reactions are somewhat representative, iow if this was how I reacted, it's likely that many others reacted the same way.
So GTC supply has shrunk while cash-strapped students and others still need to pay for game time with ISK, so prices have risen.
People need to stop whining and crying about this. Crying about not being able to train a character when not even paying for the game is pathetic. I laugh at anyone leaving for this, and wonder what game they expect to freeload off now? EVE community along with the MMO community in general have grown into some of the biggest spoiled brat crybabies I have witnessed. Get a grip kiddies, MMOs are just games.
No, what's pathetic is utter failure to understand the issue but nonetheless mindlessly commenting on it.
Believe it or not as one of those 0.0 players that had 3 accounts I had all 3 active all the time with the exception of when I was taking a break from the game. You don't have multiple accounts in 0.0 to ghost train you have multiple accounts in 0.0 to use them. If anything 0.0 alt accounts are more likely to be active and NOT training to keep clone costs down then to be training and not paying. All the multi-account friends I had with more then 2 accounts had all of them active all of the time.
It's about time someone said this. It's clear to me that most of the ppl commenting about "alts" and "char farming" are just making it up to sound like they know what they're talking about. I am a high sec player with nine accounts. I rarely got any benefit from unsubscribed training as I had the accounts to use them, not just to train them, and my computer can run all nine at the same time. All nine are "mains," not "alts." The alts are the other 18 chars in those accounts, the ones that get very little training because to train them would mean suspending training of the primary char in each account. I would gain little or nothing by consolidating my nine primary chars into three accounts because then I would be unable to play more than three at any one time.
So it's not just 0.0 multi-account holders who are likely to have all their accounts active all or most of the time. It's anyone who actually wants to run multiple accounts at the same time.
How have I used nine accounts? The first and foremost and most obvious thing is that I am my own mining fleet, with multiple high-end miners and haulers. I don't need to coordinate with corp or alliance members in various time zones and with various personal obligations just to mount a mining op. With maxed mining skills and command bonuses and the new Orca ship I can strip a belt in 1h 45m and net 50-70 mil ISK, which funds other things I do. This is a very efficient use of my game time.
Most of my primary chars are also trained in research and manufacturing. I can fill all the factory slots in an NPC station with manufacturing jobs. I can fill all the lab slots in my research POS witih research jobs.
I have at least six chars fully trained to fly Covert Ops ships with Covert Ops Cloaking Device II. I can insert them into 0.0 and watch six adjoining systems, feeding intel into a friendly alliance intel channel or guiding my alliance members safely through those systems.
When I have to purchase non-manufacturable, non-mineable supplies for my POSs, I can send haulers in six or eight different directions to make the purchases and haul back the supplies (the various POS supplies are never available in the same stations).
When flying a freighter around to take stuff to market I can be my own escort and my own webber to kick the freighter quickly into warp.
When running missions I used four ships: two faction battleships to do the heavy lifting, a salvage ship with six tractor beams and two salvagers to go in after the rats had been killed, efficiently gathering the loot and salvage, and a hauler for missions that have so much loot that a salvage ship can't carry it all.
I don't think it's possible to do PvP with more than one or two active ships, as it takes too long to maintain a watch on the char windows and to do things like target and operate weapons, but in PvE missions it's possible to run two combat ships. In mining I can easily run all nine, and in advanced mining one of them is just a passive command boost ship anyway.
So why am I pissed about the nerf of unsubscribed training? Because it was a nice, friendly feature that encouraged us to reactivate accounts if for any reason we let them lapse, and CCP lied to us and then spun it 3, 4, 5 different ways, finally letting the cat out of the bag in a dev post that it was done "for business reasons." Translation: money. OK, but anyone at CCP who made that decision in the expectation of getting more money obviously doesn't play the game and doesn't understand the dynamics of how players use the game features and reactivate sooner rather than later to get the benefit of that one training step that may have completed while the account was expired. It's going to reduce CCP's revenue, not increase it, so the whole thing is wacky from start to finish. The reasoning is wrong, the nerf was extremely user unfriendly, and the lies and PR spin were unacceptably offensive.
