Greetings Capsuleers!
While all kinds of space goodness has been under development, your friends in Team Mammon and Team Roundhouse Kick have been working to improve and expand on our popular Buddy Program – so more of you can experience that good stuff alongside your friends, comrades and fellow space bronies. We're now ready to go live with just the first of those improvements, with more in the pipeline. Up to now the Buddy Program has worked as a one-to-one invite system, with rewards of game time or PLEX for those who's friends upgrade from trials to full accounts. While direct invites work well for small groups of friends, and will remain an option, today we are introducing another option for those wishing to cast the net wider: open invites.
The open invite system, using a URL that can be used over and over again, introduces a public one-to-many option for inviting friends to join you in EVE Online on a Buddy Program trial. Most importantly, the open invites gain rewards for friends upgrading in the same way as direct invites. For every player who obtains their Buddy Program trial through a given URL and then upgrades, the player who put out a public invite using that URL will gain a reward. The process of upgrading and gaining rewards is of course subject to eligibility as set out in the terms and conditions of the program.
That brings me to another important change. With the introduction of open invites we are removing all limits on Buddy Program invites and removing the PLEX-for-PLEX reward option. That is, if a Buddy Program trial is upgraded using PLEX the inviter will not be eligible to receive a PLEX reward as a result of that trial upgrade. We're sure you can understand that this is a necessary measure to protect the integrity of the Buddy Program. We are examining options for widening the pool of available rewards and rewarding those who succeed in attracting many friends to EVE through the Buddy Program.
We'll keep you notified of future developments and are keen to receive feedback and ideas on this topic. In the meantime, remember: Friendship is Magic!
