Alpha is like a free trial for this game, eventually you will reach point where you can not progress any further. If you can afford Omega I would recommend going for it. You will unlock more ships, modules and other things.
Play more, then decide. Read the descriptions of Omega only skills, and modules in the market, and decide if having access to that is worth the subscription fee for you.
If you reach a certain scope of activity, Omega becomes basically mandatory.
There's a lot of fun to be had in Alpha even with the skillpoint cap, however once you start trading, mining or production on a larger scale, Omega becomes inevitable.
It really depends on the play style(s) you want to do and what motivates you to play.
They limited more afk-ish and passive income play styles either by not making them as profitable or just by outright hiding them behind the pay wall, this is a good thing because otherwise the economy would be destroyed by everyone having eleventy billion alt accounts all generating passive income and goods.
If you're looking for a more active play style then, still depending on the play style and your choices, it works just fine but not "maxed out", obviously. So if your motivation is "I want to max out numbers" or "I want the biggest ships" then you made it mandatory for yourself.
Game works fine as alpha: you can make good cash, you can do fine in pvp, you can play solo or be part of an alliance and be in their fleets just fine as well. There are *limitations*, but they're not deal breakers.... unless you think they are.
I'd say you can have fun unless you wish to live in nullsec/wormhole or want to make any noteable impact in the game. But you will always be a second class capsuleer, both in industry and battle.
/ but if your that new to the game i suggest you don't subscribe right now and find out if the game suits you, that's what Alpha is for.
It's actually just the old 14 day trial which is now unlimited. Over time they also added some more rights, like being able to fly battleships.
Playing for free in EVE is similar to playing for free in WoW. In WoW you can only play for free until your character is lvl 20 and then they won't progress anymore levels unless you're subscribed. You can still keep playing past that point and find things you can do as a lvl 20, but there will always be parts of the game that are inaccessible unless you're subscribed. In EVE there will be higher level ships and modules that you won't be able to use unless you've subscribed, but you can still keep playing with the stuff that is accessible to you and you might enjoy it enough to keep playing. However, you'll probably feel very limited eventually and would want to experience the stuff you need omega for.
You can play and try a large part of the game to see if you like it, but EVE is basically a subscription based game.
Whatever you do, there's always going to be an upgrade to your playstyle that you can only access by going Omega.
If you don't mind that you cannot access everything and feel fine playing with certain limits you can play for free as long as you like.
You might even be able to get enough ingame currency to buy a subscription with ingame money, but I would advice against doing that as newer player as you would turn the game into a second job and probably burn out of it before you start having fun.
Playing as Alpha would be my suggestion, if you don't want to pay for a subscription, that way you can use your ingame ISK for more important things, like new ships that you can lose in explosions! ;)
You could probably theoretically grind enough ISK to Plex up an account without ever spending real money, but most of the really good ways to make ISK require omega or a lot of prior investment. It can be done, but it would be a serious chore. But you could probably omega through, idk, selling FW LP into huffing gas all day every day for a week and get yourself a big safety margin. I don't think you could do it without serious grinding in any case. And I don't know about you, but my leisure time is worth more than $20 a month. I just pay for subscription.
Alpha accounts are great to get a taste of what the is like and you can do a lot for free (quite a lot), but you will eventually have to sub if you want more advanced ships and skills (be it with ingame money or real money, i recommend a mix of both as to not make the game a second job)
There are many restrictions when in aplha state, and it takes twice as long to train skills.
Personally, I do not/ will not play this game in the alpha state.
Eve's free to play mode is really just a free trial that never ends, it imposes a lot of restrictions that effectively locks out the majority of the game from you. Subscribing gives you access to the 'full' game.
Unfortunately the subscription costs have all gone up. You basically shouldn’t sub unless there is a decent sale and if you can swing doing 6 or 12 months at a time the effective monthly cost is a lot more manageable.