Instead of nine accounts subscribed almost all the time CCP will now get maybe 2-4 on average from me. They took the shine off my Eve experience and I find it distasteful to send money to a company that not only lies to me but is also stupidly self-destructive in their apparent motivation for the change.
But it gets worse... Quantum Rise nerfed missiles, and I find missions no longer practical, nor will I invest a year of training for battleships of other races to run missions again only to see them eventually nerfed, too. Enough is enough. Quantum Rise also brought a ninja change in how corp standings with factions are calculated based on members' standings. This resulted in an unexpected loss of faction standings in our POS corp, something that will cost 450 mil to hire a contractor to restore. Thanks but no thanks. We're not going to operate POSs anymore. I used to pay all the POS costs myself, for the whole alliance. Now I have almost no pressure to mine ice or generate ISK to buy expensive POS supplies, so it's practical to reduce the number of active accounts I pay for.
Yes but they were seeing a drastic upswing in characters that were being created and trained exclusively with ghost training, hence characters were being farmed to sell for isk, which means that the isk farmers were starting to abuse the mechanic and that's the most likely reason for them to stop it.
It has never been possible to train chars exclusively with unsubscribed training, so we're seeing yet another post by someone with an uninformed opinion, someone who doesn't play Eve or knows very little about it. Unsubscribed training only ever completed the current training step, after which reactivation of the account and logging in were necessary to start another step. And if you knew anything about this you would know how difficult it was to plan training so that each time the account was allowed to lapse there would be a fairly long training step active.
CCP said they noticed an increase in unsubbed training. They never said they researched it and found that it was being done for char farming. You're making that up. You're also confused about ISK farmers and char farmers, the former having been a reality for a long time but the latter only alluded to by people making guesses to sound like they know what they're talking about.
CCP seems to have failed to notice that an upswing in unsubscribed training could easily have been attributable to 1) the season, with ppl returning to school, and 2) the worldwide financial crisis with attendant layoffs and fears causing ppl to cut back on discretionary spending.
... 3) their own 'fault' by changing gtc's (making them more expensive).
well, anyways ... my last account expired today - gl to ccp to come up with a big enough incentive to return AND forget the behaviour they showed.
ps: i would have stuck to eve (most likely with less accounts, but nevertheless) if they would have made the change in a decent and appropriate manner ... not just plain stupid lying about the reasons for the change.
Comments
No you're right it doesn't, but the fraction of the 10,000 reported ghost training user's that will actually quit is largly insignificant for the overall population. An MMO only needs about 60-70000 subscribers to be profitable, even if ccp were to lose the full 10,000 they're still in no danger of running out of money. And honestly the game can do without the alt armies some people have. it was getting rediculous.
Makes you wonder why Eve has the buddy program doesn't it.....
There's nothing wrong with having alts. In fact the game sort of demands it with the way skill training is set up, so your "alt armies" complaint is specious reasoning at best. Also, you're implying that these are active accounts which means they aren't ghost training.
Seems to me the only arguments people really have against ghost training are these:
1. "I don't use it so no one else should". ie. indignant jealousy.
2. "They're getting something for nothing". Which is specious at best because they still have to buy access to make use of anything trained in ghost mode. ie. it actually encourages people to come back.
3. The are blinded by their love of the game and feel it's their "duty" to defend anything CCP does. ie. misguided loyalty aka kissing their ass. It's not even an argument.
CCP had their reasons and that reason was money. The way that they went about it is poor in the extreme - two days notice is pitiful. They should have at least given people a months notice or allowed whatever they were ghost training to finish. And then to add insult to injury they tried to claim it was a bug. Which is just a flat out lie like their "streamlining" of prices which to anyone who isn't an idiot knows was simply a politicians way of saying "we've put the prices up but we have so little respect for our paying customers that we're going to call it anything but a price rise".
This is what has angered me the most about CCP - their lack of respect for the people who pay their wages.
Little poll for you to answer....
CCP are their own worst enemies on this matter. Its not the stopping of ghost training that has people quitting in droves but the manner on how they done it.
