EVE General Discussion

Hello, fellow forum dwellers!

It has come to my attention that people are confusing "I Hate Incarna!" with the events that unfolded with "Monoclegate". In one thread in particular, we are blamed for the canning of roughly 100 people in Iceland and the United States. It is because of us, the vocal minority, they say, that people have been fired, Walking-in-Stations is on the "backburner", and World of Darkness is (hopefully!) never coming out.

Get ready with your popcorn, my fellow denizens. This one has the potential to be both informative and long-winded! Much trolling material is to follow, I am sure. I expect Helicity, Miilia, and LadySpank to be ready to troll in all appropriate spots!

Let's start with the beginning, which is where every good story begins.

What the hell had all of you so pissy?

That is a very good question. Was it the walking around in stations? No. Was it the fact that you could no longer ship spin? No (and yes). Was it the fact your computer overheated a lot and it became damn near impossible to run more than one client simultaneously? Sort of. Was it the fact that many players suddenly had to go out and buy nVidia cards because AMD cards "hadn't been properly tested"? No.

Was it the NEX? You're getting there!

The problem wasn't WiS. The problem wasn't the fact that a brand new feature had been rolled out that simultaneously destroyed our lovable ship spinning. The issue was many things, though this did help in raising out collective ire.

Hardware Issues

Computers have always been finicky. Screw up one line of code and a BIOS can **** the bed. Screw up a hardware installation and you might just lose your expensive rig (I've seen it happen, man was it amusing for me). These rigs need upgrading, but spending a few hundred dollars on a piece of hardware should net you some decent time on it, right?

Many players knew they'd need to upgrade their video cards for this newest expansion. In fact, CCP had a "promotion" with nVidia for EVE players to get a 10% discount on some outdated video cards (I can't remember the exact models, but they were not new). What people did not expect was even new cards overheating with just one client open.

I run a GeForce GTX 460M. Not exactly new, but not old by any stretch of the imagination. EVE Online ran fine (and now, with the tweaks they did, I can run two screens and three clients no problem) before Incarna. When the expansion debuted, there were a lot of upset players. The newer cards were showing signs of wear very quickly, and people had to take days and weeks off while waiting for a new video card. My own computer was incapable of running one client for extended periods of time. Needless to say, people were not happy when their FPS went down to high teens on brand new 560s (or whatever).


The "Noble Exchange", or NeX

When this came out, we didn't know what to think. You'd turn PLEX into a new currency called AURUM, which was used to buy things from this new market. However, there was a very limited selection (one pair of pants, a shirt, and a monocle), and the prices were up there.

This led to the familiar name, "Monoclegate". The Monocle (referred to in-game as the ocular implant) cost $60.00 USD of real-life money. Think about that. That's four months of gametime! Shirts in-game cost $20.00 USD, roughly the equivalent of a real-life t-shirt.

People were a bit upset about the prices and the limited selection, but what really pissed people off was the next item...

Fearless

This was probably the thing that started it all. CCP's internal newsletter, Fearless, was "leaked" to the public. The title of this month's issue? Greed is Good.

Now that doesn't seem too bad, but you need to take it in the context of the previously mentioned "Noble Exchange". We pay to play this game. The Noble Exchange wa an in-game microtransaction store where one could pay additional money for in-game stuff. Right now, it was only stuff for dressing up Barbie and Ken. However, in it Kristoffer Touborg, AKA CCP Soundwave, started off his interview about him being in favor of microtransactions with the following:

"I would like virtual goods sales in EVE. In fact, I'd like to sell a lot more than vanity items."

Players jumped on this, pointing to it as the "smoking gun" saying that we were going to have more than just clothes in the NEX. If CCP's lead designer wanted to add more, what made us, the players, think we could stop it? No one bothered to dispute this notion, and so many a player was left flabbergasted and appalled that not only would we be paying a monthly subscription, but that in order to win we'd have to buy proverbial "golden ammo", or items that weren't readily available from in-game sources without paying real-life money. Not only that, but that "golden ammo" would be destructible. This was, after all, EVE Online, and everything should be destroyable. This was in direct contravention of a previous CCP developer who said there would not be microtransactions in EVE. Ever.

Players were willing to allow microtransactions for vanity items and clothes. They weren't going to be told they had to buy new ships to win in this game.

The Leaked E-Mail

Around this time, a new e-mail was leaked from CCP. In it, the CEO of the company was found stating that the players should be ignored. Saying Incarna launched "without a hitch" despite multiple pages of threads about hardware failures/overheating, he went on to say, about microtransactions:

"Currently we are seeing _very predictable feedback_ on what we are doing. Having the perspective of having done this for a decade, I can tell you that this is one of the moments where we look at what our players do and less of what they say. Innovation takes time to set in and the predictable reaction is always to resist change."

