EVE New Citizens Q&A

Was an experiment, most people hated it so it's been put on hold. Atm it's purely cosmetic.

Once upon a time, there was a plan for this feature of EVE Online called "Incarna". The idea was that you would walk around stations, and even lease your own little bit of floor space to do stuff in. That stuff might have been a dimly lit bar with lots of private spaces for people to trade contraband, perhaps with a little eye-candy in the form of exotic dancers. Maybe that stuff you did in your little establishment might have been a rare goods store or spice emporium.

From around 2008, we were teased with vast space station interiors, trading "off the grid", and the basic gritty reality that without the spaceships wrapped around us, Capsuleers are basically just humans after all. Human, and mortal.

Apparently, somewhere between 2009 and 2011 the company management headed off in a bizarre direction, believing that with the Incarna feature there would also be high fashion, and the whole thing would be so awesome that, like Jesus, it would perform miracles and bring the dead to life (or in the case of EVE Online, bring it from a few hundred thousand subscribers to millions). We would have an amazing range of clothing to choose from, we be able to do stuff together in stations. The hype started: the promises that with Incarna we'd have a whole new world of gameplay to explore, and everything would be AWESOME.

And then in 2012 we got Incarna. Everyone was required to resculpt their characters. Then, GPU heatsinks glowing red hot, we plunged into the amazing new world of Incarna …

… to find that we were all stuck in a Minmatar captain's quarters. The rest would arrive soon, we were promised. Just some problems with sorting out the graphical assets.

At the same time, the Noble Exchange was released. This was EVE Online's "virtual item store" selling highly desirable items to the capsuleer community. Of course some people were a little upset when the luxury goods being sold were being sold at luxury prices: the crown jewel of the store being a very ugly monocle that sold for the ingame currency equivalent of about $70 in real money. The great unwashed masses got angry! "Where are the micro transactions?" they asked, even though CCP had always pushed the Noble Exchange as a luxury items store. "Why is the cheapest thing in this market a pair of boots at 1100 Aurum?"

Amidst the confusion and anger over the Noble Exchange, the lack of any place to explore outside the Minmatar captain's shoebox, and the lack of any real benefit to the "flying in space" portion of the game, someone publicised the "Greed is Good" edition of CCP's internal newsletter, "Fearless". In this newsletter, it appeared that CCP was planning to introduce microtransactions for everything: pay a dollar, get a hold full of ammunition. Pay another dollar, get more saved fittings. Buy "gold ammo" from the Noble Exchange that was more powerful than anything else in the game.

As you might understand, the community exploded in a great riot of untamed anger! People gathered in Jita and shot the statue! People unsubscribed en masse! There were threadnaughts in the forums! The world of EVE Online was literally falling apart!

In the fallout from the expansion, 20% of the staff were retrenched.

And so it is, that even to this day if you mention the word "Incarna" around CCP staff, you can see them cringe a little as they remember the emotional scars of the past. Walking in stations and Incarna are almost taboo: one does not mention these things lightly around veterans of the Summer of Rage.

And this, young Marmaduke, is why we cannot have nice things.

Hilarious, and explanatory! :D

That the developement team apparently fell WAY behind the shedule and only a single one Captains Quarter was done and ready when Incarna was released - the dreary, rust-colored, depressive Minmatar one, giving the looks and feels of a third world prison cell, didn´t help either.
Subscribers walked up and down their CQ once, which took about a minute - and that only because you don´t really walk but crawl - then looked at each other, shrugged their collective shoulders and went back to the Hangar view to spin their ships. Only to discover that THERE WAS NO LONGER A HANGAR, much less a ship to spin. Yes, in their wisdom, CCP had decided to do away with the players beloved hangar, basically the games´ heart.
BUT there was The Door. It could not be opened.

It was like CCP giving its playerbase their finger.

Mara Rinn quite nicely sums up all the other things that went wrong with that expansion so check that post as well.
Threadnoughts sprang up, Ponies and pictures of (closed) doors were posted, posts were deleted, people were banned. Devs complained that they "can´t fix issues because they had to moderate the forums" (it was the time before ISDs) which caused even more pictures of Ponies and closed doors (or open doors with Hilmars standing inside) being posted....

Considering that the Eve playerbase is exceptionally fanatical, it was really no wonder that what was called the "Summer of Rage" happened.

Just be patient. Eventually we'll be able to do naughty things in the quarters if you subscribe long enough to see.

Don't do that! You turn off ship spinning too! D:

I waited for Walking in station/Ambulation/Incarna for years and i was thrilled when it was finally "ready"...I wont lie, was a huge let down, but i remain hopeful that maybe one day they will add more to it and it will be closer to what they imagined when they first started to work on the project

I suppose the CQ could be called an RP thing...as my laptop emulates a Cessna on takeoff roll every time I try to use it.