whoops, no more training a skill on an inactive subscription

Gunslinger42 · Post by **Gunslinger42** » October 14th, 2008, 4:58

<a href="http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp ... d=592">CCP are jews</a>

Things like this and replacing the 90 day time card with a 60 day one that costs virtually the same are why I don't play eve anymore.

friznit · Post by **friznit** » October 14th, 2008, 9:04

Right. Or you don't play anymore because you don't enjoy the game and this is entirely incidental?

narf for those who do actively play the game this make bugger all difference. It's a totally weird concept to allow skill training on inactive accounts - no other game would do it and I'm surprised it's lasted this long.

Both this and the 60 day time cards are perfectly reasonable changes.

Post by **HereComesPete** » October 14th, 2008, 12:27

Not often I venture in here and even less often I post, but reading this I felt compelled to.

Given you haven't played eve in quite some time, do you actually care about the game or are you pissed off that you aren't getting leet characters with no input of time or money on your part?

You're losing nothing but a freebie that isn't granted by any other game. Labelling them jews is rather harsh when you're not actually paying them anything whilst still having characters on their server that they update and maintain. Changing their methods so they move in line with other mmo producers isn't money grabbing bastardisation, it's fair.

Shada · Post by **Shada** » October 14th, 2008, 12:59

Hah, looks like I won't be a master of assault ships when(if) I renew my subscription for Ambulation after all.

I doubt Ambulation will make me want to play again, anyway. EVE got so boring :(

MORDETH LESTOK · Post by **MORDETH LESTOK** » October 14th, 2008, 13:18

it was still only 1 skill that you left training when the account goes inactive, right. Not like there was a way to change skillz or have a que of skillz to learn offline?

Cuz with 2 accounts I started to go inactive with a 20-30day skill with one account while I just played the other one with shorter skillz. If I was active with a large corp and plenty of peeps...then it wouldn't matter, but solo was too boring to wait 20-30days for a skillup.

Gunslinger42 · Post by **Gunslinger42** » October 14th, 2008, 14:14

<i>Given you haven't played eve in quite some time, do you actually care about the game or are you pissed off that you aren't getting leet characters with no input of time or money on your part?</i>

I haven't played in about a month because I went back to uni and didn't really have the time. I do enjoy the game, and it's not as if being able to leave one little skill on while I'm going through a month or two of not being able (or as interested in) playing is really going to let me have leet characters with no money or effort on my part. Of course the lamers with 8 different subscriptions all doing it can probably get to be an issue, but they're lamers with 8 different subscriptions.

As pointed out in millions of posts on the eve forums, people liked being able to take a break and having something little to come back to. The main thing I don't like is the way they handled this, they didn't just flat out say "look, now we want you to pay to watch training time pass", they started saying all these accounts with a single timer were a problem for the database and that it was a bug (despite the fact it's a "bug" that they've known about for years, mentioned as if it were more like a unique feature in posts/the player guide and in one occasion when the bug broke they even went out of their way to fix it so it worked).

As far as the timecards go, I wasn't really aware of all the reasoning behind it or the drama on the eve-o forums, from my perspective all I saw was a 90 day time card being replaced with a 60 day time card that cost nearly the same, so as valid as it might have been to change prices or change the options, to me it's just a price hike.

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » October 14th, 2008, 14:45

Gunslinger42 wrote: I don't like is the way they handled this, they didn't just flat out say "look, now we want you to pay to watch training time pass"

But that's all eve is, the time based training method only exists so you have to spend more time and real money to get skills than other MMOs.

I can see leaving a skill training for say, 2 weeks after a sub expires being a good thing if money is tight, means retards don't feel the need to choose between game and food.

However, as you're not a paying customer while you're doing this shit, CCP has no obligation to you whatsoever, most MMOs say "we'll keep your chars for 90 days, after that, we might delete it because your face looks like hey"

Gunslinger42 · Post by **Gunslinger42** » October 14th, 2008, 15:13

Dr. kitteny berk wrote:However, as you're not a paying customer while you're doing this shit, CCP has no obligation to you whatsoever

Well yeah, of course they don't. But the fact it's something they've done for five years to just turn around and go "well no, it's a bug you dirty exploiters!" is a poor cover up for them just wanting to make a little more money (which is fair enough, just be honest about it)

Maybe now they're getting rid of this "bug" they can implement a skill queue, I mean since people wouldn't be able to chain up a years worth of progress on an inactive char then it isn't something that could be massively abused.

buzzmong · Post by **buzzmong** » October 14th, 2008, 15:15

It's a non issue with me, think mine rolled over Gal BS 5 sometime last year, I've not paid to log on and change it, and people have to pay to then use those skills anyway.

