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Doing my part

P.S. Nice vid

good man dot forget this one

There's something about EvE that just breaks my ability to watch Youtube videos of it. Anybody else experience this? You try to sit there, watch the video, but reflexively, every once in a while you move your mouse cursor over and click+drag, because you want to ship spin and see a different angle on the beautiful ships. And of course, it's a video, all you do is pause it from clicking on it.

I'm sure anybody watching me do this, without context, must think I'm completely nuts. "He keeps clicking on the video, pausing it, uttering a curse under his breath, then resuming the video. Why does he do this?"

Not just with this video. Almost any video regarding EvE. I remember watching bomb run tutorial videos, and I kept doing it there too. And those videos showcasing Golems stomping people in nullsec? "Hmm, glare from the game's light source is ruining the view of the paintjob, just going to...*click*pause*....[bleep] I did it again...*click*unpause*...sigh...".


Getting back to the disucssion at hand, however, the video touches upon the psychology of this and I'd like to emphasize that. This entire thing feels patronizing. It feels manipulative. It feels like the company is pulling our strings rather than letting us be.

I'm sure if every individual sat here and thought about it, you could come up with a scenario from your past that had similar themes. There was something someone wanted from you. Or maybe there was something you were already going to do, but someone wanted more or wanted it sooner.

For a quick and easy example, you're a teenager living with your parents. Today you're going to borrow the car and take the family's laundry to the laundromat, do some of your own errands, and come home. Promptly at 7:00am, your mother is knocking on your bedroom door, pleading for you to go out and to the laundry right now. For no reason, either. It's not good enough that you're doing it on your own time, you have to do it on her time. After some bickering about being able to sleep in on a Saturday, you're already agitated and awake. But now she's patronizing you, saying she'll give you a Reese's Fast Break bar if you do it right now. She takes a fishing pole and dangles it in front of your face while you're trying to just get 15 more minutes of sleep, dangit.

You, as an agent of your life, now have less perceived control over your own actions. If you do it on her terms, you think to yourself about how your mother is still dictating what you do in your life. You resent surrendering that bit of your own agency, even if it is just one little bit. You worry about it becoming a trend. You worry about slipping down a slope where other people dictate bits of your life, and each bit diminishes you. If you don't do it, well, all the same errands happen, you just don't get the candy bar. And damn, those Reese's are good stuff. Or maybe the reward was using the car that night to take Jennifer Parker to the Lake.

In a game about free will, choices, and consequences, this is enforcing a lose-lose scenario upon the players. Either we surrender a bit of autonomy, the cornerstone of the game, to get a reward, or we miss out on a "bell" of a reward so tempting even Pavlov would be impressed.

We're not here to be your bit__s. But we feel like we are if we go along with it, and we feel like we're missing out on something significant when we don't. Lose-lose. Worse yet, we know you're purposefully manipulating us, making us feel patronized, and we resent you for it. Lose-lose-lose.

Let's reverse this and turn the tables on CCP. CCP, let's take any random idea off the current front page of "Player Features and Ideas". The author of that idea is going to take a literal fishing pole, attach a business card sprayed gold with "PLEX" written on it, and dangle it in front of the faces of developers and managers at your company at random intervals while you're trying to work. The promise is that if you implement their idea, they'll plex two additional accounts for a year, and leave them AFK cloaky in null to boost PCU too.

You can wave them off and disregard them.

But tomorrow they're going to do it again.

And again.

And again.

It gets annoying, doesn't it?

Does it feel patronizing?

And after you wave him off, you see him approach the desk of the dev a few feet away from you. And you think to yourself, "If that Dev does this guy's bidding, he's going to bring in more cash to the company, and he might even get recognition for it from the boss. Maybe even a raise."

Now you're tempted.

Not because of a reward. But because someone else might get ahead while you're sticking to your principles and refusing to go along with it.

Hey, you have goals in your life. Retirement fund needs to be funded, kids need to go to college. Someone at the office is getting a year-end bonus. If there's a chance some extra dollars come your way...

Now this isn't a reward, is it? It's a form of coercion. And you hate yourself for thinking about it. Because this has corrupted and diminished your autonomy, because they are corrupting the process involved.

The reward is one of the most amazing MMO's ever made.

The process should be making it even more amazing.

Corrupting the process with a Reese's Fast Break diminishes the game, diminishes us, and diminishes you too.

So what's the difference in doing missions for SP every 20 hours ? and doing missions and getting isk then with that isk buying SP's ? i see the same thing.
We already have 3 months missions, they're called "ark missions"

So for ark missions we have to log in every 3 months ?

right because the OP didn't allude to this becoming much more than one rat and its never spiraled ot of control in any other MMO when they see just how well it affects their hollow numbers

For god's sake! At the end of the day FC will be annoyed of doing this ****.

Quoting a goodpost.

Ofc I realise that. I did dailies in WOW. At some point I stopped with thought "What am I doing with my life"? I don't need that ******* mount I have dozens of them and using maybe 2...Then I seek for game without such things. I like sandbox and space, landed here. Now I feel like the sand in this sandbox is full of someone urine...
People will fall into this. People always fall for sweet candies, but it ends with tooth decay. Do you think EvE playerbase is better than rest MMOs playerbases? Wrong.

others about this "feature":
Jonny Pew about dailies
Neville about dailies

Well, the dream of any GOOD teacher is to have their student reach the level where they are... Maybe not while they are taking lessons with them but after that, through higher studies or what they'll learn while working...

(and yes, I'm a teacher... so I know what I'l talking about here ;-) )

More subscriptions or more PLEX means more money. The measurement of daily logins is only a simple to obtain metric that hints towards part of the health of the game. The problem with only using simple metrics is that they can easily be manipulated or misleading.

As an example, one way to increase ARPDAU (Average Revenue pre Daily Active User) in a F2P game is to stop allowing non-paying players log in (I've literally seen this happen). This simple action can make ARPDAU go through the roof, but obviously it will mean that there won't be many people playing the game any more so the paying players won't be as enticed any more. Doing something like that in EVE Online where the players ARE the content can be incredibly detrimental to the game's overall health.

Implementing a change in order to make one metric look better can have unintended consequences that destroy the game by discouraging the core players who are the bread and butter customers. The Star Wars: Galaxies NPE is a classic example.

EVE players want meaningful and engaging choices in the emergent sandbox, not operant conditioning.