EVE General Discussion

We have both a working text and voice chat already. Why do we need yet another one? I suppose my Avatar is supposed to appear to be speaking when I am "chatting"?

How would any of what you propose have an impact on the game or provide any consequences for player actions? Why should CCP divert any more of their limited resources to pure vanity items/features that do not contain or provide any playable content? I hear stagnation and SC as proposed reasons, but those are pretty weak fear-mongering arguments when EVE's subscriber numbers have been increasing since they changed focus, CCP is getting positive press coverage again, and SC is still years away if it ever gets released.

How much would you anticipate your ideas would cost to implement, and how many new subs do you anticipate CCP would acquire if we could only chat and congregate in another room outside of our CQ?

What excuses? The new jump animation replaced the old one, it is not a new option available in addition to the old one. The question was: Why do we need a additional way to "chat" when we already have 2? The answer you gave is basically: "because CCP does stuff". Also, CCP gave their reasons for replacing the task bar with an animation, something to do with "death to loading bars". Lame, but they gave a reason. What case can you make to divert resources to build another chat?

How does dumbing-down an existing career path equate to the issue at hand, or my post you quoted?

Who is "we"? I'm not you... and I've been playing this game for over 8 years...
Who decides what is "meaningful"? EVE is a (shocking revelation) MMORPG, not a MMO space ships only simulator...
Useless dudes? Crap? You demand? Ah... ok, I see... never mind then.

To offer another angle of gaming that is a part of, but not completely tied into, the space ship only aspect. CCP is attempting to make progress with Dust and Valkyrie as a different angle to the universe. So with avatar gaming, there are possibilities to be explored.

In an avatar form, you would not appear in local to those residing within a ship. And vice verse, those within a ship would not appear to those in avatar form.

A whole new range of skills ranging from assassination to hand-to-hand combat to personal defense to politics to sabotage, along with a whole new market of equipment and gear, could be a possibility.

Carelessly left your clone unguarded during a period of war? Destroyed.

Rose in power with an empire faction that they bring you into the fold and you control a few of their solar systems? Politics.

You lead a legion of Dust mercenaries while offering "off-grid" bonuses? Leadership.

Just some ideas off the top of my head.

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Again, did the star gate animation replace the task bar, or just mask it? From reading this thread, and a few others that ended a while back, it would seem the animation is on our computer and not ran from CCP's server farm per jump. So short of personally manipulating a file, changing this animation, much less having it not run if I wanted, should be an option. But CCP wants to be stubborn and claim whatever they want to claim as a reason. The same line of thinking for dumbing-down exploration - they can claim whatever reason they want. CCP avoiding any coding involving player owned stations? They can claim whatever reason they want. Any ideas, issues, problems, or wild thoughts about anything related to the game as a whole seem to have whatever reason they want to use at the moment to avoid it.

For a company that used to be daring and breaking new grounds into unknown forays, they have become very passive and only will go the safe route. With Sony as a partner, I would not be surprised CCP's new slogan becomes, "You're in our universe now."

A bit off-topic and hopefully not too rant raving.

There are many ways it could go, it opens up a whole new world and I think CCP does not want just a spaceship game, but rather a immersive space simulator, with your opinions they might as well delete avatars completely as it does not add any "meaningful" gameplay.

I am completely for WIS, it would add some interesting ways of communicating and options for the future

Do you know why companies bother selling vanity items? Because their bang per buck is freaking high, specially in a monopolistic environment where the only customer choice is buy/not buy.

Vanity items can be developed by a diminutive team -an artist, a coder, a QA member and a team head. 4 guys, 2 of them working partial time, are enough.

Now let's make some numbers, please. Say that only 1 in 100 subscriptions could be bothered to spend money in a vanity item. Those are 5,000 sells of anything "Team Trinkets and Mirrors" comes up. In a typical micro-transaciton fashion, that's 15 to 25,000 USD worth out of literally 12 days/man, in a company which may have a potential pool of about 130,000 days/man per year.

And be noted, I am UNDER-estimating potential customers (1%? More like 10% even in EVE), and OVER-estimating the average dev time consumed by vanity items (remapping a item is quite simpler than make it from scratch).

Vanity items are the holy grail of ancillary sells. They don't break anything, make the players happy and provide lots of money.

Don't let the goon trolls get on you. Mittens was clearly in favor of Incarna peviously to Incarna, and probably he would jump back aboard if CCP took the "meaningful content" road.

Except when they don't provide lots of money. Case in point: Incarna

The question was: How does this (and/or meeting room) attract NEW subscribers? Your proposal fleeces existing players, and that's not going to go over too well, unless we're talking ship paint jobs and putting corp logos on things neither of which involve avatars.

Except I believe there were hundreds of monocles sold in the first month alone (which, in RL money was worth about 80 dollars apiece), and someone has to buy clothes from NeX or I wouldn't be able to buy them off the market. So yeah, yes it does make money. Not sure if lots, but not nothing at all either.

When you balance the cost to build the cash shop, the products, and the avatars to wear the goods vs. the revenue generated to date, I would guess CCP did not recoup 1% of its expenditures. Otherwise, we'd probably be seeing regular additions and iteration to the shop and WIS if either was so lucrative and contributed anything statistically relevant to CCPs bottom line.