/subj

It would be perfect if there'll be an option to pay for another person subscription without getting his password or any personal details, like alts, etc.

It could be done like.. : "Buy subscription for your friend!", "Purchase gift subscriptions!' or "Send subscription to your friend!"

Because, for example, THC could help the best pilots to get free subs from clan if the members don't have money to pay due to crysis.

Or another example, Mr Breazle helped our clan with broken plugins and we'd like to send him free sub, but atm it's not possible to send sub legally.

+1
Great potencial, subs as gift. No downside. Surely worth implementing, also for cases like that Terran Ambassador, I (and others) would be pleased to pay him a few months for doing ship models...

You can give people money to pay for subs without revealing your credit card, though I agree a gift option would be nice, have very little downside, and probably require a minimum of effort to institute. Currently you do the third party thing, ie: buy a visa gift card and give the other person the numbers, this gives them a certain, set amount of money, without giving them your personal info.

Just to clarify, I'm agreeing with the op completely, just giving you (Pirren) an option if you want to help breazle out in the meantime.

Alternately, if you don't mind revealing email addresses, you can use paypal.

I also agree with the OP.

FWIW, the way EVE does it, you can pay real-life money to buy an in-game item called PLEX that is exchangeable for subscription time. The item can then be traded with other people in-game. Since we don't have a secure way to transfer items, that could have interesting consequences if implemented here. Though the odds of a person having an opportunity to steal it would be pretty small.

That might open the possibility for outside wealth to impact the game, but probably not by much. This is a cheap game, less than $10 a month. Considering that time is money, how much is $10 worth in credits? For me, maybe 2M. Of course, time spent playing the game is more fun than time spent working, so I'd be willing to spend maybe 5-10M for a month sub, even though that would take a bit longer. I wouldn't be willing to spend more than that. I figure the sorts of people who have more than 10M to throw around are smart enough to understand this as well, so I don't think people would be able to sell subs for massive sums of money. And anyway, this is a skill based game, so money doesn't get you very far anyway.

I support this idea (it'd be nice to be able to give a month of subscription to a friend).

However, whatever you do, don't make it possible to gain ingame advantages by selling it ingame.

PLEX was the main issue I had with EVE. Being allowed to sell GTC for isk was bad enough, but to actually make an ingame item out of it to trade with ingame currency?! I'd probably get banned from this forum if I use the words I want about that.

I'd like to see it implemented WEB-ONLY.

Inside the "BILLING OPTIONS" page, add a Button: [Donate a subs]

Then the player pays for whatever period and have 2 options:
1. Send as email to a new player, not in game. Comes with link, confirm to retrieve prize.
2. Send to existing player name/nick. Ingame nicks only.

This is a GIFT, not a merchant to be traded in game. I would gift 1 month to few friends to bring them in and addict them... :)

And anyway, this is a skill based game, so money doesn't get you very far anyway.

+1

I'd like to see it implemented WEB-ONLY.
Inside the "BILLING OPTIONS" page, add a Button: [Donate a subs]

Yes, that's exactly what I suggest.

Oh, and there are some games, where you can buy unique code, that any player may enter in the secure form and receive one month free sub in exchange.

Yeah, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to get a PLEX-like solution added to VO, just mentioning it as a possibility. I don't really care one way or the other as to whether it should be taken that far. I'd be perfectly fine with only an out-of-game way like Alloh describes. I figured PLEX would come up anyway though, so I thought I'd go ahead and throw it out there now and offer my thoughts on it.

I don't really see how a PLEX-like option would hurt anything though. If every newb and his brother started trying to sell subs in VO, they would saturate the market pretty quickly and drive the price way down, and even if they didn't, it wouldn't sell for very much. And remember, each customer is only going to buy one sub per month max (they might buy several months at once, but then they won't buy any more for several months, so it averages out). So even if you only have half as many sellers as buyers, each one would only make two sales per month. 20M/mo doesn't really get you much. A rich newbie will die just as well as a poor one - their coffin will just be prettier before it gets blown up.

But yeah, just playing Devil's Advocate. The important thing is just to have a simple way to send somebody a sub without many personal details being involved. Everything else is just sugar (or rat poison, depending on who you ask I guess).

My understanding is that PLEX was CCP's way of legalizing/regulating/taxing what was already happening.

True. The issue started before that, when they allowed selling GTC for ingame currency.

I like the idea of anything that will help support the game, but suspect this would not be used much in real life. For the situations where you really do want to do this, couldn't you just buy one of those Pays by cash (or whatever the company is called) game cards at your favorite retailer and then PM/email the code to the intended receiver?

You mean go outside? Blasphemy.

+1 OP. How it is done is up to the devs, but I agree real world money should not become a widget. Off the top of my head, what if you bought any number of gift months on the billing options page of your account, then have them available in-game just like friend keys?

The easier the better.

so far, the easier I found is:

-Anonymous OR identified donation as a {GIFT} button in subscribe.

-Player purchases a "PromoCode" to be sent directly by an email to gifted person, from promo@Vendetta-online.com. If player chose idenfitied info, add his stats or a free form field to be included in email. Maybe also accepts in-game nicknames, with confirmation dialog, when no email is sent.
>Purchased Code(s) is(are) ALSO sent to player (purchaser) by email, so he can simply use it as a ingame message, SMS, IM...

obviously, code is single-use, and gets marked when used. So it is even possible to reuse given codes that were not used.

> Who gifts the subs can see who retrieved it, only by provided info, email or in-game-nick.

-Anonymous OR identified donation as a {GIFT} button in subscribe.

+1 to Anonymous donation too