EVE General Discussion

--} I was referring to stuff with easier access, like faction goods, but with real life currency playing more of a factor than ingame currency, i.e. players can already purchase PLEX and resell for ISK to gain access to faction gear with lower fitting requirements, etc...

Go away Mittani.

Why on earth CCP would choose to imitate some shabby Korean grinder MMO cash shop when they already have such an elegant, versatile, efficient, innovative MT solution escapes me. The only explaination I can think of is that no other MMO that I am aware of has copied them, so they must be suffering from some kind of perceived inferiority complex about it or something.

Could I trouble you to sadistically ask CCP this question on our behalf:

A better question is: if the other 3 CQs were in good enough shape to lead mittens to believe that "Incarna owns" back in April, how is it that they're not ready for release 5 months later?

This post is not only full of contradiction but also dangerous.

The statement and sentiment for much of the argument; "Much of the criticism of Incarna vanishes if there had been a successful deployment." illustrates a poor and superficial grasp of the underlying issues.

Incarna would be no more successful had it been successfully deployed; whatever that means. 4 more rooms, a corridor to link them and a bar to show off your NeX items?

The rage from Incarna was not specifically and solely rage at Incarna. This is an important point to understand.

Players who had previously raged at CCP when the :18 months: investment plan was revealed for development which had nothing to do with FiS were dutifully ignored by CCP. Resigned in defeat they sat and waited for Incarna, which they secretly feared was going to be crap, but they were willing to keep an open mind and be pleasantly surprised. It may not be content they had asked for, but perhaps CCP would surprise and delight them and the world would not be so bad (they might even enjoy the out of pod experience).

Instead, Incarna has turned out to be as poor an investment as everyone had predicted. Untold thousands had predicted it so and warned CCP. There is no substance to Incarna and adding more rooms or vanity items isn't going to fix that anytime soon.

Let's be clear, I don't think anyone would mind Incarna (there are clearly those who like the immersion factor of it) if it had been delivered as part of a fine FiS expansion. The issue however is that CCP have invested multiple years of resources solely into Incarna at the expense of everything else. Even the forums have had more investment than FiS over the past 18 months (and still I have to re-type this post because of forum bugs).

To put things into perspective, I would proffer that Incarna has taken at least 3-4 times the resources to develop compared to Apocrypha. Now, if you ask players (as buggy as Apocrypha was); would you like an expansion 3-4 times the size and content of Apocrypha, or would you like a room for your avatar with ridiculous vanity stuff in a shop? The answer should be obvious.

The issue is about balance of priorities, and CCP have gotten this wrong by orders of magnitude and it has taken plummeting subscriptions to only start to rectify this, not the wisdom, foresight and vision of the product owner/lead designer (bless your souls for being so out of touch).

What is dangerous is the encouragement your post seems to be suggesting to CCP. As head of the CSM this is very, very worrying to me. You can't seem to decide whether "some within CCP have lost touch with their core focus (making a game about spaceships for people who love spaceships)" or "The release of Incarna and later Dust 514 is likely to make EVE’s subscriber base and revenue generation explode".

A bad strategy (or rather, roadmap) with an improved delivery execution is still a bad strategy. Picking out the following excerpts from your post, I am not sure whether you are genuinely trolling or not;

* Much of the criticism of Incarna vanishes if there had been a successful deployment.

* we were supposed to have four racial Captain’s Quarters and Establishments

* The cries of “Give us things to do, not things to wear” also goes away

* I suspect that we wouldn’t have had nearly the level of rage over Incarna if the Caldari CQ was the first to be released

* Theoretically, Incarna’s primary benefit is an improvement to the New Player Experience

* The prices are too high, there’s no place to show off one’s ‘virtual goods’

* since 2003 we have seen some truly outstanding expansions and ideas from the company

All of this stuff is just like rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic as i have said before.

In the long-term, WiS and Incarna has great promise and could offer untold opportunities for creative ideas to expand the game. However at the moment, the game is so horrendously broken that investment into Incarna at this stage (or rather, with such a huge bias) seems (is) utter folly. Plummeting subscriber numbers, player discontent and boredom has nothing to do with a poor Incarna implementation. There are fundamental issues which need serious (1-2 years) investment; sovereignty, ship balance, 0.0 risk/reward incentive, botting being the key ones. When the game mechanics can support the creativity and ingenuity that the player community can weave, then CCP will have ample opportunity to invest in other directions.

I was happy to see your recent takeup of the FiS torch (admittedly a year or two behind the curve). Reading this post, I'm not sure you actually 'get it' though. You can't be all things to all men. In this post it seems as if you're trying to be.

Ps. Incarna may be appealing to new players but what is more damning is long-term players and veterans telling them (directly/indirectly) not to bother. "Welcome young adventurer, your ultimate quest is to slay the evil dragon!". Except when you get to the end of the quest, there is no dragon, just a bucket of pis* to pour on your head.

If that was from the internally leaked memo, which I was assuming you are talking about, I would still be skeptical of it being their actual business plan, as opposed to it being an employee who was asked to argue in favor of such a thing, for the sake of argument.

If that is from some other source beyond the leaked memo which CCP admitted was more of a Devil's Advocate session than anything, then I have to admit I have not heard or read of it as of yet, and would not be in the know on them actually having taken that stance on business letterhead itself, so to speak, i.e. I would have to reconsider my position.

But as far as I am concerned, I am happy with the notion that the leaked memo was poison fruit and that I cannot take it all at face value in and of itself, as it is improbable that an internal brainstorming discussion where employees were asked to argue hypothetical situations, is the actual core business acumen of the entire company itself.

This we have done after months of research by a group of highly competent professionals, soliciting input and perspective from thought leaders and experts in and around our industry. We have communicated our intention here internally in very wide circles through the Virtual Economy Summit presentation at the GSM, our Fearless newsletter, sprint reviews, email lists and multiple other channels. This should not come as a surprise to anyone.

I'll ignore the part where you presume to know the real reasons people were upset during the protests. Any review of the threads created at that time will paint a different picture.

Instead, I'll simply ask if you are aware of the Dev responses that reveal that despite the extreme difficulty of making the system deliver bpc's that this is exactly what they want to have in place eventually?

If you don't understand why bpc's presents a difficulty in the first place, I would recommend reading the blog concerning what it took to simply make bpc's and bpo's have different color icons.

Please as if placing one asset into a hanger is any more difficult than placing another.

It isn't like they needed to create any new code to do it. BPC's already exist, hell BPC's that take completed ships as a component already friggin exist, so what exactly is so hard about this?

The dev blog you were referring to was simply talking about the difficulty in making the client tell the difference between a BPO and BPC for graphical purposes I seriously doubt the server side has gotten confused over which type was being used.

The part about the loyalty store once again was simply talking about displaying the Icons and had nothing to do with depositing the asset in question into your inventory.

So you don't understand the issues involved, are unaware of the long term plans for the NeX, and have no interest in being confused with the facts. Gotcha.