silence! you are the minority!!!

PLEX wont brake the game. what it will do is (if done right) make A.C. more money & allow more people to play the game with nic. PLEX isnt pay to win. If plex comes in then i have a reason to resub some old accounts. im sure i wouldnt be the only person to do that.

True Pros make a Podcast to influence the Devs minds, 
The rest of you guys are Hacks

PS. I got my Highways & stopped playing b4 they came in & have never used them! ...... Irony much ?

+1 for ICE
-2 for EP for $

Not a bad idea. I'm not sure about the 25% but having some certain amount of EP, that is determined by the maximum EP theoretically possible to have added to the agents would dampen the issue guite a bit.

So basically EP for agents would work like this:
Baseline EP + EP gained from subscription = Total EP

Baseline EP would be the same for each and every agent, be it old or new and it is calculated by the server and then added to the agents. It would be calculated, like stated previously, based by how far the game has progressed. Easiest would be to calculate it from the amount of EP that is currently possible, but there are also more fun and complex ways. Also, not saying it should be 25% but maybe just 10%-15%?

So as an example, Max EP is determined to be 1m right now therefore every agent gets a boost of 10% of it, which means 100k EP. Whenever the max EP is 1.5m, every agent gets 150k. The boost would not be applied only when creating an agent but would be a dynamic player in the total EP calculations so no-one is left behind when they unsubscribe.

Whats the current Max EP possible purely from time and not from the boosters? I'd guess it's around 1m so having each and every player granted their 10% of it would be great. 100k extra EP would make people quite capable.

With this idea, subscribing toons is still very appealing, extra EP always helps.

Ok lets look at this then guys.
Any new player "can" be competitive with in 2-3 months EP wise. So to put that into perspective thats between 86.4k ep - 129.6k ep.

A new player right now gets 20k Ep (+20k ep with kick starter?) so possible 40k Ep in total depending.  Personally i feel 30k-40k ep is a good amount for new players start with (we no longer have the Nav extension to waste 10k+ ep on). It allows them to get basic weapon skills & robotics & support skills, maybe not high skilled but hey its days one.

Here is why im against increasing the "lump" sum of ep a new player is given one day 1.
1. A true new player is new to the game & doesnt understand the basics of how the game works & plays. He/She needs to play for a bit to understand this can take days or week(s) to happen.

2. Giving a player 50k 80k 100k EP would be pointless as they would either waste ep or worrse yet get into mechs they dont understand how to pilot & may have spent most of their time grinding just to lose it in pvp or pve (personally i dont object to free killmails).

3. the above 2 issues I do admit can be overcome. But this one i feel could be the most detrimental to the game. RMT.
We all want the game to grow but with groth will come the RMTers its a fact that it will happen we have had them in this game b4. Just because we dont have it now doesnt mean we wont again in the future. To understand how a lump large sum ep start for new players could be abused i put to your the following scenario:

Im your local RMTer the Evil capitalist hating DEVs have just banned 15 of my accounts for RMT. But we all know banning accounts or even IP ban will never stop people getting new accounts. Not being a noob at this i create new accounts.
Given the PLEX system paying for new accounts is easy and thanks to getting a large ep boost i can get my mining army into full production right away. perhaps even into rivelers in a matter of days (getting fresh nic to new accounts thru money laundering via the market isnt overly hard to do & is dont ALOT in EVE). So 1 day after the DEVs banned my accounts im back out doing my thing. with a large EP boost to start with my training time to being a good (miner / farmer) is cut down my profit margins (in game or RL) will not be effected to badly.

The above is a little extream but it holds true prinsiple for people that Macro for none RMT reasons. Marco'ers & RMT'ers hurt games. They drive down mineral prices for miners making the time that section of the community spends worth less than it should be. this also has a negatic effect on the market to.

Lump sums of ep for new accounts allow these kind of people to get back up & running VERY fast. to find them takes time & twhen found the prosses starts over again. This would be true no matter what I know, but large starting ep bonuses make this so much easier.

