Well I managed to do a stupid thing the other week, I reactivated my old eve-online account. For those who don’t know, eve-online is a 3d space game where you can do all manner of things. Anyway I reactivated it while making my own space game, I thought it would be good to have a basis if I ever get stuck (yeah right!).

So I’m travelling from system to system wonder how I will implement my game to give players a good experience while also spending money to do something in game (not sure what quite yet), and the main thing which interests me about eve is that the skill tree requires real time to complete something. So navigation 1 allows your ship a better stat when doing manoeuvres and takes about 14 minutes to complete whereas Navigation level 5 gives the best stat, but would take a good 6/7 days to complete. Now take that and times it by a lot of skills each having different levels of timespan they can complete on.

If you’re PVPing you will want best attack damage and best ship if possible (amongst other things), so you’re going to spend time on these skills, you’re going to want to spend the money on monthly subscription for all of this and although I don’t plan to do a monthly subscription I do want people to spend money on the game. So I’m considering using the time part for researching new technologies (so that the colonies can research completely new avenues and sell their new items to everyone else for lots of currency), however am still unsure about what players would be happy to pay for.. I could charge for:

• Mining tiles
• Trading
• Declaring war
• Special Actions in game (most games would be like, click train skill, skill done .. but a special action would be more like, click train skill, type in what you hope to achieve (or trying to do with the action) and then it would be handled by a human GM)

So far that’s all I have for ideas.. suggestions?