EVE General Discussion

Is anyone else as disappointed as I am about how the whole Incarna/WalkinginStations thing turned out?

I left the game for a while after Tyrannis was released and came back to Eve recently (a couple of weeks ago). I was looking forward to going for a stroll in a station or two, spamming /dance, playing some games, hitting up the bar staff, etc. Instead I find I'm stuck in a small room, forever alone.

A new player to the game would question: "Why such an involved 3D character creation process when there's nothing in-game to actually DO with said creation?" This was an issue before Incarna with the old character creation process too, going through it all just to snap a portrait.. Well, what we have now is just a 3D, movable portrait.

Anyway, I did some digging to find out why it ended up this way, and it turned out that a bunch of players had a hissy-fit when Incarna was released, which forced CCP to take a different direction, thus leaving the whole thing as an unfinished mess. How unfortunate. Maybe now that the whole thing has calmed down somewhat, it is time to finish it? Get WiS rolled out fully, the code is probably there, waiting, I don't know if you figured out how to handle choke-points like certain Jita stations, but I (and I'm sure many others) would love the extra functionality for our 3D characters, especially those who spend all day playing the market.

Reasons why you should finish what you started ASAP:
- It could bring more new players to the game
- It could bring some older players back
- Having 3D characters that can interact with each other in stations could spawn a whole new wave of Eve machinima videos like Clear Skies, which is free advertising
- More fun and depth to the game for roleplayers
- People would have more reason to buy all those clothes you've been releasing
- People like me who have a 3D/uncanny-valley fetish will get to molest NPCs and other players

What some of you are going to say:

"Eve is a game about spaceships, keep it about spaceships and only spaceships."
- Having a 3D avatar is just natural progression, after all you play a capsuleer in this game, not a lump of space metal. Even the X series of games (which I'm sure most of you are familiar with) is taking this direction.

"There are more important things to fix first, like inventory, and the fact that other people can play this game differently to me."
- Sure, there are a lot of things which also need fixing in this game, but for new players this would be the most noticable fix, and for CCP it could be potentially the most profitable.

"You just want to jerk it in stations."
- True, at the moment I have to right click on the pilot in the chat window, show info, view portrait, view full body, and even then they might be flat-chested or something which turns me off. I'm currently sat in Jita right-clicking your portraits and "enjoying myself", and there's nothing you can do about it.

End of current and future debate.
If they try and do anything innovative beyond internet spaceships, the game dies.

There was no innovation... that was half the problem

Also involuntary alpha testing guinea pigs

The vast majority of vocal players, sure. Most Eve players probably never post on the forums.

This. Suck it up, buttercup. WiS is in the shitter where it belongs.

Its hard to understand what happened because you weren't here, but there were a ton of issues with Incarna.

It was 7 months after Incursion, and they only had one captains quarters done. After allegedly already working on it for some time. It took a full year for all the captains quarters to be added. If 4 small rooms take a year, how long would 4 racial stations take?

They tried to force expensive micro transactions on us, after players told them they didn't want micro transactions in a pay game.

And finally, there were a couple internal leaks. One was a internal paper discussing all kinds of things they could charge extra real money for; ships, ammo etc. And the second was a leaked email from Hilmar (CCP CEO) saying he didn't care what his customers thought.

Totally happy with how the Incarna debacle turned out. I never wanted WiS, I still don't. If I change my mind, I'll go play Star Trek Online.

Ok, my source didn't go into this much detail about it, I should've gone deeper though. It seems it was a complete clustertruck of events that CCP handled very poorly, and it wasn't just a few players having their "time of the month", so I retract that.

I would still like it to be finished sooner rather than later though, but I think CCP are probably playing this out very carefully, to avoid any similar backlash in the future.

You did see all the incarna items released without incident this patch, right?

A bunch of folks had a temper tantrum. that alliance main was GOON and their pets. A few here an there. Then the NEX store along with several emails leaked from CCP staff and or CEO, protesting in Jita and the masses were placated by the GODs of New Eden as I giggled fully expecting what happened to appease the children. Many Eve players burned up their computers with the new tweaking to the graphics. Combination of who knows what happened but when you overclock for no reason you deserve a computer sitting there as the blue smoke escapes and from what i heard it was mostly those with Nvidia cards. No idea what was done to resolve this. personally i do not care.

But for WiS, CCP could make more money if they already had Deployed it already but instead they made empty promises in FanFest concerning it or was it a 10 sec blurp on it that can ran over with the FW new tweaks.

The steps CCP should have taken
1> Keep its big mouth shut
2> play with it on their servers fixing issues
3> prepare NEX store ONLY with fashion items
4> Remember STEP 1!
5> Make sure DEVs have diffrent computers built out of their own pockets or something.
6> have ALL the DEVs play with new toy on THEIR server for a few weeks (Vacation time and drunk DEVs. WOOHOO!!!)
7> Compare notes go over issues
8> Remember STEP 1! and WHATEVER YOU DO...DO NOT TELL CSM ABOUT THIS.
9> Rework what needs to be fixed
10> Repeat steps 6 through 9 as needed then move on.
11> Drop the new toy into the public Test Server and now you can drop the bomb on the CSM.

I wonder how difficult it is to get a job there