EVE General Discussion

Already said CCP arn't being as bad in this matter. The rage you have seen from the playerbase here is nothing compared to the rage and hate on the SWG forums. SOE went on a banning frenzy and booted anyone who dissagreed with them be they ranting or making valid points. I doubt CCP has banned the same amount of players in the past 8 years then in the first few weeks of the NGE.

Its hard to express to people who wern't there to see it.

Quite honestly CCP are being very open and chatty on these new forums.

Myxx don't argue with Baltec1.
That person is of very questionable morality considering his posts been reported and deleted for very good reasons.

Yes Baltec1 I remember your comment about Nazi camps comment you posted. It was removed along with few other comments very fast. But i saw what you posted there. I must say your bans are well deserved.

Myxx he's a troll and not the best around. Pointless to discuss anything with people like him.

but... but... but... playing with my prey before utterly crushing them is fun!

... oops...



Re-read the thread and see its about how its being handled...

Wut?

Did we both just get trolled?

Yea I was one of the mad ones

We won after some rather good trollposts. They have even allowed us to get away with a pony thread on the new forums after they banned pony pic threadnoughts. The lack of images wont stop us from trying

Correct. This seems to be what people are missing the point on. Screw the game mechanics or how similar or different the games are. It's the attitude that the company is having towards those who pay their salary that's the issue.

CCP created the CSM in order to be above that. That way, they could filter stuff out of the "vocal minority" and get an actual true representation of what the player base wants, and have those points presented to them by a council elected by the players. What do they do? They tell the CSM all the nice things they want to hear at summits, give them their plans, etc and send them home happy. Then, they basically ignore everything that happened during CSM summits and go do things whatever way they want, even things that they outright told the CSM they wouldn't do. That's purely contempt for their playerbase and customers.

And that's what SOE did (in a nutshell) to their SWG customers, only without a player panel. NGE was a big reason SWG failed, but a lot of that was basically because of the hilier-than-thou attitude that management had with the player base thinking they knew better. Turns out they were wrong, and SWG went down the tubes because of it. I don't think anyone wants that to happen to Eve, but if CCP continues down its current path, Eve will die. If Eve dies, Dust dies with it, and WoD dies as well.

Correct they are exactly the same.

Sony has billions of dollars and 100 other ventures, so does CCP.

NGE is mandatory, so is NEX.

The Star Wars franchise has hundreds of millions of fanbois, so does CCP Soundwave and Zyrg.

I touch myself to SWG and I touch myself to the CCP dev calander.

I 'liked' OP on all 25 of my alts.

Any similarities boil down to and stop at confirmation bias and group think.

Beyond that there are too many differences between the handling and quite frankly as critical as I've been of CCP they've been nuch better than SOE was on NGE.

SOE always had a cultural problem of not listening to their player base, since they were the first to really make a successful MMO people like Smedley let their ego's get too bloated and lost sight of the importance of listening to the people paying your paycheck.

CCP is in a similar situation in that they were pretty much the only company to weather the collapse of the Icelandic economy as such their leaders have decided that their success was due to their brilliance rather than being lucky that they had an asset that wasn't tied to the world of finance.

Apparently confirmation bias is a cultural trait of the Icelandic male , It's a problem for everyone but appears to be particularly problematic when it comes to the culture of men in Iceland who are by nature and necessity gamblers and risk takers.

Confirmation bias can be generally described as believing a thing mainly because you find the conclusion emotionally satisfying and as such any evidence supporting that belief will be given more weight and viewed with less skepticism that it deserves while conversely under valuing or out right dismissing evidence that undermines the preferred outcome.

I think the problem is that much like SEO, CCP imagines this massive and lucrative potential player-base out that there that only require the courage to take a risk to tap it. They've seen for instance the success that other companies such as EA have had with the freemium model and their desire to tap into that potential market has caused them to ignore important distinctions between EA's situation and their own.