Hilmar, the CEO, had called us, the players, out on this. Telling players that their response was predicted is one thing. Telling them you're not going to pay attention to the threads on the forums is quite another. When a company CEO comes out and says, "I'm ignoring your complaints", he is committing the equivalent of corporate suicide. Players were rightly incensed, and with-in a day there was a thread stating they wanted to know who was publicly leaving the game. In total, the number of accounts being unsubscribed before this settled down pushed over 6,000. And that's just what we know from public channels. How many more do you think quit in silence?

Hilmar had drawn the line. The players redrew it.

From the halls of Montezuma...

...to the forums of EVE Online!

I had to insert some kind of non-witty tribute to my time in the Corps somewhere here! Anyways, we continue!

Not long after, CCP Pann, then the supervisor of CCP's community teams, created this thread. She asked for a chance to explain to us, the players, what was going on, and promised to answer what questions we had. She even came out, stating:

" To be perfectly honest, I’m here to buy time while we try to sort things out. No sense in lying about it so I'll call a spade a spade. "

To come out, as the head of the community management team, and admit that you're playing for time while upper echelons of management work out a lip service story is...pretty ingenious, actually. Admitting to the truth is a great thing. However, no one wanted to truth. We wanted answers, and we were promised them.

Then there was the following gem, which pissed off a lot - and I do mean a LOT - of players.

"As I see it, the chief complaint is regarding the high cost of goods in the Noble Market. Second, many people are unhappy about the Captain’s Quarters. Third, there are some performance issues with Incarna."

The second and third points had, of course, upset us. No one likes it when their computer kicks you for burning it, and no one was happy about being locked in one room, unable to ship spin, and if you turned off the Captain's Quarters you got...THE DOOR!

The first one, though? That was an insult to our intelligence, and people let her know it. Of course, CCP Pann didn't show up. Whether true or not, she didn't appear for a while, and CCP Fallout stated her daughter had been rushed to the emergency room at the hospital for emergency surgery. True or not, that's not up to me. But answers were not forthcoming.

All-in-all, that becamse THE THREADNAUGHT!!!!!! that caused everything. To this day, I have yet to see a thread on a forums (gaming or otherwise) take off with such speed and length in such a short amount of time.

Communication

This was, and still is, the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back. We could take being told "put up or shut up". We could take CCP employees posing as "players" on alts to prop themselves up and make it look like people didn't take us seriously.

We could take the lag in Jita and Amarr (f*ck you Spaceship Barbie and your scamming! <3333).

We could not take the stupidity of CCP's mouthpieces. From the blog by CCP Zulu in response to our anger:

"People have been shocked by the price range in the NeX store, but you should remember that we are talking about clothes. Look at the clothes you are currently wearing in real life. Do you have any specific brands? Did you choose it because it was better quality than a no-name brand? Assume for a short while that you are wearing a pair of $1,000 jeans from some exclusive Japanese boutique shop. Why would you want to wear a pair of $1,000 jeans when you can get perfectly similar jeans for under $50? What do other people think about you when they see you wearing them? For some you will look like the sad culmination of vainness while others will admire you and think you are the coolest thing since sliced bread. Whichever it is, it is clear that by wearing clothes you are expressing yourself and that the price is one of the many dimensions that clothes possess to do that in addition to style and fit. You don't need to buy expensive clothes. In fact you don't need to buy any clothes. Whatever you choose to do reflects what you are and what you want others to think you are."

Who....who buys a pair of jeans for $1,000? More importantly, where can you find a pair of jeans for $1,000? No one took it seriously. No one believed it. No one believed someone could be so out of touch with the customers/playerbase that they would use such an outlandish metaphor to describe what was going on.

Communication has, and will be, the problem. We will always have problems communicating our thoughts with developers. The Council of Stellar Management can only do so much. We do not have one thread to list out grievances. We do not have only one thing we want fixed. This game needs a lot of love, and that love started to show after Monoclegate. But the CSM is also incapable of providing for everyone, and so you will never please everyone.

welcome to 4 months ago. why regurgitate what's been said in the equivalent of a ben&jerry's ice cream flavour buffet before?

maybe you could add how sitting in the back of the bus is wrong, and whether china really needs a wall on the mongolian border.

Speak for yourself, I don't care if people want to buy virtual clothes for real money, btw my clothes are from the free AUR

So, what happens now?

