Scottie2004 said:
In what way is it the same? I do not own a hosted server of any kind as I will not pay money for the online aspect of a game that I have already paid out for. Also, in what capacity am I running a server in Eve? Surely I'm simply running a client?
Umm.. Eve isn't a single player game. Maybe thats the source of confusion here? I hope it is. You're not just "simply running a client" You're running a client that connects to a single massive server that up to 25,000 other players are on at any one time.
Eve is based one large sized cluster of servers (70x AMD Opteron LS20 Blades , just to run the primary game cluster, let alone the redundant servers ready for hot swapping in case of disaster) all of which is hosted in a datacentre in London. Essentially Eve is one massive database for which your client is merely a graphical query engine.
Alongside the running costs of those servers, you've got the monthly costs of the bandwidth connections (not cheap, a typical LES100 connection will set you back £70,000 per year, and I'd guess they've got at least 4 of those, plus some as backups), plus the cost of staff to maintain and run the servers. You've also got to cover the costs of support staff, accounting staff, programmers, and so on.
How are they supposed to fund this? Magic? Yeah, the initial peak of people buying the game would help offset the initial equipment purchase and bandwidth costs, but that money soon disappears and the longer term impact of running costs becomes more apparent.
Paying monthly is the only reasonable approach to these, or routine releases of new 'paid-for' content. If you adopt the latter model you'd get people put under pressure to purchase the add-ons just to be able to participate in group activities. EQ2 adopts this model (but Sony being the ever greedy Sony they also charge a monthly fee
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), and I know of people who are ****** at being
forced to buy new content, seen it happen in other MMORGPS (WoW is just about to do it too..) CCP is unusual in that it doesn't charge for huge content updates, they continue to be free. If anything Eve is one of the cheaper MMORPGs out there.
If you're going to complain, at least understand what you're actually talking about before you do so.