The EVE buddy program offers either a PLEX or 30 days added to your account as a reward for getting someone to sign up. My initial though was to go with the 30 days, but the idea of splitting the value of a PLEX (400m ISK or so) with whoever signed up was brought up. While certainly more ‘fair’, I don’t think handing a new player 200m ISK is actually a good thing, but I’m curious to see how others view this.
When you first start out in EVE, a million ISK seems like a huge amount, and anything beyond that is hard to grasp. T1 Frigates sell for 200k or less, Frigate modes can cost 10k, and your initial income from missions or mining is in the thousands of ISK rather than millions. As you progress, things scale up. Level 2 missions bring in more ISK, mining in a better ship is more profitable, and your wallet goes from hundreds of thousands to millions. Fast forward a little more, and at level 3 missions, you are seeing tens of millions of ISK, and likely working your way towards a 100m ISK battleship or a major mining ship.
Handing someone 200m ISK skips all of the above. How attractive do level 1 missions look, with their 20k ISK reward (someone correct me on the amount, it’s been a while since I’ve run a lvl 1 mission), when you have 200m in the bank? If you lose a Frigate, how much do you care about that 250k or so loss? If you are focused on marketing, are you going to start small and make 100k ISK plays with 200m sitting in your wallet?
Additionally, while getting a ton of ISK will increase your progress in some areas (you can buy named fits for your Frig or Cruiser, and finish missions a little faster), it won’t allow you to instantly jump to level 4 missions, even though you can afford the Battleship. It also won’t give you the skill points needed to fly the ship, or the game knowledge to fly it correctly. And while lvl 4 missions are far more profitable than lvl 1s, whether they are more fun is debatable (many veteran players prefer to fly nothing bigger than a Cruiser, for instance).
Same goes for industry. That 200m will allow you to jump right into the deep end of the econ game, but with limited skills and knowledge, you are far more likely to get frustrated or make very costly mistakes than get right into the ‘good stuff’. Truth is, playing the market at the 100k level and playing it at the 100m level is not all that different, and what differences do exist, not all of them make the 100m level better. Producing high-end ships is not more fun than producing simple T1 frigate fits and selling them in small amounts. The scale is different, and what you can do with the ISK you make is different, but the actual ‘gameplay’ is more or less the same. If anything, the lower-end stuff requires a lot less Excel (not in space) work upfront to determine profit margins and all that fun stuff, and you are more likely to compete with other newer players rather than multi-year industry vets.
The reason I personally selected 30 days added to my account rather than PLEX is pretty similar actually. I think being handed 400m ISK would sour my motivation for a lot of the stuff I’m doing right now, and while that money would accelerate a few of my goals (getting a Golem or a Freighter), I’d rather ‘work’ for that ISK myself. It will make the day I finally do buy one of those ships that much sweeter, and make me appreciate their high cost that much more.
I could easily afford to buy a few PLEX today and get what I want right now, but I’d rather not spend money to cut content or the fun out of playing a game. I’m weird like that.
Hardcore Casual 
In other news, Eve goes back to growing and WoW loses another 10% or its players.
I blame Tobold.
Actually, I totally agree. I started to write a comment to that effect in your previous post but never got around to it.
Quite awhile ago I ran into exactly this problem when I got a RL gaming buddy to play. Trying to be helpful, I fit him some ships ready to fly, send him a bit of isk (like 10mil, I think) and basically offered him a blank cheque if he wanted anything else. Of course, that just put him into the ‘why bother?’ frame of mind. He logged in to train skills, but why mission when there’s nothing to earn? Why mine when someone will give it to you free?
Of course, I was thinking of it from an experienced player’s perspective. If I had to restart, I’d absolutely take a few hundred million and get into the ‘real’ game of shooting at other players within a day or two, skillpoints be damned. But what first got me into the game was the struggle to keep progressing into bigger and better ships, to buy skills, etc. My first battlecruiser and my first battleship were both major events that took weeks to earn; weeks spent playing the game, earning isk and minerals.
Had that been all just given to me, I’d have probably just bumped into a cap where I didn’t have the skills I needed and there was nothing to be done about it but log out and wait a week.
A final thought, I’d consider taking the plex and splitting the cash if you and your new friend have the discipline to take it all and buy a set of implants each that increase skill training time. You’d probably lose them before you got to the level where you could afford to buy them ‘properly’ anyway.
On second though, plugging in absurdly expensive implants might make you too risk adverse to try new things, like pvp or low-sec exploration or something.
Well, right now I’m thinking about joining some kind of PVP outfit straight away, where I can do gang pvp and shooting at people. I understand a noob can jump into a frigate and do tackling and all sort of fun stuff even in high level PvP. How pheasible is that?
Otherwise I’m tired of PVE grinding and mining and getting trinkets and that stuff. I could stay in WoW for that and don’t bother. If I am to play EVE and make all that effort to learn and all that, it’ll mostly be to force a change of pace (I never PvPd in WoW).
Very very feasible! I recommend you look into faction warfare corps to get a leg up, unless you want to go for a pirate training Corp. You can be running in fleets by day 3 in EVE.
Make sure you can use voice coms like Teamspeak or Mumble if you want to PVP. It is a necessity to coordinate attacks and follow the FC (fleet commander).
One more thing, many training corps provide free T1 frigs so you truly don’t need to grind for ISK. You can jump straight into the fight.
Good post. I’ve been feeling the same way with my wormhole earnings. I went in doing level 2’s and came out with at least 300 million worth of isk and ships. Now I need to catch up knowledge wise with how best to use this money.
If a player is focused on PvP, the PLEX is a better option, as 200million ISK would allow you to burn through a handful of battlecruisers, or a ton of Rifters. The experience flying and losing ships is invaluable. I admit I biased, I play the game for PVP and the ISK making is just to keep the train rolling.
For the record, a carrier with assigned fighters to a Tengu makes a great nullsec ISK factory if you dislike industry or trading and have access to Sanctums.
My corp is going to get into PvP training shortly, and I’m looking forward to it. My PvP experience in EVE so far is getting blown up a few times for being dumb.
I can’t see why a new player would not quickly either stop playing or buy a plex. I have never read anyone who said level 1-2 missions were fun or a major draw of Eve. So what person says “these missions are not a significant part of the game, but I am going to Korean grind them because I don’t want to spend a tenth of cent of RL$?”
CCP made EvE a RMT game many years ago to free players from having to waste time.
Personally, I give new players implant sets and skillbooks in preference to raw isk. However, unless the player is an accumulator by inclination, I point out to them that the more effort it takes to acquire ISK, the more resistant they will be towards spending it, even if that means they alter their behaviour to have less fun.
Agreed to the skillbooks and implants.
It can get really expensive to train and implant in the first few months.
If they know about jumpclones they can swap out their implanted clones for pvp clones.
Here’s the official “Buddy Invites and rewards” thread from the EVE-Online forums: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=9874&find=unread
My offer to rookies is simple: sign up, get a PLEX. No divvying it up, I already have the means to earn that much ISK a month with very little effort. Now it’s up to the rookie to do what they want with that PLEX.
400M ISK goes a long, long way when you’re a rookie. That’s a lot of lessons in how not to fit and fly a ship in PvP combat :)
I’ve played EVE a bit. When the Planetary Interaction patch came out I had about 2 million ISK and three frigates to my name. I invested all of that money (and the money from selling two of my figates) in buying planetary interaction skill books from an NPC vendor in one of the lowsec sectors and taking them about four jumps to a highsec system.
I made about 1.5million ISK profit and felt like the most brilliant speculator in history. I felt like a frikkin genius.