EVE General Discussion

Rouge, I talk about crazy ideas with my boss all the time and he shoots them down, I'm almost certain some of our customers would be very disturbed by some of the wild ideas I have tried to fling his way over the years, none of it is meant to fleece our customers by any means, but then some of my ideas would be time consuming, and costly, and customers might get the impression that my wanting to sell them this 'new product' is an attempt to fleece them.

That's just the way it works, we are just as sensitive about the economic situation of our customers as necessity merits, i.e. we need to turn a profit, but we are not looking to bankrupt our clientele either, what is good for the goose is good for the gander, as it were.

CCP driving away their customer base is the last thing they want, you can be guaranteed of this, now whether they stumble into just that situation is up for debate or not, what is not up for debate is the fact that they rely on subscribers to pay the bills, and even if it seems to some of you that they are attempting to drive those subscribers away, or are blind to the fact that they are, or do not care... at least two of those things could not possibly be true, and the one that could be true, we will never know until it happens.

Maybe they have lost touch with their subscriber base, maybe they have not. All I can say is, do not just marginalize them as "CCP", rather ... realize that as clearly volatile as the subscriber base has evidently come, what makes you think CCP would even dare risk alienating all of us now at this very moment?

Trust me, they have gotten the memo that a large portion of the forum goers will absolutely not play the game if it truly goes P2W, but whether they sneak in perks and 'skill boosters' is another matter. The argument's against such things are a lot slimmer in a grand sense, as we all have to realize, this game needs more subs, or more money from the subs it has, to keep producing new content, because the content that came before it still has to be maintained as well, etc. etc. product overhead and operating costs, all that blahness... etc.... I'm tired, so maybe tomorrow we can talk more about practicality, and the like.

Fancy that, a bitter Eve playing animator is the epitome of "right"? I think you'll find "CEO's" and "Investors" go a bit beyond Youtube cartoons to formulate policy.

Notwithstanding that some of you guys are repeating this MT crap over and over and over. It's done with, finished.

It's a NON issue.

1) CCP MT are optional aesthetic items
2) CCP MT are optional aesthetic items
3) CCP MT are optional aesthetic items
4) CCP MT are optional aesthetic items
5) CCP MT are optional aesthetic items

Which bit don't you get?


I'm intrigued why the haters resort to this whenever challenged.

And challenged they are. Obviously.

TL:DR

Thats a joke I did read it and it was a lot of wasted words. As are most of your posts. Learn to get your point across briefly and with succinctness.

Said animator and his team are game developers. Do some research before you open mouth insert foot next time.

I have to say whatever happens at your job has no bearing on anything in this discussion. Sorry I need to captain obvious that one for you. Also your work environment sounds like a cluster **** if it runs that way.

What we do know about CCP culture and what ex employees have said about the newsletters, you know that thing called empirical evidence and first hand accounts, is that those newsletters are not just them playing around. One section had a back and fourth. The rest was laying out the map for the direction they were going and for all hands to get on deck.

Last you must have low self esteem to get so bent out of shape over my few sentence post to crap out that wall of text in response. And have it filled with lots of stuff that is not helpful to the conversation and only creates confusion and clutter.

Knock it off.

I was reading over this and just had to poke at it a bit... all in good fun I promise.

Are you a programmer Skex? Or had any experience in programming languages at an academic or professional level?

Just because you can say "Hell it's only legos, just rearrange them!"
Sounds all fine and well until there are fifteen thousand rows of them, per se.

It is never just about theoretical difficulty, it is also about time, not only that, but programming is not just "It's easy, do it!"

It is, "Sure it's easy, but you gotta actually make all those changes, line for line, word for word, in hundreds of different locations for a very large project. So I will see you in *looks at watch* a few weeks? Have fun!"

See, people who do not code, cannot always distinguish between theory and practice, because they do not know what the practice actually means.

It is mundane, boring, time consuming... it is only difficult sometimes because it tests your endurance, how many hours straight can you keep all the changes floating around in your head so you can make them over... and over... and over... in dozens of locations, every day, day after day... until the tedium is over. Writing the initial code sure, it's already there, you are right, the hard part is done, but the time to alter what was created may or may not be hours, days, or weeks, depending on what you are altering. There are probably tens of thousands of lines just for blueprint features, and likely hundreds and hundreds of locations in various files where small but necessary changes must be made, over, and over... and over... oftentimes in slightly different ways for different files, unless your software engineers are anal retentive about code structure like I am, I mean you get it right?

Do not mistake the seeming 'ease' of a change for it being done in a heartbeat, it takes time Skex.

Ah not trying to steal your thunder for the last word here, but yes, it is rather bottle necking, but then at the same time... I find it rather frivolous that folks like Rouge seem to think this is such a big moral crusade for them to fight.

In the end, long as CCP doesn't royally eff things up, most of us with any practical sense will just try to make the best of it, and enjoy the game. It is a game, after all.