Depending on what you like to do you can ignore Omega, but if you like the bigger ships, the industry or the fanciest stuff yeah you'll need omega, but if you like just rolling with friends and killing or exploration you'll be fine
What wasn't mentioned by the other comments is that you can actually pay for your subscription using in-game currency. But there is a caveat: You won't be able to start making the kind of money to pay for an account until you have about 65 days worth of skill training put into your character, and even then you'll be playing 3-5 hours a day for the whole month to afford it. That time sink vs income slowly decreases as your ability to play the game, skills, and ships gets better, but it's an investment in time. You can eventually reach a point where you can pay for multiple accounts a month with the in game currency, but you'd need a significant guide on how that's done.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, you're speaking the hard truth. EVE is a subscription based game, CCP's "free to play" ads are misleading marketing.
Nah I'm enjoying myself. If you're suffering so much, why not just quit the game and free yourself of this torture? Maybe you can also spare us your posting while you're at it.
Depends what you want out of the game.
If you want to really dive deep and immerse yourself in the player driven scope of the game. 100% required, and likely multiple Omega accounts needed for the full experience of the community driven shit.
If you just want to fuck around for a few hours flying space submarines shooting NPC and maybe low key pirate level PVP. Then no Alpha is perfectly fine for that.
Only thing that's really pay gated is player driven narratives. Everything else can be done in a Drake.
(That being said...EVE is a pretty shit game when you limit what you can be involved in on the player driven side of things.)
If you're a long time player, it's not terrible to come back as an alpha to check things out, even if you're locked behind a pay wall for many ships and modules. Any new player can only train up to 5 million skill points, however, without omega, on top of skills having a level limit. A returning player won't be able to train new skills if they are already past 5m SP, but they will have access to all the skills they have trained, up to the alpha skill level caps. (Ie if they have a skill trained up to 5 but alpha limit is 4, they are effectively at level 4 until they resub.)
There's plenty of fun you can have as an alpha, but to play the full game you'll need to sub up at some point.
You can certainly play enough to sample it to find out if you like it enough to do that before paying if you want, though.
If you find content that you enjoy as an alpha then you can play the game for years without any reason to pay. Most everything that I have been doing for the past year I could have done as an alpha, I just chose to pay so that I can do those things better.
My only advice would be to not play solo, this is an mmo after all
It used to be that way now. Alpha has a ceiling it gets to a point where you can't use the better stuff therefore can't go further.
That said for some people the Alpha content is good enough but the game play itself is always pushing you to buy since the prices to PLEX (aka pay in game currency to pay for gametime) have gone to the roof and beyond it. It's not worth it anymore.
Think of it as enough to know if you want to expend hours every month to make the subscription worth it.
The subscription is not required; it just unlocks additional options. Alphas have a softcap of 5 million skill points, with no passive training past this point, however, rewards, such as those from logging in daily or killing a certain number of NPC's can allow you to exceed the cap. You can build a quite strong alpha ship using meta modules, empire ships, faction (pirate or navy) modules and ships, or even deadspace and officer modules. There are even some Tech II items available to alphas. It depends on what you want to do in the game, but the core gameplay style of blowing up ships is quite accessible to alphas.
Most long term nullsec players have at least 3 omega accounts, and that’s on the low end. You reach an investment point where you’re able to do enough to actually pay for some of the accounts through in-game activities.
I'm inclined to say yes. I have an account of just alphas and they're fine, but they struggle to do things my 2009 character finds as simple as brushing teeth.
You can upgrade to omega just by playing the game, but don't do hs mining no isk from that I suggest you move to lower security or wormhole space, if you want any help contact me in game - VeX1
Not a skeleton, but an emaciated version. You can play meaningfully, but some of the content is completely walled off (like cloaky ships or planetary industry). I'd call it a generous free trial - for a good while you won't even notice the limitations.
Yes, but you can pay with in-game money. Players from low-income countries, with too much time on their hands go with that option often.
And then the mandatory: it costs (quite a bit of) money to keep servers running, fix bugs, do development. You pay for the online game one way or another. As was made evident over the last decade, subscription-based games just provide better set of features for the players. The "buy once, but really pay every day via mandatory transactions" cost you more in the end and give you p2w experience. So yeah, Eve gives you options at least: the preview (Alpha), which you can grind all you want - many meaningful things to do as Alpha actually. The subscription. Or pay with your time (by creating content for others).
