Player Features and Ideas Discussion

How many of you, given the chance, would vote in a poll from CCP about whether funds should be dedicated to "Walking in Stations" versus "DUST/EVE Link"? Assume that the outcome of the poll would have any/some/significant influence on CCP's decision making.

How many of you would make a choice between "engine trails" versus "hybrid rebalance" (I know it's a done deal, but bear with me)?

What if CCP released "token shirts" through the NeX?

As an example, they're coming up to a go/no-go decision about Feature A vs Feature B. So they introduce two new shirts into the NeX: an orange shirt with a big white "A" emblazoned over it, or a green shirt with a big white "B" emblazoned over it. You "vote" for your choice by buying the shirt and setting your character's profile to include Shirt A or Shirt B. Or for the choice of which tier 3 battlecruiser to give an exposé on next, they could release four new shirts: each of them grey with the empire logos on them. Same deal: recustomise your character to indicate which choice you are opting for. CCP could then get a feel of customer sentiment by checking how many characters are wearing a particular shirt on polling day!

Even better players could use these "token shirts" as trolling material in-game (in the real world, we'd call it an "ice breaker" or "conversation starter"). Perhaps you might end up declaring war on orange shirts, or going out of your way to suicide gank all red-shirts (with sincere apologies to those caught up in the Thai unrest recently).

This could also work as a way to reward CCP for simply communicating to us. In order to release the shirts, they'd have to tell us, "Hey guys, we're looking at these two options for future development: go or no go? Here are some shirts to help you decide." The reward to CCP would be the fact that they get more RL funds from giving us the shirts to buy.

Is this a totally stupid braindead idea that will unfairly bias CCP's decision making to the will of the players with the most ISK/money/alts?

Is there any merit in the idea at all, or am I just a lunatic without a clue? If there is some merit, what would be your cut-off price? If there were four such decisions posted per year, would you be able to afford to participate in the shirt-wearing frenzy for $1/shirt? $10/shirt?

Remember, this is not about democracy, this is about displaying a general disposition of customer sentiment. I would expect that the portion of the population that will participate in buying these shirts would either be RL-rich or ISK-rich, and not necessarily indicative of the sentiment of the whole customer-base. But at least it would be a talking point, an opportunity to get a souvenir item ("I was there!"), and a means of egging people into fights ("Gallente fanboys must die! We wanted the Caldari T3 battlecruiser! RAAARGH!").

Of course, the fights bit might me more meaningful if NeX items were destructible. *sigh*

So you'd never gank someone for spending RL money on a NeX store item? You'd never blow up someone's ship just because you enjoy the satisfaction of kicking someone's sand castle down? If you saw a kestrel full of PLEX leaving Jita 4-4, you would bid them god speed and wish them well?

Possibly. What I was describing was a "pay to express sentiment" concept so that CCP could have some means of (a) communicating vague future plans and being rewarded for it, and (b) players to express their sentiment ("vote" is probably a bad word in this context), and (c) CCP to get some coarse measure of player sentiment.

i.e.: "Hey boss, here's a graph showing the number of orange shirts currently worn, the number of red shirts currently worn, and the cumulative total of the number of orange shirts killed by red shirts, and the number of red shirts killed by orange shirts."

"Wow... I guess people really want us to focus on improving faction warfare rather than adding new ships to the NeX?"

So rather than exploding all over the forums at our community managers, we could explode all over the game at each other!

Thus "trolling shirts"

What's wrong with just doing a forum poll?

I mean if this forum has taught us anything, it's that Eve Online players have absolutely no problem sharing their opinions for free. They can't give them away fast enough.

Considering the amazing monocle rage, I've rather come around to the idea, provided, as I said before, its not used for anything game critical.

Basing your research on the number of people wearing an obnoxious t-shirt just gives you the opinions of people inclined to wear obnoxious t-shirts in an internet spaceship game (and I guess pay real money for said t-shirts). Not exactly a representative poll.

Most the time EVE players will just take to the forums and cry for days or go to Jita and shoot a monument (... yeah, shooting a monument) to make CCP do what they want. They would do that in a microsecond before ever buying a shirt with a letter on it.

If only they made a shirt that said "T.I." for your toon to wear. Because this is a terrible idea, and you should be on display for it.