EVE General Discussion

Mob mentality and hysterical panic eh?
So I'm guessing you are one of those people who believe the jita-riots and unsubscription movement was wrong to act so decisively to reverse the direction Eve was being taken in by various "industry experts".

That "hysterical panic" was an expression of a deep unease over the direction of the game that let ultimately to CCP needing to lay off 20% of its workforce and refocus all efforts on core gameplay. Now you can say the players were wrong to feel this way but it doesn't change the way they felt and whats that saying ... ah yes, "the customer IS always right."

You (through this mouthpiece) have consistently argued for the development of NeX/MT and against any protection of the player-led economic sandbox that kept this game unique and successful through its long lifetime. Perhaps you aren't CCP Zinfandel - maybe you are just one of his mates - or some kind of shill operated to push his agenda. All those things would be more creditable (somehow) than the conclusion you actually believed the things you have said on the argument.

Exactly!



No, my stance is simply that the Noble Exchange should become an NPC corporation with its own LP store. All LP stores should allow Aurum as a parallel to LP (e.g.: allow 1:1 purchase of LP for Aurum). All items should be manufactured by players based on blueprints supplied by NPCs.

The NeX would then simply be the supply of flair items that don't make more sense being supplied by an existing NPC corporation. Thus schematics for player-corporation uniforms would come from NeX LP stores, while schematics for Angel Cartel uniforms would come from Angel Cartel LP tires.

The actual clothes would be manufactured on planets using PI materials such as polytextiles.

Then it just boils down to whether you'd part with 600k Aurum and a Raven to get a CNR

Which is ironic because the method of content provision through a NeX monopoly does impact gameplay by denying player involvement in those aspects of the economy.



And thats different from how Eve currently works ... how? I can express my wealth by flying around in rare battleships or jump portalling my allies around via an Erebus class titan. I don't need an infinite supply of poorly-designed "fashion" accessaries to achieve that. Only way you could make NeX the preserve of the truly rich would be to limit the numbers of items it can supply to the game and have an escalating cost to simulate rarety. A monocle cannot be rare or impressive because an infinite number of them can enter the gameworld. Produce 1 super monocle that will enter the game each month to the (idiot) who puts the most plex into a blind auction) and you might be talking.



There are those who consider that mining is a degrading activity for a capsuleer. They are welcome to their views as you are to yours - but in neither case should those opinions limit or restrict the provision of meaninful content to those who disagree with you.



Again we will agree to disagree on whether the simplification(cheapening) of gameplay systems is a good thing. The reality is that if ship skins were produced from LP stores and had players involved somewhere in the provision and manufacturing you'd have competitive downward pressure on prices that ultimately would be good for the consumer of these things. If they come from NEX store then prices are fixed and you pay whatever Zinfandel or his ilk want to charge you.



I would rather the artists misemployed in NeX find ways to make us feel better about genuinely flashy things in Eve. I'm currently wearing a HALO implant set with Jade. Thats 3-4billion worth of rare pirate implants that have the effect of reducing the signature of any ship I fly significantly. How should that be represented on my avatar? Shimmering nano-beads, unworldly expressions, dangerous looking holo shadows at the corner of her eyes? These implants truly represent the expression of wealth and power in Eve online. Why should they be hidden away while pointless meaningless chaff like the monocle display prominently on the character display.

My wealth does something in the gameworld and can be taken away from me if other players take appropriate action. Surely that makes it infinitely more impressive than some kind of mall-bought perma sticker that everyone in eve can attain with a press of a button and will never risk losing under any circumstance whatsoever?

Tell me how that makes sense?

The problem with MTs in a game isn't what the players want...players will wind up wanting to buy pretty much everything there is that now has to be earned. (To think otherwise is buffoonery.) The problem is with the owners of the store. Once they see those transactions coming in on those credit cards...5 bucks here, ten bucks there...their imaginations run wild and they convert the entire game into one giant MT Store advert.

Yeah, it starts with just adding a button on the UI, then before you know it the entire game is festooned with MT offers, and reminders and then the "Sale" mentality becomes engaged. Sales EVENTS, STAFF picks...on and on and on. The final blow happens when those who were once providing a game are now using a game as a vehicle to provide merchandise.

Aesthetics is the first thing to go out the window when money is to be made hand over fist. All the nice game design is easily edited for "this small thing" then "that small thing", and pretty soon the game has all the aesthetic value of junk mail. NEW players, who've never seen the game before think "It's always been this way." People with a shred of intelligence and who can only take so much nausea eventually leave, replaced by "players" who by now are just people with credit cards.

So...buy it, or earn it by game play? If you know anything about addictive behavior, you'd choose the latter. Those with little self-esteem invariably choose the former.