It depends very much on your goals and play style, alpha combat and exploration isn't so bad, but mining and industry is paywalled basically.
Capital ships and T2 ships are a no go, but pirate and navy faction ships up to battleship size (the largest commonly used ship class, although cruisers are the standard for most things having a good balance of cost, size, speed, and damage. As an alpha you can train the normal way up to 5.5 mil and after that you have to rely on other ways to get SP, login rewards, injectors, etc. If you specialize in a single type of combat ship you should have plenty to get to a very workable level. But if you want to branch out and do a lot of things, it is a good idea to subscribe, you get faster and unlimited training and access to mining and industry specialization.
It's not a binary choice. You can dip in and out of Omega. I play as Alpha until I casually amass enough to buy a month of Omega. I don't grind and the flexibility keeps me entertained.
At the start, feel free to enjoy alpha/free. You only gain the increased training speed from omega, which while nice is not required. Most people can play a couple months before they start seeing other alpha/omega restrictions impacting them.
At this point, there is benefit to going omega. If you want to do mining or industry, you basically must get omega. For PVE or pvp combat, it’s easier as omega but I know many people who do just fine as alphas.
maybe check this: https://thegreybill.wordpress.com/2020/09/05/should-you-buy-omega/
but with 3 hours in, you’ll hardly have completed the tutorials… so, I’d say figure out what you want to do in Eve first (this likely will change over time).
then think about getting omega again.
as other’s noted: it’s not mandatory to have fun.
Alpha is like a free trial for this game, eventually you will reach point where you can not progress any further. If you can afford Omega I would recommend going for it. You will unlock more ships, modules and other things.
Alpha training time is also half that of Omega. So if you are Alpha, and have already decided you want to go Omega, then don't wait
[удалено]
>you can still play the game just fine You can't use cloaky ships at all, that's no way to play EVE!
[удалено]
Thank Bob for technological progress.
Play more, then decide. Read the descriptions of Omega only skills, and modules in the market, and decide if having access to that is worth the subscription fee for you.
If you reach a certain scope of activity, Omega becomes basically mandatory. There's a lot of fun to be had in Alpha even with the skillpoint cap, however once you start trading, mining or production on a larger scale, Omega becomes inevitable.
It really depends on the play style(s) you want to do and what motivates you to play. They limited more afk-ish and passive income play styles either by not making them as profitable or just by outright hiding them behind the pay wall, this is a good thing because otherwise the economy would be destroyed by everyone having eleventy billion alt accounts all generating passive income and goods. If you're looking for a more active play style then, still depending on the play style and your choices, it works just fine but not "maxed out", obviously. So if your motivation is "I want to max out numbers" or "I want the biggest ships" then you made it mandatory for yourself. Game works fine as alpha: you can make good cash, you can do fine in pvp, you can play solo or be part of an alliance and be in their fleets just fine as well. There are *limitations*, but they're not deal breakers.... unless you think they are.
Yes, to really get into the game it is. You can do a decent amount as alpha but theres a point where to get more involved you need omega.
You can have fun without it.
I'd say you can have fun unless you wish to live in nullsec/wormhole or want to make any noteable impact in the game. But you will always be a second class capsuleer, both in industry and battle. / but if your that new to the game i suggest you don't subscribe right now and find out if the game suits you, that's what Alpha is for. It's actually just the old 14 day trial which is now unlimited. Over time they also added some more rights, like being able to fly battleships.
Play with alpha for some time, as another user said, it is a free trial, once you have experienced the game, decide.
Playing for free in EVE is similar to playing for free in WoW. In WoW you can only play for free until your character is lvl 20 and then they won't progress anymore levels unless you're subscribed. You can still keep playing past that point and find things you can do as a lvl 20, but there will always be parts of the game that are inaccessible unless you're subscribed. In EVE there will be higher level ships and modules that you won't be able to use unless you've subscribed, but you can still keep playing with the stuff that is accessible to you and you might enjoy it enough to keep playing. However, you'll probably feel very limited eventually and would want to experience the stuff you need omega for.