Fair enough CCP is a company and as such like to make money. They started this whole debaucle by introducing the 60day GTC's to 'streamline' the payment and removing the 30day and 90day GTC options, but they bumped up the price of the 60day GTC which was 16% a markup. Then adding insult to everyone they basically said 'adapt or die' buy time using credit cards.
Everyone did adapt to it, more people started ghost training acounts, CCP saw this and spat its dummy out saying its not fair, so put a stop to it.
Its not the reason why they stopped it, its the manner of how they did it by insulting the intelligence of the player community saying it was a 'bug', but was clearly stated on their website and in manuals it was a 'feature'. Now them saying they didn't know it was a feature is more lies, I can quote from the forums written by CCP employees as saying u can train inactive accounts.
Proof Proof2 Proof3
So more lies about u 'didn't know' it was listed as a feature even their own staff have said it was possible to train on inactive accounts.
As a company would you trust them? This interview just screams more lies to the community and i for 1 don't trust a company that doesn't know what the left hand is doing from its right.
when i quit 3-4 months ago I had started training Mini BS 5, I didnt realize that it would keep training, lol I could almost hop in a carrier today I guess
Checkmate!
This is just the last straw for many people. This change and how it was handled will not go over well for the foreseeable future.
If I were to exclude the Ghost Training issue, this company still has a lot to correct.
1. Horrible customer service.
I have filed a couple petitions in the time that I was playing.
Every reply I ever got from a petition was dripping with condescension.
It was as if I was just a random stupid customer.
2. History of Dev's playing favorites and giving special items to their In-game friends.
If I had known about this before I started playing, I never would have started.
3. Last expansion consisted mostly of fluff spelling and grammatical fixes on item descriptions.
4. Hot topic forum threads get buried. Such as the t20 and the "ghost training" threads.
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=896318&page=170#5087
An example of customer service.
Hmm that gentleman's post seemed to have gone missing. He corrected it though.
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=896318&page=171#5124
Image1
Image2
The rise in GTC prices for ISK is quite simple: the same people who are pissed about the unsubscribed training nerf and the lies and PR spin are the ones who bought GTCs for RL money and sold them in game. They are supplying fewer GTCs, so prices are rising. How do I know? Easy... I am one of those. When I lost a Raven Navy Issue with faction fittings (>1 billion ISK) in a mission due to some silly mistake or surprise, I resorted to selling GTCs in game to replace it. When I wanted to set up a large research POS (several hundred million ISK) with two Advanced Labs (150 mil ea) and six Mobile Labs (90 mil each) I broke down and sold GTCs in game to raise some of the ISK.
Since the unsubscribed training nerf and lies and PR spin I have not sold a single GTC in game. I have found that in a lot of aspects of life my reactions are somewhat representative, iow if this was how I reacted, it's likely that many others reacted the same way.
So GTC supply has shrunk while cash-strapped students and others still need to pay for game time with ISK, so prices have risen.
No, what's pathetic is utter failure to understand the issue but nonetheless mindlessly commenting on it.
It's about time someone said this. It's clear to me that most of the ppl commenting about "alts" and "char farming" are just making it up to sound like they know what they're talking about. I am a high sec player with nine accounts. I rarely got any benefit from unsubscribed training as I had the accounts to use them, not just to train them, and my computer can run all nine at the same time. All nine are "mains," not "alts." The alts are the other 18 chars in those accounts, the ones that get very little training because to train them would mean suspending training of the primary char in each account. I would gain little or nothing by consolidating my nine primary chars into three accounts because then I would be unable to play more than three at any one time.
So it's not just 0.0 multi-account holders who are likely to have all their accounts active all or most of the time. It's anyone who actually wants to run multiple accounts at the same time.
How have I used nine accounts? The first and foremost and most obvious thing is that I am my own mining fleet, with multiple high-end miners and haulers. I don't need to coordinate with corp or alliance members in various time zones and with various personal obligations just to mount a mining op. With maxed mining skills and command bonuses and the new Orca ship I can strip a belt in 1h 45m and net 50-70 mil ISK, which funds other things I do. This is a very efficient use of my game time.