We watch. And we wait. Hilmar has released a blog stating he "understands" our frustrations, and given the responses he sees our point of view. He claims the game is stronger than ever, pointing to a "higher subscription count" than this time last year. At the same time, he tells us resources are being "redeployed", and World of Darkness is being placed on the backburner in favor or getting DUST 541 out the door and onto the Playstation, and more resources for fixxing what's wrong in EVE Online.

However, days later Hilmar releases a statement, saying CCP is terminating 20% of it's employees. Among them? CCP Pann and CCP Fallout, leaders of the community team.

"First, EVE Online is in good health. Our subscriber numbers are higher today than they were a year ago. Unlike many other MMO’s on the market, we have continued to grow year-on-year since launch in 2003. However, over the past two months, our subscribers have gone down from their peak this summer. We attribute this to our own mistakes and poor communications with our players. We are correcting that now.

Second, World of Darkness lives on. Its concepts are revolutionary. CCP continues to believe that it will alter the landscape of the MMO as significantly as EVE has done but we need more time to continue to develop them before dedicating the substantial resources required to bring this experience to market."

You may be reading that and saying, "A healthy game that was better off than it was a year ago, but you fired over 100 people?" One must understand, CCP was getting close to the deadline on paying back their loan, and so this could have been inevitable. At the same time, though, the game has always been a niche game, and the sole source of income for the company. It is because of this game they have development funds for DUST and WoD. Forgetting about us for those leads to no more money, which means those games never deploy!

At the same time, though, Hilmar is shifting blame. The entirety of the letter tries to shift the blame from him to the players.

In addition to that, CCP Hilmar once again chose the way of the coward. He never appeared during Monoclegate, and he only started talking again with that recent blog posting. Once again, he ignores the players, giving an interview with a news site. My own response can be found in the thread talking about he layoffs, stickied at the top. My responses are on page 32, numbers 623 and 624.

In all, our anger is not at the deployment of Incarna. We accepted long ago we would be the testground for WoD's graphics engine. Our anger is at CCP's management, and in particular it's CEO, Hilmar. We have been ignored and told to leave if we don't like it, then begged back when they realized we would actually do it. We were lied to consistently, and the people who offended us hid. We were made to look like the bad guys, when we want this game to succeed.

But in order for success to happen, egos need to be broken, and the problems need to go away. Sadly, the largest problem does not seem to think he is that problem, and ignores us and common sense so his own ego can survive.

EDIT: I apologize, as it appears this thing is not letting you post websites. :(

Take out any %25 type things from the URL, and replace it with that should be there. Thats what breaks links ;)

Enjoying the read, wish you had reserved the posts so you could have avoided the spam between segments.

It's after 0400. I'm not redoing everything. :P As for reserving, it was about 0230 when I started. Didn't think that far ahead!

didn't read cuz it too long....
however monaclegate shown that Eve players are just voice children in most. And this is really sad.

I don't actually know of anyone who was pissed about the prices. Most people were amused by the prices, and then insulted by the justifications CCP put up as to why they were so expensive.

The anger of it being a MT storefront is the fact that Fearless implied that it WOULD be a MT storefront, not at anything it sells now. Hell, I even spent some cash on a couple things for my avatar myself. Why not? Some of its pretty cool, and if you get the setup you want, you can update your portrait with them and then sell the items on the market.

No.

Monoclegate showed that Eve Players are considerably more than even CCP executives gave us credit for. The people that pay subscriptions for this game are NOT the kind of credulous patsy marks that other games companies are able to target and milk with cynical MT schemes without consequence. Eve has always been a game of consequence and it appears the greater game of ccp development priority and corporate management has now joined this principle in the metagame.

Eve players are not just vocal children.
If they were children then they would have been suckered by NeX/Incarna, monocles and $1000 jeans (mainly because it would be their parent's credit cards they were begging the use of)

Eve players are something unique in the games industry - they are smart, passionate, active and now radicalised in the sphere of game development revolutions. Years ago when I served as the first chair of the CSM I listened to Hilmar describing the player representatives as "chieftains of the internet" coming to Iceland to argue for the way our tribes wanted to see this game develop.

Well, now the tribes have united and faced down a deeply unpopular regime (MT/NeX/GreedCarna) and won a clash of will and ideology. Hilmar challenged us to act rather than simply talk and we acted in a way he could not ignore. The protesters of monoclegate made history in the games industry and may well have saved an MMO from its own internal corruption and business misadventure.

This is not the achievement of mere children.

And frankly "March Rabbit" you should count yourself priviledged to play a game with a user base as visionary and bold and impassioned as the Eve community.

I know I do.