It seems to me that this news misses a more fundamental point about game balance and the player base in EVE Online.
To those unfamiliar with EVE Online: EVE is a "skill-based" spaceship MMO where instead of gaining XP by completing missions or killing NPCs, you gradually and constantly accumulate points in skills that directly affect your available ships, combat attributes, and market trading efficiency, for example.
This means that veteran players have an enormous advantage over newer players by being able to fly the highest tiered ships, fitting the highest tiered weapons, and using their items with maxed efficiency. While competent players can make great use of low-skill characters, there is an effective initial skill barrier between 10-20 million SP, which corresponds to about 6-12 months of training/subscription time. Beyond that initial barrier, players with 40-50 million+ SP can be more or less maxed in several categories of skills, allowing them to fly certain classes of ships at near-100% skill efficiency.
The skill barriers in EVE provide an obstacle to new players that requires at least a year of training to reach a comfortable SP level, and at least 2 years to max out the SP for a given "class". This is a barrier in the sense that the new player base can still make effective use of lower-tiered ships, but this usually limits their options in PvP and PvE to areas like Faction War, or level 3 missions. There are still ways to participate in richer aspects of the game, like in 0.0 fleet battles by flying cheap Drakes, but e.g. small-mid sized warfare in advanced ships (armor HAC gangs, shield gangs) is completely inaccessible.
What does this have to do with selling in-game items for RL money? Doing such a thing provides an easy path for lower-SP characters to become competitive with veteran characters. Judging from the response on community sites like FHC, it seems that it is the veteran players who are not too keen on the idea. Possibly because, you know, these RL money items could screw up veterans' SP advantage, i.e. their investment in terms of years of EVE subscription.
But if CCP cannot retain new players, then perhaps it doesn't make sense for them to alienate their veteran player base by releasing RL money items. So this episode raises deep problems in EVE's player base composition and the difficulty which CCP has always had in retaining new players.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 13.1 ms ] threadTo those unfamiliar with EVE Online: EVE is a "skill-based" spaceship MMO where instead of gaining XP by completing missions or killing NPCs, you gradually and constantly accumulate points in skills that directly affect your available ships, combat attributes, and market trading efficiency, for example.
This means that veteran players have an enormous advantage over newer players by being able to fly the highest tiered ships, fitting the highest tiered weapons, and using their items with maxed efficiency. While competent players can make great use of low-skill characters, there is an effective initial skill barrier between 10-20 million SP, which corresponds to about 6-12 months of training/subscription time. Beyond that initial barrier, players with 40-50 million+ SP can be more or less maxed in several categories of skills, allowing them to fly certain classes of ships at near-100% skill efficiency.
The skill barriers in EVE provide an obstacle to new players that requires at least a year of training to reach a comfortable SP level, and at least 2 years to max out the SP for a given "class". This is a barrier in the sense that the new player base can still make effective use of lower-tiered ships, but this usually limits their options in PvP and PvE to areas like Faction War, or level 3 missions. There are still ways to participate in richer aspects of the game, like in 0.0 fleet battles by flying cheap Drakes, but e.g. small-mid sized warfare in advanced ships (armor HAC gangs, shield gangs) is completely inaccessible.
What does this have to do with selling in-game items for RL money? Doing such a thing provides an easy path for lower-SP characters to become competitive with veteran characters. Judging from the response on community sites like FHC, it seems that it is the veteran players who are not too keen on the idea. Possibly because, you know, these RL money items could screw up veterans' SP advantage, i.e. their investment in terms of years of EVE subscription.
But if CCP cannot retain new players, then perhaps it doesn't make sense for them to alienate their veteran player base by releasing RL money items. So this episode raises deep problems in EVE's player base composition and the difficulty which CCP has always had in retaining new players.