What it looks like is, every corner of the universe is in danger of becoming part of one huge billboard.

I've seen the future, and it's murder. BUY! BUY! BUY! (20% off with your purchase code!)

I was watching the forums quite heavily at the time and the volume of traffic they day after the results of the emergency CSM summit were announced showed a remarkable decrease in activity. New post stayed on the front page for hours at a time as apposed to a day earlier when a new post was lucky to last on the front page for 5 minutes.

I do not mean to imply that the emergency summit fixed everything, there was indeed a lot of resentment and anger still in the community while it waited to see what CCP would do next.

It would be a mistake to try and lump all of the rage on to one single issue as there was a number of problems that came to a head. There were just as many forum threads arguing about what the real problem was as there were talking about any specific problem.

There were a lot of things that people were unhappy about, but the overarching theme was definetly that CCP was working on features they didn't want at the expense of features that they did. Try to imagine if the crucible expansion and the incarna expansion had been one and the same. What if CCP had released an expansion that had all of the FiS content of crucible along with the new stuff form incarna. Would the rage have been anywhere near as apocalyptic?

I am more than willing to admit that having "impressive space fassion" come from a player driven economy would be prefferable in principle to the nex store. But that was not the decision that was made, nor was it promised. CCP chose to take advantage of the oppertunity to do what every other subscription based MMO is doing, add an optional cash shop for vanity items. Did they do it well? hell no, I don' think they could of screwed up the rollout more if they'd tried.

But the existance of the NEX store does not preclude a player driven fashion market in the future. As long as items in the NeX store do not compete with items from the player economy then they have no effect on ech other. That's the unique thing about fashion and vanity items, even though 2 items can be near identical, they can appeal to vastly different markets. Though I loath to reference Wow, they have a very functional system where you can get mounts in game and you can buy mounts with cash if you want. There is no competition between the in game mounts and the cash mounts as they are just personal preference.

The eve economy is fragmented all over the place. Some items can be manufactured, some items must be baught with LP, some items only come from loot. The great equaliser is that they can all be traded on the market for ISK. Items aquired with Aurum can also be traded on the market with ISK. As it stands at the moment, NEX store items are just PLEX that you can wear. With enough ISK there is nothing in the game that you cannot buy.

I choose to think of the NEX store as a donation bin. I love Eve, I have some spare cash, why not donate some of that to the company that makes it and in return they give me a cool t-shirt. This in no way takes away anything from the rest of the game. It could be argued that it fails to add as much as it could, but that could be said about a lot of CCP's work over the past few years.

I think the summit secured people's position that we had to watch what CCP did not what they said. If it achieved anything it was in buying CCP long enough to make the change of direction that led to Crucible and the total refocusing of their company. But I don't think the summit in and of itself solved anything much. Those issues were not really resolved until Hilmar's mea culpa and the winter patch with returned focus on Eve.



I don't think so. I think the general consensus was that Eve had been abandoned for a long time and NeX/Carna represented a direction we didn't want to go down. That of no content aside from Microtransaction sales. It didn't help that CQ were terrible, that incarna release took away functionality from the client for the sole reason of presenting a display cabinet for Aurum bought NeX clothes. This was all pretty clear.



I'm not sure its possible to imagine this really since it took the near death experience of the company and the death knell of WOD to associated reduncies to get priorities back on Eve gameplay. NeXCarna was a product of "industry experts" riding roughshod over the Eve subscriber base. I do not think the world of NeXcarna thinking can coexist with the Eve centric planning of Crucible and new expansions.



Well it clearly wasn't the decision made (which was the wrong decision thus shown by the unsubscription reaction and the financial crisis it plunged the company into) - but its wrong to say it wasn't promised (or at least implied). The selling point of Incarna had long been that players would setup storefronts and run businesses from stations and that clothing and station based content would be some of the things players could do there through gameplay. CCP specifically promised to enlarge the selection of clothing in the character designer "iteration" when it was released and while you could claim that by NeX they met this - you'll admit that promising something by iteration comes up short when it turns out you need to pay extra for it!



Yes CCP did choose to take advantage of their player base and copy the decline of other subscription based MMOs - but they forgot that the reason they are still in business is that people LIKE the originality and uniqueness of the Eve gameworld and they don't (in the main) want WOW style sparkle ponies and MT hats. Their rollout was exploitative and insulting and for this I blame the "industry experts" they hired to advise them who directly created the climate leading to the NeX rollout and rode roughshod over player feedback and advise clearly telling them not to do this.

