Out of Pod Experience

Comet ISON (C/2012 S1) is scheduled to potentially become a comet so bright it's visible in the daytime and at night it could dominate the sky and outshine the moon in November of 2013 and January of 2014. Can you imagine if CCP launched comet mining around that time? Every evening everyone in the world looking up would be seeing an advertisement for EvE online. What do you think?

Me or Discovery?

not sure where I lost you... not real life comet mining i meant comet mining as an in-game feature marketed along side the RL event.

isn't there already ice mining?

because, you know, thats what comets are.

however, comets are pretty and i, as a player attracted to the aesthetically pleasing (gameplay be damned), support the mining of them in game.

get on this ccp.

comet mining was talked about a few years back ..... but like with most things with CCP they say one thing ...then do another unfortunatly .

Well he's got me curious now to be honest. Since he seems to be in to marketing, I'm wondering if he's worked out the margins yet to see if the number of people who see a comet not being mined but would like to mine a comet in a game, exclusively over other current mining careers, would benefit the time required to design an event that would allow a player to track and mine a single comet.

Well, faeces! If that's the reasoning, CCP should be turning our ships into ponies! Those are pretty, and have tails, and you can ride them!

Will the great northern star return to New Eden?

The hardest thing about marketing in my view is also the most streight-forward. The initial hook in most cases is worth about 95%+ of your effort/expense. Comet ISON could be a dud. It could be destroyed by the sun so badly that all we see is a faint haze in january. Right now, things are looking really good for a low magnitude object though, below a -13 (lower is brighter and a -13 is crazy). If this happens, I guarantee you there will be all kinds of BS iWhatever and Android games, facebook games, etc that take advantage of it, and they will sell like crazy. If you want to hook someone who has never played before, I don't think there will be a RL event short of aliens doing a flyby over new york that will garner more attention. You pput a video out showing people mining a comet in eve, and it will be featured in every article (and there will be MANY) talking about this huge object blazing across a third or better of the night sky every night when people are getting off of work for months. People will want to read about this. It'll be a global event. CCP could get an unprecedented amount of free press right there. Think of all the trials that would start up! Just getting a shout out on the countless news articles that pop up about it will pay for the development of such a feature 100 fold.

Demographics: People reading about Comet ISON, assuming it's as big as it's theorized to be, will be:

1) Legion. Everyone on earth who sees the night sky for months will probably want to know what they are looking at, and will at some point probably read an article or content piece about it.

2) Unfiltered. Instead of targeting one tight demo, which makes sense if you want to get the most for each advertising dollar, CCP will be in front of the eyes of EVERYONE reading about the comet. Why does this make sense? Because it's not about marketing efficiency if you aren't paying for the ad space. If ad space is free, you want to be in front of every set of eyeballs you can possibly get to focus on your message. In this case, the global population with internet access.

3) Shocked. Stories? You won't have any. The parents of your grandparents have NEVER seen a celestial event like what's predicted. They can't say s*** about it. Nobody can. ISON will probably be unprecedented in living experience on Earth. That makes for an audience open to a new experience. A new experience like eve.

Success breeds success. Conversations about the comet will abound, and perhaps in some fraction of those conversations eve will get a name drop. The only downside is that the comet is a bust (possible but unlikely) and eve gets a cool new feature that people wanted anyway. Moon mins, something new, who cares? Just add the feature and all this and more can be CCPs... and by extension, ours!

Edit: If ISON is what it ought to be, you will not need headlights at night to drive safely and you'll be able to read a book by comet light at midnight no problem. No joke. Don't take it from me though! Read about it!