NKD wrote on Feb 28, 2013, 18:25:

ItBurn wrote on Feb 28, 2013, 17:30:

NKD wrote on Feb 28, 2013, 17:13:
Also EVE is already essentially free to play once you've got some income. You can buy game-time with in-game currency!

I've played for several years and never had enough money for that.
As for being able to be effective quickly, I call bullshit on that. Unless the game dramatically changed since I played. Back when I played, you had to train for months before you could do anything productive at all. And if you did something well, it was that ONLY thing, nothing else. And you had to focus only on that or else you were severly gimping yourself. Got boring quick.

If you played for several years and weren't making enough money per month to pay for your game time, you were probably spreading yourself way too thin or were just sitting offline training skills instead of actually playing and making money. When a month of gameplay is 1/4th the cost of a nicely fitted battleship or strategic cruiser, it's hard to imagine not being able to pull that together in a month on a focused character with skills that bring in actual money.

There's no reason after 3 months of training that you should HAVE to pay a monthly fee. I pay a monthly fee because I don't log in often enough right now to actually make ISKs. In fact, I lose ISKs because of skill book costs. But if I were to log in I could pay for my sub in 20 hours of running missions or mining. 20 hours a month to avoid a monthly fee isn't a huge investment.

In fact, I really do wonder what you actually do in EVE. You have no isk, and say it takes months to get effective. Get effective at what? Running L4 missions? Sure. Wormhole space? Sure. Tackling? Sniping? Scouting? Mining? Hauling? All of those are 4-6 week training to get effective enough to where you can get into an okay corp. In fact, you'll have the character skills before you actually know how to properly play the role. They do give you accelerated learning for your first so many SP now though, and have eliminated the "Learn to learn faster" skill tree.