EVE General Discussion

I found the article to be insipid and pointless.

Much like Incarna, in fact.

i know something you should write....

You STILL here?

I could bundle you same as Mittani.

1) You speak heaps and do nothing.
2) The whole issue was crap and bought shame on Eve players, the game and CCP.
3) And both of you think you're cool as a result.

gtfo. both of you.

This post is not only full of contradiction but also dangerous.

The statement and sentiment for much of the argument; "Much of the criticism of Incarna vanishes if there had been a successful deployment." illustrates a poor and superficial grasp of the underlying issues.

Incarna would be no more successful had it been successfully deployed; whatever that means. 4 more rooms, a corridor to link them and a bar to show off your NeX items?

The rage from Incarna was not specifically and solely rage at Incarna. This is an important point to understand.

Players who had previously raged at CCP when the :18 months: investment plan was revealed for development which had nothing to do with FiS were dutifully ignored by CCP. Resigned in defeat they sat and waited for Incarna, which they secretly feared was going to be crap, but they were willing to keep an open mind and be pleasantly surprised. It may not be content they had asked for, but perhaps CCP would surprise and delight them and the world would not be so bad (they might even enjoy the out of pod experience).

Instead, Incarna has turned out to be as poor an investment as everyone had predicted. Untold thousands had predicted it so and warned CCP. There is no substance to Incarna and adding more rooms or vanity items isn't going to fix that anytime soon.

Let's be clear, I don't think anyone would mind Incarna (there are clearly those who like the immersion factor of it) if it had been delivered as part of a fine FiS expansion. The issue however is that CCP have invested multiple years of resources solely into Incarna at the expense of everything else. Even the forums have had more investment than FiS over the past 18 months (and still I have to re-type this post because of forum bugs).

To put things into perspective, I would proffer that Incarna has taken at least 3-4 times the resources to develop compared to Apocrypha. Now, if you ask players (as buggy as Apocrypha was); would you like an expansion 3-4 times the size and content of Apocrypha, or would you like a room for your avatar with ridiculous vanity stuff in a shop? The answer should be obvious.

The issue is about balance of priorities, and CCP have gotten this wrong by orders of magnitude and it has taken plummeting subscriptions to only start to rectify this, not the wisdom, foresight and vision of the product owner/lead designer (bless your souls for being so out of touch).

What is dangerous is the encouragement your post seems to be suggesting to CCP. As head of the CSM this is very, very worrying to me. You can't seem to decide whether "some within CCP have lost touch with their core focus (making a game about spaceships for people who love spaceships)" or "The release of Incarna and later Dust 514 is likely to make EVE’s subscriber base and revenue generation explode".

A bad strategy (or rather, roadmap) with an improved delivery execution is still a bad strategy. Picking out the following excerpts from your post, I am not sure whether you are genuinely trolling or not;

* Much of the criticism of Incarna vanishes if there had been a successful deployment.

* we were supposed to have four racial Captain’s Quarters and Establishments

* The cries of “Give us things to do, not things to wear” also goes away

* I suspect that we wouldn’t have had nearly the level of rage over Incarna if the Caldari CQ was the first to be released

* Theoretically, Incarna’s primary benefit is an improvement to the New Player Experience

* The prices are too high, there’s no place to show off one’s ‘virtual goods’

* since 2003 we have seen some truly outstanding expansions and ideas from the company

All of this stuff is just like rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic as i have said before.

In the long-term, WiS and Incarna has great promise and could offer untold opportunities for creative ideas to expand the game. However at the moment, the game is so horrendously broken that investment into Incarna at this stage (or rather, with such a huge bias) seems (is) utter folly. Plummeting subscriber numbers, player discontent and boredom has nothing to do with a poor Incarna implementation. There are fundamental issues which need serious (1-2 years) investment; sovereignty, ship balance, 0.0 risk/reward incentive, botting being the key ones. When the game mechanics can support the creativity and ingenuity that the player community can weave, then CCP will have ample opportunity to invest in other directions.

I was happy to see your recent takeup of the FiS torch (admittedly a year or two behind the curve). Reading this post, I'm not sure you actually 'get it' though. You can't be all things to all men. In this post it seems as if you're trying to be.

Ps. Incarna may be appealing to new players but what is more damning is long-term players and veterans telling them (directly/indirectly) not to bother. "Welcome young adventurer, your ultimate quest is to slay the evil dragon!". Except when you get to the end of the quest, there is no dragon, just a bucket of pis* to pour on your head.

I hate to say this, but it was a decently thought-out and well written article.

@sister bliss: I dont agree with you. What Mittens said is correct, the problem wasn't the idea of incarna itself, rather than the fact that CCP couldn't deliver. And another thing is that at least I personally got tired of waiting solutions to the nullsec problems of massing wealth and supercaps. Ive been very negative ever since ccp nerfed anomalies instead of moon income, making sure that strong get stronger and weak get weaker. And this was supposed to ensure that there is going to be change and fluctuation in nullsec power balance? Part of my dissatisfaction with incarna was that we didnt get any solutions to those problems, we just got a piece of a small carrot and lots of promises.

In regards of incarna release I believe that the crux of many problems is the technological hurdle that CCP built for themselves. I understand perfectly that they have spent so much time trying to make their carbon technology thing work, so it could be used in their new games like WoD. I have no problems with the allocation of their resources. However, things are not gonna go well if the only solution is to wait couple years so people have better graphic cards.. Knowing what the problem is isn't going to make me any happier.

What are you talking about ? It ended almost exactly as I expected it to end.

Sums it up. There's a game right now called Eve Online that was about spaceships... you know... the ones IN SPACE!

Walking doodles that are not even capable of lying down on their own couch is NOT "the game". That's the Sims and even in the Sims, you could take a nap. I doubt even Will Wright would've given a "GO" on this simili-sim add-on.

Pablum.

Well Mittani you are predicable and boring and your article reflects it.

Why am I not surprised to see Mittens lacking the format to admit he was wrong when defending Incarnage?