Unlike you I believe the existence of the NeX store does preclude player driven fashion market because its competing for art assets against traditional gameplay and promising to deliver them in a cheaper fashion. Its dumbing down of the economy in Eve to the lowest common denominator. WOW again is obviously a terrible comparison to make because its an entirely different kind of player base. There is a reason that most WOW competitors fail horribly and Eve has not - and thats that Eve is NOT a WOW competitor. The kind of player who retains a subscription in Eve does so because Eve is different to WOW not because its becoming more like it. Different polls of the MMO world.

The Eve economy really isn't fragmented as you argue because ultimately it all ends up on the player market put there by players selling to players for prices they think they can sell at. Supply and demand has a factor, rarety, perceived function, supply difficulties, hell, even the wars in nullsec and anti miner crusades impact this stuff. Its all interconnected. NeX is not. Its a eternal source of "press button get stuff content" that has nothing to do with gameplay.

NeX store items are PLEX you can wear that cannot be destroyed. Sure there is nothing you can't buy with enough isk - with 85b isk I can buy another titan. But if I mess up my cynos and fall into a trap you can bet that thing can be destroyed. Stupid NeX monocles glued onto somebodies face cannot. And the production and sale and logistics behind that titan provides gameplay for other players. NeX has nothing behind it. Its just press button get stuff.

If you want to see NeX as a donation bin then have it selling out of game items.

I'd support the NeX store selling rl Quafe teashirts, Mugs, mouse-mats, EON subscriptions, etc etc. Let players support CCP through the NeX by spending aurum on things that cannot impact in-space economy because they don't interact with the game in space.

But keep the core gameplay sacred to everyone who pays a subscription and don't deny content to anyone behind MT paywalls. Eve is still alive because it is unique in the landscape of copycat MMOs that tried (and mostly died) to emulate WOW.

I don't want any kind of microtransactions in Eve, and if I could, I would remove PLEX from the game as well.
PLEX is the I win button of Eve, because people that are willing to spend metric **** tons of RL money on Eve PLEX get a million advantages over regular, sane people, who just pay the regular subscription.
A regular player has to work for his ISK, and losses mean something to him, a player that buys ISK with PLEX from real money can afford everything in the game with no effort at all, and they don't have to waste days recovering their losses.
Not to mention that Eve seems to be specifically engineered for people that have 50 alts, and when you have 50 alts, you get a HUGE advantage over every other average player in the game, because you basically have your private fleet.

If they want to charge us RL money for random crap, fine... but make the game F2P.

Microtransactions have NO place in a P2P game, except if they are cosmetic, and even that I do not agree with.

They completely LIED about everything they said Incarna would be, they said that everything in incarna would be made by players from blueprints, and sold on the in game market for isk, just like everything else, but no, instead they made NEX.

Eve stopped being a level playing field when the introduced PLEX.

Oh, and to the people that say stuff like *I will quit Eve when you will be able to buy in game advantages with real money!*, well, you should have quit when the PLEX system was launched, because PLEX is basically RL money > ISK > Ships, mods and power.

I have yet to see another P2P MMO where the developers basically encourage you to buy virtual money from them, and where a player has to have 50 alts to get anywhere by himself. I've seen NO other P2P MMO where a single character can't do everything by himself, and be competitive, without having to resort to a million alt acounts.

Sure, they did that in some P2P games, but those were made by Crytic, and they were epic fails and became F2P, go figure.

/endrant.

Could you list sources for these CCP and CSM quotes as I haven't seen much support for MT in the forums or the CSM and I seem to recall that CCP has stated they aren't going to a full MT model in the recent past.

1. Yes (I'm not a Plex fan by any means but its here and not going to go away).

2. Gameplay, always.

3. Player economy every time, create the tools for a new player run profession.

4. Use ISK, it is the currency of EvE after all.

5. The Nex store was a mistake.

6. If the Nex store was expanded to provide items other than vanity products I'd shut down my ISK making activities, sell the characters involved and play until my ISK ran out and then move onto some other game.

Just when I think all hope is lost I read a few Jade Constantine posts and the world seems a little brighter. It's comforting to know there is still at least one other soul out there (who hasn't completely given up and left) who gets it. (Doesn't hurt that he hides his contempt for you morons a lot better than I do. Are you a special education teacher by any chance, Jade?)

CCP: Listen to this man. Your livelihoods depend on it.

If you look at all the games that have implemented heavy microtransactions, they're almost all dying/dead. They all move off to F2P within a year or two, then go belly up. EQ2 is the latest addition to this. They pushed the microtransaction thing hard, the lines started to get blurred between cosmetic and gameplay affecting items...they then went F2P, now it's pretty much dying off. They've had to merge servers for like the 4th or 5th time...you can no longer get support what so ever unless you pay a subscription and they are no longer releasing "real" content....just remodeled zones, and a player "dungeon creator" which is supposed to make up for not developing any more real content.