Most of my primary chars are also trained in research and manufacturing. I can fill all the factory slots in an NPC station with manufacturing jobs. I can fill all the lab slots in my research POS witih research jobs.
I have at least six chars fully trained to fly Covert Ops ships with Covert Ops Cloaking Device II. I can insert them into 0.0 and watch six adjoining systems, feeding intel into a friendly alliance intel channel or guiding my alliance members safely through those systems.
When I have to purchase non-manufacturable, non-mineable supplies for my POSs, I can send haulers in six or eight different directions to make the purchases and haul back the supplies (the various POS supplies are never available in the same stations).
When flying a freighter around to take stuff to market I can be my own escort and my own webber to kick the freighter quickly into warp.
When running missions I used four ships: two faction battleships to do the heavy lifting, a salvage ship with six tractor beams and two salvagers to go in after the rats had been killed, efficiently gathering the loot and salvage, and a hauler for missions that have so much loot that a salvage ship can't carry it all.
I don't think it's possible to do PvP with more than one or two active ships, as it takes too long to maintain a watch on the char windows and to do things like target and operate weapons, but in PvE missions it's possible to run two combat ships. In mining I can easily run all nine, and in advanced mining one of them is just a passive command boost ship anyway.
So why am I pissed about the nerf of unsubscribed training? Because it was a nice, friendly feature that encouraged us to reactivate accounts if for any reason we let them lapse, and CCP lied to us and then spun it 3, 4, 5 different ways, finally letting the cat out of the bag in a dev post that it was done "for business reasons." Translation: money. OK, but anyone at CCP who made that decision in the expectation of getting more money obviously doesn't play the game and doesn't understand the dynamics of how players use the game features and reactivate sooner rather than later to get the benefit of that one training step that may have completed while the account was expired. It's going to reduce CCP's revenue, not increase it, so the whole thing is wacky from start to finish. The reasoning is wrong, the nerf was extremely user unfriendly, and the lies and PR spin were unacceptably offensive.
Instead of nine accounts subscribed almost all the time CCP will now get maybe 2-4 on average from me. They took the shine off my Eve experience and I find it distasteful to send money to a company that not only lies to me but is also stupidly self-destructive in their apparent motivation for the change.
But it gets worse... Quantum Rise nerfed missiles, and I find missions no longer practical, nor will I invest a year of training for battleships of other races to run missions again only to see them eventually nerfed, too. Enough is enough. Quantum Rise also brought a ninja change in how corp standings with factions are calculated based on members' standings. This resulted in an unexpected loss of faction standings in our POS corp, something that will cost 450 mil to hire a contractor to restore. Thanks but no thanks. We're not going to operate POSs anymore. I used to pay all the POS costs myself, for the whole alliance. Now I have almost no pressure to mine ice or generate ISK to buy expensive POS supplies, so it's practical to reduce the number of active accounts I pay for.
Thanks, CCP, for helping to break my addiction.
It has never been possible to train chars exclusively with unsubscribed training, so we're seeing yet another post by someone with an uninformed opinion, someone who doesn't play Eve or knows very little about it. Unsubscribed training only ever completed the current training step, after which reactivation of the account and logging in were necessary to start another step. And if you knew anything about this you would know how difficult it was to plan training so that each time the account was allowed to lapse there would be a fairly long training step active.
CCP said they noticed an increase in unsubbed training. They never said they researched it and found that it was being done for char farming. You're making that up. You're also confused about ISK farmers and char farmers, the former having been a reality for a long time but the latter only alluded to by people making guesses to sound like they know what they're talking about.
CCP seems to have failed to notice that an upswing in unsubscribed training could easily have been attributable to 1) the season, with ppl returning to school, and 2) the worldwide financial crisis with attendant layoffs and fears causing ppl to cut back on discretionary spending.
... 3) their own 'fault' by changing gtc's (making them more expensive).
well, anyways ... my last account expired today - gl to ccp to come up with a big enough incentive to return AND forget the behaviour they showed.
ps: i would have stuck to eve (most likely with less accounts, but nevertheless) if they would have made the change in a decent and appropriate manner ... not just plain stupid lying about the reasons for the change.