EVE General Discussion

Disappointing.... I had high hopes. My subscriptions are running out and will not be renewing them. The game just isn't the same any more for me, the fun has gone.

I was hoping the WiS would give Eve that needed boost. CCP reach for the stars and the boring called out for more of the same. Oh well I needed a real life...

Hardly. There has been a long history of people not staying with the game due to lack of avatar related content. Before Incarna CCP said many times that new players were quitting because they could not relate to being a spaceship rather than a person in a spaceship.

The interest in Avatar development indicates to me CCP needs to do some work here. CCP needs to form a new team. The entire "we will not develop it if it takes resources away from spaceships" is not really possible. Whenever money is spent on feature A, less money will be available for any other feature.

So what to do? I propose the amount of effort spent on WiS be proportional to the number of players that want it. Part of every subscription goes to development. If CCP spread the money around in proportion to what the players wanted, then every player would know that none of their money was being spent to develop features they did not want.

Incarna was a kick to the gonads, the content was severely lacking and the initial release made Eve unplayable for a lot of players, but what really killed it as an expansion was the NEX debacle, the leaked emails, the greed is good memo, the dismissive response from certain devs and $1000 trousers.

The blockade of Jita wasn't about the lack of avatar gameplay, it was about the couldn't give a crap attitude towards the players perception of what the NEX store may have become. I was one of those beating the hell out of the memorial in Jita, 90% of the chat in the protest channels was about micro(lol)transactions and how we didn't want them. The monetisation of Eve and the downright blatant cash grab is what killed Incarna as an expansion, not the WiS content although that was severely disappointing, considering the amount of time that had been spent and the promises made it definitely did not meet expectations.

I love this game, it's the first MMO that I've played and it'll probably be the last. I want to see CCP succeed, I want to see the server population grow and IMHO WiS will help to do both of these things, but it should not have been released until it actually had content beyond a single room with a locked door.

you can explain this over and over again,believe me ,i tried
so expect some trolls about barbies and emotes from now on

Mixed feelings about this it can means that they will not fiddle with Nex store as well,and that can only be good for this game...but if they continue to push store and they did shelved the only reason for wanting wis in first place,

possibility of awesome emerging game-play,

and no i don't think emoting barbies and playing poker have anything to do with awesome or emergent ,than sad day it is.

That may have been a part of it. But there's more.

Look at Incarna itself. What was added? One small empty room (just one race, Minmatar I think?). This, after what, 18 months or so of a virtual stop put on everything else? And what did they say? This is the first step, more is coming in winter expansion 6 months down the road, which would add up to 24 months of no changes to the rest of the game? And for what? To open the door into another, slightly larger room, with a few other avatars in it, still with no plan for meaningful gameplay? That's what many people got so fired up about. There was no meaningful avatar gameplay even planned at the time.

But while all this was happening, they had plenty of time to add a clothing store, where a single item cost an equivalent of $60?! That was another straw on the camel's back. I mean, I've seen ripoffs in my time when it comes to F2P stuff, but $60 item? I honestly don't think I saw this in ANY cash store in any game ever. Correct me if I'm wrong. That, by itself, made my jaw drop, the sheer unadulterated greed of it. Even Blizzard never went to sell their virtual ponies for more than $25 or so, and even that was pushing it, to put it mildly. But $60?! Are you nucking futs!?

OK, OK, we could have ignored the cash shop stuff. IF they waived the subscription! As in, if they removed $15/mo or PLEX requirement, and gone full-on F2P. Had they done it, cash shop would have been much better received. But it made no financial sense at the time, so it was an insane cash shop on top of usual sub. Which, again, not many MMO devs dared to do, and definitely not with $60 items (or was it $70, I can't recall).

So, yeah, all of that, PLUS people who were into spaceships and got fed up with years of it being ignored, finally boiled over and exploded. And we got the Monoclegate and all that stuff. And to give CCP credit, they quickly scrambled into damage control mode and recovered from something that could have easily killed (and has killed in the past) many a fledgeling MMO.

Bottom line - they botched it. It was NOT the time to even MENTION the cash shop. Before meaningful avatar gameplay was added, cash shop shouldn't have been even worked on. They should have began with meaningful gameplay and THEN considered adding captain's quarters. CQ by itself is 100% meaningless. It is, in essence, player housing of other MMOs. Note how in other MMOs first the game comes out, and THEN housing is added? After gameplay is already there? If even Nexon can figure it out, why not CCP? Well, CCP went the opposite way and added housing with no gameplay. Any wonder that it blew up in their faces like it did?

As much as I would like to blame the entire debacle on the mindless herd, the bulk of the blame lands squarely on CCP there, I'm sorry to say. And then they went and made another mistake - scrapped avatar stuff and focused 98% on spaceships. Which was fine and dandy, but the split should have been 50/50 or 60/40 in favour of ships. After spending so much time, manpower and resources on the Carbon engine and avatars, they should have pushed it through to completion. Instead they de facto scrapped it. If they ignore it another few years, the engine itself will become too outdated, and then what? Start from scratch? People who made the engine will have moved on, or forgotten some of the intricacies too. It's much easier to pick up something that is still fresh in your mind than something you haven't looked at for years.

It's just...really disappointing. I don't know if they realize it or not, but there's NOTHING they can do with space ships that has the potential to attract a huge new chunk of players to the game and keep them. They can tweak combat mechanics, they can improve the AI, they can do all kinds of things, and it might bring a few hundred players, or even a few thousand. But adding avatars and meaningful avatar gameplay has the potential to turn EVE from "spaceship MMO" into THE "sci-fi MMO", and attract tens or even hundreds of thousands of players. Players who will never fly ships, but will play until their eyes bleed with avatars.

Let's just say I was very angry about Zulu serving up a plate of zero-gameplay and forcing everybody to eat it and enjoy it. I feel the need to continuously voice my opinions/whine against wis lest they repeat the same mistake, it sure worked for the miners.

See, I hear you there. But we're not here arguing because we want CCP to add more WiS without gameplay. We want them to develop actual gameplay. I too am angry that there is a part of the game that has taken up so much time and has literally no gameplay, which is why I want CCP to be true to their "No more abandoned features" chant and actually develop some interaction for WiS.



They were already using Unreal as the engine for WiS back in 2006, when they had a seemingly good and working prototype. It looked fantastic. And apparently they just dumped it.

Oh man, seems the community is having a relapse.

Let me make this clear, even though it has been made clear many times before: You never needed to spend real cash on these items, and everything in this game can have a cash value attached to it. A 'fleet ready' titan, for example, is worth $7600.

You are correct, you didn't need to spend real life cash in the NEX store, instead you had to exchange multiple PLEX for AURUM, you could either buy PLEX from the market, which assumes that you had the ISK resources to do so, or you could buy PLEX/GTC from CCP and 3rd party vendors which did actually involve parting with real life cash. The poster you quoted does say equivalent of $60, not an actual $60.