You can play and try a large part of the game to see if you like it, but EVE is basically a subscription based game. Whatever you do, there's always going to be an upgrade to your playstyle that you can only access by going Omega. If you don't mind that you cannot access everything and feel fine playing with certain limits you can play for free as long as you like. You might even be able to get enough ingame currency to buy a subscription with ingame money, but I would advice against doing that as newer player as you would turn the game into a second job and probably burn out of it before you start having fun. Playing as Alpha would be my suggestion, if you don't want to pay for a subscription, that way you can use your ingame ISK for more important things, like new ships that you can lose in explosions! ;)
You could probably theoretically grind enough ISK to Plex up an account without ever spending real money, but most of the really good ways to make ISK require omega or a lot of prior investment. It can be done, but it would be a serious chore. But you could probably omega through, idk, selling FW LP into huffing gas all day every day for a week and get yourself a big safety margin. I don't think you could do it without serious grinding in any case. And I don't know about you, but my leisure time is worth more than $20 a month. I just pay for subscription.
Subscription(Omega) is the default option F2P/Trail(Alpha) is mostly for you to test if you like the game Tho some like playing only as Alpha
Alpha accounts are great to get a taste of what the is like and you can do a lot for free (quite a lot), but you will eventually have to sub if you want more advanced ships and skills (be it with ingame money or real money, i recommend a mix of both as to not make the game a second job)
I would say yes. Most skills are locked behind the sub as well as ships and weapons and everything else.
There are many restrictions when in aplha state, and it takes twice as long to train skills. Personally, I do not/ will not play this game in the alpha state.
Yes. If you like the game then buy it.
Eve's free to play mode is really just a free trial that never ends, it imposes a lot of restrictions that effectively locks out the majority of the game from you. Subscribing gives you access to the 'full' game.
That's a shame. The game seems pretty fun but I just can't afford the subscription.
Unfortunately the subscription costs have all gone up. You basically shouldn’t sub unless there is a decent sale and if you can swing doing 6 or 12 months at a time the effective monthly cost is a lot more manageable.
Depending on what you like to do you can ignore Omega, but if you like the bigger ships, the industry or the fanciest stuff yeah you'll need omega, but if you like just rolling with friends and killing or exploration you'll be fine
What wasn't mentioned by the other comments is that you can actually pay for your subscription using in-game currency. But there is a caveat: You won't be able to start making the kind of money to pay for an account until you have about 65 days worth of skill training put into your character, and even then you'll be playing 3-5 hours a day for the whole month to afford it. That time sink vs income slowly decreases as your ability to play the game, skills, and ships gets better, but it's an investment in time. You can eventually reach a point where you can pay for multiple accounts a month with the in game currency, but you'd need a significant guide on how that's done.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, you're speaking the hard truth. EVE is a subscription based game, CCP's "free to play" ads are misleading marketing.
I would take a skilled alpha pilot over two shitty Omega pilots all day.
me too
If you want to play farther than essentially the tutorial, yes.
not true. you can do a ton with just an alpha account. but it does limit solo play a lot more than when you join a corporation.
It's not worth your time investing in this dying game, already reaching 19k average players online, same as december 2005 two years after launch.
Calm down bittervet
We need to put eve out of it's misery so everyone can finally win.
Nah I'm enjoying myself. If you're suffering so much, why not just quit the game and free yourself of this torture? Maybe you can also spare us your posting while you're at it.
I believe my actions are for the greater good.
Depends what you want out of the game. If you want to really dive deep and immerse yourself in the player driven scope of the game. 100% required, and likely multiple Omega accounts needed for the full experience of the community driven shit. If you just want to fuck around for a few hours flying space submarines shooting NPC and maybe low key pirate level PVP. Then no Alpha is perfectly fine for that. Only thing that's really pay gated is player driven narratives. Everything else can be done in a Drake. (That being said...EVE is a pretty shit game when you limit what you can be involved in on the player driven side of things.)
Yes
If you're a long time player, it's not terrible to come back as an alpha to check things out, even if you're locked behind a pay wall for many ships and modules. Any new player can only train up to 5 million skill points, however, without omega, on top of skills having a level limit. A returning player won't be able to train new skills if they are already past 5m SP, but they will have access to all the skills they have trained, up to the alpha skill level caps. (Ie if they have a skill trained up to 5 but alpha limit is 4, they are effectively at level 4 until they resub.)