I concur with 'slinger though, it's a shady way of doing it by shouting "zomgs, it's a bug, honest, even though it's been there since DAY 1 and we've not had an issue with it before".

I'd say they've said that because they're going to roll out skill queues, which if I remember correctly, offline non paid training was raised as an issue about 2 or 3 years ago as to why they wern't doing it, but they just don't want to say they're implementing a queuing system.

MORDETH LESTOK · Post by **MORDETH LESTOK** » October 14th, 2008, 15:29

One thing about EVE though is...that you're really paying for only 1 toon per account even though you can have a total of 3. With the time based training and splitting the time between 3 toons...you'd never get any progress. Atleast with the other MMO's you can have 6-? toons on one account and level them up as fast as you want to.

I had a point somewhere in there...

Gunslinger42 · Post by **Gunslinger42** » October 14th, 2008, 15:40

Yeah, EVE's not like the standard mmo, so applying the standard model to it doesnt always work properly - the standard mmo structure would suggest that having a character progress when you're not playing at all is ludicrous, but it works in EVE.

Maybe they could let you train on all three characters you have on the account (maybe make it so they train slower if you have them all training at once just to balance it out a bit).

friznit · Post by **friznit** » October 14th, 2008, 16:15

Actually there's a dev blog which for once doesn't involved CCP sticking their foot in it. They cite their reason for fixing this 'bug' is due to a recent huge increase in people actively abusing the unsubbed account training. It's not so much the occasional people who come back from time to time, but active players with 60mill SP+ who are abusing the system to their advantage.

As always it's a minority who have forced an unpopular change on a majority of legitimate players. But that's the way of the world.

A skill queue would be nice though.

Post by **Dog Pants** » October 14th, 2008, 17:04

I always assumed skills stopped training when your subscription ran out. I'm surprised it hasn't always been like this.

A skill queue would be extremely useful, but I reckon leaving that out was deliberate so people would have to keep logging on.

MORDETH LESTOK · Post by **MORDETH LESTOK** » October 14th, 2008, 17:11

Dog Pants wrote:A skill queue would be extremely useful, but I reckon leaving that out was deliberate so people would have to keep logging on.

Yea...but its silly that when you're sleeping or can't log on for a day or two...you get screwed unless you tossed on a long skill...even if it wasn't something you wanted just not to waste skill time.

Post by **Dog Pants** » October 14th, 2008, 17:24

MORDETH LESTOK wrote: Yea...but its silly that when you're sleeping or can't log on for a day or two...you get screwed unless you tossed on a long skill...even if it wasn't something you wanted just not to waste skill time.

Indeed, which is why I can't believe they haven't thought of it. By which I mean I don't believe they haven't thought of it. Which by extension means they probably have a reason for not implementing it. It's a shame, it would make the game so much more user friendly, even if it was limited to a couple of skills ahead.

Fear · Post by **Fear** » October 14th, 2008, 22:05

The 2, maybe 3 breaks I had with Eve before finally throwing in the towel were sweetened by having a high rank level 5 skill waiting for me on my return.

I wouldn't have paid for pure training, and I'd have been less inclined to return to exactly where I was before - so it definitely helped me come back.

Post by **FatherJack** » October 15th, 2008, 13:30

I never knew about this, but perhaps would have used it in the past to mitigate the fact that you could only actually train 1 of the 3 characters you had per account (making the other two virtually useless) so if you wanted another training character you needed a whole other subscription. That's something that distinguishes it from other MMOs right there, and not in a good way.

I suppose if you think about the costs to an MMO-maker, the main one is provision for active users concurrently playing (or server/node/shard capacity), the least (though not insignificant) would perhaps be the database holding the account data and perhaps user details. Somewhere in-between (cost-wise) would be the scripts which update characters/subscriptions per tick, for example Eve's offline training.

So, while I buy that there is a cost associated with continuing to update inactive subs (which does not renumerate them), and that that cost is probably higher than (say) granting extra character slots per account would be (ie: not negligible), I do not buy how allowing multiple characters to train on the same account is costly enough to demand players pay another full subscription, that is to my eyes is a license to play on another computer concurently.

Fear · Post by **Fear** » October 15th, 2008, 13:47

I think it is an attempt at making more money, but it may well have the opposite effect.