

Leaks, riots, and monocles: how a $60 in-game item almost destroyed EVE Online - TwiztidK
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/07/monocles.ars

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epsilondelta
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.