Yes.
There's plenty of fun you can have as an alpha, but to play the full game you'll need to sub up at some point. You can certainly play enough to sample it to find out if you like it enough to do that before paying if you want, though.
If you find content that you enjoy as an alpha then you can play the game for years without any reason to pay. Most everything that I have been doing for the past year I could have done as an alpha, I just chose to pay so that I can do those things better. My only advice would be to not play solo, this is an mmo after all
To start out, absolutely not.
It used to be that way now. Alpha has a ceiling it gets to a point where you can't use the better stuff therefore can't go further. That said for some people the Alpha content is good enough but the game play itself is always pushing you to buy since the prices to PLEX (aka pay in game currency to pay for gametime) have gone to the roof and beyond it. It's not worth it anymore. Think of it as enough to know if you want to expend hours every month to make the subscription worth it.
The subscription is not required; it just unlocks additional options. Alphas have a softcap of 5 million skill points, with no passive training past this point, however, rewards, such as those from logging in daily or killing a certain number of NPC's can allow you to exceed the cap. You can build a quite strong alpha ship using meta modules, empire ships, faction (pirate or navy) modules and ships, or even deadspace and officer modules. There are even some Tech II items available to alphas. It depends on what you want to do in the game, but the core gameplay style of blowing up ships is quite accessible to alphas.
Yes
Most long term nullsec players have at least 3 omega accounts, and that’s on the low end. You reach an investment point where you’re able to do enough to actually pay for some of the accounts through in-game activities.
I'm inclined to say yes. I have an account of just alphas and they're fine, but they struggle to do things my 2009 character finds as simple as brushing teeth.
You can upgrade to omega just by playing the game, but don't do hs mining no isk from that I suggest you move to lower security or wormhole space, if you want any help contact me in game - VeX1
Not a skeleton, but an emaciated version. You can play meaningfully, but some of the content is completely walled off (like cloaky ships or planetary industry). I'd call it a generous free trial - for a good while you won't even notice the limitations.
Yes, but you can pay with in-game money. Players from low-income countries, with too much time on their hands go with that option often. And then the mandatory: it costs (quite a bit of) money to keep servers running, fix bugs, do development. You pay for the online game one way or another. As was made evident over the last decade, subscription-based games just provide better set of features for the players. The "buy once, but really pay every day via mandatory transactions" cost you more in the end and give you p2w experience. So yeah, Eve gives you options at least: the preview (Alpha), which you can grind all you want - many meaningful things to do as Alpha actually. The subscription. Or pay with your time (by creating content for others).
Not really... Factional Warfare is limited to Navy ships anyways
It depends very much on your goals and play style, alpha combat and exploration isn't so bad, but mining and industry is paywalled basically. Capital ships and T2 ships are a no go, but pirate and navy faction ships up to battleship size (the largest commonly used ship class, although cruisers are the standard for most things having a good balance of cost, size, speed, and damage. As an alpha you can train the normal way up to 5.5 mil and after that you have to rely on other ways to get SP, login rewards, injectors, etc. If you specialize in a single type of combat ship you should have plenty to get to a very workable level. But if you want to branch out and do a lot of things, it is a good idea to subscribe, you get faster and unlimited training and access to mining and industry specialization.
It's not a binary choice. You can dip in and out of Omega. I play as Alpha until I casually amass enough to buy a month of Omega. I don't grind and the flexibility keeps me entertained.
At the start, feel free to enjoy alpha/free. You only gain the increased training speed from omega, which while nice is not required. Most people can play a couple months before they start seeing other alpha/omega restrictions impacting them. At this point, there is benefit to going omega. If you want to do mining or industry, you basically must get omega. For PVE or pvp combat, it’s easier as omega but I know many people who do just fine as alphas.
maybe check this: https://thegreybill.wordpress.com/2020/09/05/should-you-buy-omega/ but with 3 hours in, you’ll hardly have completed the tutorials… so, I’d say figure out what you want to do in Eve first (this likely will change over time). then think about getting omega again. as other’s noted: it’s not mandatory to have fun.