If this were my medical insurance CCP were tinkering with, I'd be grabbing a pitchfork just like Rouge.

I've played through and left behind too many games that I never wanted to stop playing even for the twenty years or so now since I was introduced to the first Nintendo console as a kid, played through too many games, to fall into the trap of thinking this is THE game, that I can never let go.

I just hope CCP doesn't fubar it all up, if they sneak in a few money making schemes here and there fine...long as it doesn't turn the player driven economy on its head... the game is old man, at some point potential subscribers are gonna be turned away just based on that fact alone, no matter how shiny or amazing CCP makes it. This is the modern age after all, as much as it saddens me to speak of it so lightly, we live in a throwaway society (in most industrialized nations at least) so what makes us think EVE is not going to ageify itself even if CCP pours their heart and soul into every line of code for FiS and only FiS?

Not only that, but something will come along, the more successful CCP were to make EVE, the bigger guarantee we would have that someone else would capitalize on that success and produce a viable alternative at some point.

I just prefer to be pragmatic about this kind of stuff. The game is not going to be around forever, it has already been around for a very long time, no the subscriber base has not really grown as large as I imagine it would need to be to accommodate the continued escalation in operating costs that have likely been accumulated, let alone allowing for diversification of the business model, and if I have to watch it go south slowly over time, that's the way it is.

That is after all, how most of these things end, interest wanes, the product ages, subscribers move on to new products, better products, from companies who may have even taken and improved on the concept, etc. and eventually it all starts to close in on itself, some point at which, I'm sure we would see some more F2P or other various mechanisms thrown in to keep the revenue solvent enough to support the dwindling subscriber base for as long as possible, to yes, make money as long as possible.

Anyways, you are right, and I certainly did not mean it in the sense that, none of it matters anyways, moreso in the sense that, none of it matters THAT much, when it is a video game.

I am here to enjoy the game while it lasts, I have no illusions that it will not be around forever, nor that CCP might or might not continue to try and sneak in more ways to generate additional revenue for a very old and large product whose subscriber base really does not grow to a great degree every year (and so long as they do not do more harm than I am able to stomach, I will keep playing). 300k-ish subs for a nearly ten year old MMO? With how many expansions that we were not charged for? I'm surprised CCP employees are not rattling cans on the corner outside HQ, (no insult intended).

No I'm not a programer though I am in the technical field, Currently I mainly do reporting and analysis working primarily with different ... wait for it... DATABASE APPLICATIONS though my background is in PC and networking support. I started off doing Desktop phone support for a major PC manufacturer back when we still had to manually manage memory and write config.sys and autoexec.bat files working with everything from simple home systems to enterprise servers, I then moved into field work installing various networking technologies including Cable, Ethernet, DSL and WIFI both the physical install as well as all the configuration and scripting, from there I to the NOC side of things and on to my current role. So yeah I got a little bit of familiarity with what we're talking about.

Yes undoubtedly building a completely new system from scratch is time consuming and given to unintended consequences bugs and errors. But in this case there is no reason to do that because all the code they need already exists. The NEX assets exist, BPCs exist, the mechanism for converting BPC's into other assets to be added to the players inventory already exists. It really should be a matter of setting the properties on a BPC template and telling the NEX application to output the BPC rather than the item. As I've said over and over again it is no more complicated to tell the NEX to output a BPC than it is to output a Monocle. It really should simply be a matter or changing a single value for each item in the NEX. Sure there is some grunt work involved in creating the BPC's but that's just data entry.

So far all the excuses I've seen for not doing so appear to be nothing but techno-babel intended to confuse and confound those who are not technically knowledgeable.

I'm sorry. This OP doesn't merit this much of a response. A new thread to discuss it clinically would have served better, unless you're Pro-Brown Noser. Then, of course, giving the impression the OP was significant would serve your interests.

This is very much "Don't feed the troll" country for those still capable of critical thinking.

I'm beginning to suspect that "RougeOperatot" has an issue going back to character creation having to do with the color of his cheekbones.

True, I do not know how they had it all laid out for BPCs and what legacy code may or may not be sprinkled all over the place that could cause them to takes so long to make relatively simple changes, etc.

I just was curious to see if you knew that it is not nearly as simple sometimes as it may appear on the surface, when it comes to actual code, the physical code itself, not the theory of operations or science of it.

I think we can agree on that, that the delay or length of time is certainly conspicuous, and for what reasons they have provided, it may be more PR spin than anything.

I don't know, I just thought I'd explain it a bit for anyone that may have been confused over thinking it is always easy if the code 'already exists'. It should be, for something as simple as a linked image file based on what could be as easy as a boolean, "BPO = true/false", as the alternative for it not being a BPO, is well... it being a BPC,



But yea, good stuff, thank you for the informed response, I appreciate it.

It is ok to be wrong. The problem is when you are constantly wrong and can't admit it (The Mittani).