EVE General Discussion

PCGamer Interview

Please tell me that Soundwave knows that EVE isn't a free-to-play title. Does he not realise that through the sale of vanity items, etc is how F2P titles get revenue because unlike EVE they don't have a subscription/PLEX. Trying to rationalise the NEX Store based on F2P games, your a long way out on a very small limb there Soundwave.

I'd say the thing that Soundwave screwed up is thinking that the EVE players wanted an additional microtransaction on top of their sub/PLEX.



Interesting that I don't think we have seen the true impact of trying to run a F2P title for an extended number of years. Even Farmville is reporting lower profits and less logged in users recently. Also the market is being saturated with games and the point has to be reached where the spread out number of 'paying' customers no longer support the game and the infastructure required.

Work on Earth Eternal is grinding to a halt with Lego Universe and Troy Online being another couple of games that are about to bite the dust shortly.

Please tell me you are not skipping elementary school to write this garbage .. Goddess knows you are obviously falling behind as it is.

Soundwave is an idiot (as far as I am concerned), but nothing in that quote is false or proof of his idiocy. Eve will, can and shall benefit from a more personal interaction by use of avatars and CCP did in fact **** it up something fierce ..

PS: Go for brand tinfoil, the cheap **** you have is evidently not strong enough.

Not really apples and oranges to be honest, although he states free to play games, i think he knows and many others do that there are also games out there which are subscriiption based with a vanity style store tacked on that work very well, star trek online being one of them. The difference between them and what CCP tried to do is simple.

1. Vanity items are very cheap to buy, in some case mere pennies.
2. The items are only vanity they're not needed items.
3. They have aq large selection of items which are added to regularly.
4. They have a "finnished" walking around engine so people can actually view your vanity items.

I've always felt that if CCP folowed these simple rules in the first place this would never have gotten the enormous negative reaction they did.

Granted, it's all about making money, but what's better?

Expensive limted amounts of items that only a few people will buy,
or
lots of small cheap ticket items that a huge amount of people will buy?

Why do you think pound/dollar stores are so common nowdays? It's because they make money hand over fist selling lots of cheap items all the time instead of one or two expensive items now and again. This business model could easily be used by CCP to make the NEX store popular.

Seems reading comprehension escaped you, practise some more and you may yet get into secondary school.

Where did I say anything about avatar interaction being a bad thing? WiS if done right can be a great thing for EVE.

The point of the original post is that Soundwave appears to be setting the bar for the inclusion of vanity items based on F2P games rather than the unique game that he is the lead designer for. You do realise it is possible to deliver vanity items in EVE but still remain true to the sandbox or can't you comprehend that.

I don't think Soundwave doesn't understand the outrage, I believe he is afraid to say loud that there is a big pink elephant in the middle of the room.

If you want to understand outrage you have to figure out what ppl fear. Humans are driven by feelings and EVE rage is no difference. After moving the semi end game into a direction where you pretty much have to have 3 accounts (Can anybody light me a cyno pls? Hello? Anybody there?) and making it common practice to not pay for those 3 accounts, introducing competition over PLEXes with some silly vanity items will force players to fear that PLEXes sky rocket and thus may drive them out of the game. It does not matter if that fear is justified. Fear does not care about reason.

Another big point of fail that is not named in that article is that there is some sort of unwritten agreement. We make CCP get $ and we get nice shinies to make and sell to fill out wallets. By creating any form of inverse RMT you Mr Gamedesigner try to compete with me over the iskies of my fellow players. AND IF YOU COMPETE WITH ME IN EVE I WILL MAKE YOU FEEL REALLY REALLY BAD. Try again and you get more pain.

There are quite a few players that didn't like the idea of having a CSM. Since there is one you better vote or you might get woman with a unspeakable name into it again. So counting the number of votes does not tell you that ppl like it, even if marketing pretends otherwise. If you then go and let a most undesired change of direction getting signed of by monkies who where willing to put their name under a NDA you should not wonder to find yourself in the middle of a shitstorm.

Incarna wasn't just "We screwed that up a bit", it was a prime example of cooperate blindness, caused by a complete disconnection from the player base. It happend because of t20 and the CSM. The rules of dev participation in the game got changed and a proxy was setup between them and the player base.

As long as you keep the CSM and refrain from holding space in 0.0 you wont get my trust back because you don't play the same game then I do. I can't trust you because I can't expect you to understand what is driving me.

Errrm, Eve Online is Free-to-Play .. has been since the introduction of plex. The uniqueness of Eve stops at the game itself, the underlying business model is a copy of a copy of a copy of copy maybe with a twist.

Where it differs from the "others":
- It doesn't have a glaringly obvious Pay-to-Win scheme (Plex is of Pay-for-a-leg-up-depending-on-market-price kind of thing).
- Everyone has access to all content regardless of whether one pays with time or cash.
- CCP's revenue is recieved from macro-payments (subs/GTCs) rather than micro-payments (P2W, cheap vanity).

Incarna was supposed to be introduce the micro-payment revenue stream to Eve as a supplement (or even replacement) to the macro-payment, but due to euthanasia worthy stupidity they started out with <10 items priced at more than one months worth of game time .. that glorious fiasco is on top of the developer time they burned on the SpaceBarbies and thus didn't have available for the actual game giving them the corporate headache they are now trying to get rid of.

all I really see is that CCP still has no understanding of WHY microtrans failed.

They seem to think that the product and mechanism for delivery are the issues and not the fact that most people don't want what is commonly perceived as a gateway to P2W

its not what you did, or how you did it, and if you could quantify the real problem it was more like too much radical change too quickly

You know what? I like my new shirt. Y'all just hatin'.

Stop hatin', haters.

Want a connection to the way your avatar looks?

Lets have a complicated exploration/manufacture system that means if you wanted to dress up with a super rare blood raider bikini you'd have to run missions in cosmos, trade parts on the market, explore for rare fabrics / invent blueprints and fund planetary factories to produce this rare stuff. When you wear that bikini it says "I put some effort into aquiring this thing" ... not

"I clicked a button on the damn NeX store"

Nothing that will ever be sold in the NeX store can ever be unique or impressive because anyone with a credit card to buy an unlimited number of them.

Eve is a game where truly impressive rare things are rare because they take a lot of time and effort to construct.