This over-inflated sense of competence created by their success with EVE has also convinced them that lightning can and indeed will strike not twice but thrice so they've bitten off the additional challenge of two additional triple A titles in the form of WOD and Dust, either concept is big and bold enough that most developers would consider major under takings, both together is quite honestly beyond the capabilities of all but a handful of top tier developers.

It further appears that the predictable result of such ambition has materialized in the form of a cash shortfall, Since currently EVE is the only source of cash CCP has access to (banks ain't lending to no one despite having mountains of cash at their disposal) the attention has shifted back to see how much more can be milked out of it.

Finally to exacerbate all the other problems we have the issue of Plex, While Plex was nothing short of a stroke of brilliance, in that it allowed CCP to keep both their time rich cash poor players and cash rich time poor players subscribed and active and at the same time undermined the RMT market it has had the unfortunate side affect of becoming an asset that market players have chosen to hoard. This has resulted in a substantial amount of paid time sitting out there on the market as a liability on the CCP books. And while it was indeed nice to have that front end injection of cash it's now a problem in that it's undercutting new injections of cash that CCP needs to keep it's other projects afloat.

So someone gets this brilliant idea, "why don't we do a cash shop that uses Plex, this will both remove excess plex from the player market while simultaneously driving demand for Plex beyond what is needed to support existing subscriptions"

From a financial perspective it really is brilliant it allows them to make a liability disappear at essentially no cost to the company and increases cash-flow as the Plex that vanish are replaced by people who still want isk or now want items from the Cash shop, and it would have worked too if it weren't for those meddling kids... err I mean those leaked internal documents.

Honestly if they'd stuck with cosmetic enhancements only and had implemented a rational pricing structure I think the grumbling would have been minimal, unfortunately for CCP the Fearless document leaked indicating that while pay for ingame advantage wasn't released with Incarna they were somewhere beyond just thinking about it.

This is when the nature of their player-base worked against them. EVE is a game that tends to attract the more cerebral player not necessarily smarter than WOW players but much more focused. It's a game that by it's nature rewards those who have patience and are willing to research. We're also a notoriously un-trusting bunch as anyone who plays EVE for any significant length of time learns to view all carrots as potentially poisoned. It's one of the consequences of a "cold harsh universe"

As such we put 2 and 2 together, We saw the sloppy half arsed deployment of the CQ we understood that the only value the CQ provides in it's current state is a showroom for items from the cash shop, we watched the EA P2W presentation we read the Fearless document and said "Oh, no you didn't"

CCP then completely mismanaged their PR and another leaked document, Hilmar's "Watch what they do not what they say" email came out and all hell broke lose.

The question now is will CCP be able to see past their own confirmation bias? Will the massive failure of the Incarna roll out break through the yes men and group think at the top to make Hilmar and the other decision makers re-evaluate their plans and shift resources back to this cash cow.

That said the only real similarity shared between the NGE and EVE ends there CCP did eventually address our concerns whether they are being sincere is yet to be determined but it's still a different reaction.

8 years for one dingy motel room...

Bravo. Give this man a cookie. He's wrapped it up quite nicely and realistically. That's exactly what's happening. He just expressed it more eloquently than I could.




The CSM is a "feelgood' PR tool to make players think they actually have a voice. Nothing more. However, I believe that this is backfiring on them now that Mittens is the chair. His recent actions to bring to light CCPs incompetence is sheer brilliance IMO. He's a smart guy, a lawyer (if I remember correctly), and it's not easy to fool him. If anyone can do it, it's him. Regardless how I or anyone else may feel about Goons or Mittens in game, he truly does have the best intentions of Eve and its community at heart.

I see this going one of 2 ways. Either CCP will pay attention now that they're getting heavy negative press along with a shrinking subscription base and will do what's best for Eve, or they'll permanently dissolve the CSM with the "It's more hassle than it's worth" attitude and continue down the same path which will leave Eve to suffer the same fate as SWG.