I know some people or DEVs will say reading this, "but the game is so small we dont have to worry about it yet" or "we will sort that out when it happens" To those peeple i say "only a fool see disaster off in the distance & does nothing about it"

I feel keeping a 20k - 40k starter ep is good BUT having a percentage boot for the first month wouldnt be bad. perhaps 1.5x ( or if thats a technical problem then 2x for the first 2 weeks) of a payed subscription.
Infact that brings me to this thought:
Trial account 20k
On paying for your sub +10k-20k ep & bonus starts to kick in.
This way abuse of trial accounts isnt so tempting. infact ide even be pro giving trials 10k ep

But i still feel ep isnt the real problem new players face. its tutorial missions & light bot / assaults. these are great bots that just lack something to make them more usefull in general.
So if you have read my whole post i thank you & no i cant be arsed to TLDR

True Pros make a Podcast to influence the Devs minds, 
The rest of you guys are Hacks

PS. I got my Highways & stopped playing b4 they came in & have never used them! ...... Irony much ?

Ice just needs to happen regardless of market activity.

... giving new players suddenly a large sum of EP just to be "competitive" is for me like giving a child a million dollars...

there were already remarks by new players (ingame+in the forums) that already the 20k+ from kickstarters is a challenge to put to good use, those new players also said that 40k to start with are okay but they wouldn't really want more.
At first, I thought (looking at my earlier post) that maybe giving an EP-boost to newcomers may help, but players won't ever get used to slower EP-rate after that starting phase nor would they be satisfied with suddenly having to wait weeks and even months for EP after getting a bunch of EP from the start.

Beside that, with the percentages of max. EP its a hard thing to calculate in a good percentage (be it a bunch of ep or a boostlimit), atm. starting EP with kickstart edition is already 4% of max. EP. Doesn't sound much? Those 25% are already 250 000EP (more than 5 months of EP!). Most know that under the right directions a new player already can be competitve in their 2nd-3rd month -> ~75k EP would be 7,5% of max EP.
And thats just for the moment. Then what will you do in a half or even one year ahead? Lower that "start"-percentage or have it stay the same? With 300k EP you can already be more than "just competitive" at your specialized profession. With 600k EP some professions have maxed their extensions. Within a year those 7,5% will grow to over 100k EP and of course players will then have learned within their first month how to spend massive EP...
This whole thing about more EP for newcomers won't solve any problem, it will just delay it.. This game originally was based on a RPS-system and thats what needs more emphasize.

Sadly, this isn't only the case with the EP-question but also that for ICE. To start out and help playerbase grow it may help, but in long term I have to agree with Celebro - AC will loose their income from vets. So for this one it is still an Okay from me, but only for a limited timeframe.

Guys, we heard you.
EP selling in any form has been canned. The idea is bound to raise its head from time to time, but we got the picture.
However we'd still like to give a larger incentive for players to go from a trial account to the first subscription - what are your thoughts on giving a bunch of EP to players subscribing from a trial account? Of course however much this EP is, it'd be retroactively granted to all accounts that have ever subscribed.

As for ICE, it's in the works.

I still like Acceleration, but it may be making it more complicated than it needs to be. Whether EP is accelerated for a while or given out in one chunk you will have issues with players using EP very unwisely.

Do new accounts get to downgrade extensions still before hitting level 7? Maybe that will be enough for correcting mistakes.

So, give 40K bonus EP for first month sub. That gives potential day one sub 60-80k (depending if they bought kickstarter) and 124,800 to 144,800 by day 45 (one month plus 15 day trial). That's as competitive as anyone needs to be as a beginner, imo.

And still listen to community on light bots and give us some new bots while you're at it!

Great work on Greenlight. I think I'm gonna be playing again soon...

A quick note on this: we're currently in the process of creating a new screen for the character creator because of this - it'll feature the most common types of characters currently in the system. Basically you'll be able to one click create a full fighter or full indy character. The original process will become the "advanced character creator".

i actually like this Idea ^^

& after reading Anni's post made me think that with your new character creation when you select the faction you devs should have a basic list of the main features of each faction.

True Pros make a Podcast to influence the Devs minds, 
The rest of you guys are Hacks

PS. I got my Highways & stopped playing b4 they came in & have never used them! ...... Irony much ?

Nice move coz really the only people that use alpha 1 islands are new players.... us old players are to L33t

True Pros make a Podcast to influence the Devs minds, 
The rest of you guys are Hacks

PS. I got my Highways & stopped playing b4 they came in & have never used them! ...... Irony much ?

There goes arganos and combat lights, just throw away noob bots for a week use. Way to throw a 1/4 of the game content in the first week of playing.