Jita Park Speakers Corner

Here you can discuss the "EVE Marketing, Customer Loyalty and Player Experience" sections of the CSM minutes.

You can find the full minutes here

If tokens are tradable, how about making redeeming them tied to character age (with the results being unable to be traded)

That way, a certain type of ship could only be flown by old characters. But them getting blown up isn't quite so insane.

Player experience: remember that thing they did where they broke players workflow with inventory? Remember the part where eve has a learning cliff? Whatever changes made with these fundamental core ways people interact with the client, you are affecting millions, if not billions of man hours your players have put in to familiarize themselves with the game. Consider it sacred, and don't do anything that dishonors that. Any new methods of doing tasks should be at least as efficient on the very first attempt as it was with years of experience of the previous way.

I'd encourage the team working on the loyalty program, to take the same approach as other teams do with in-game mechanics, try to avoid edge case complexity.

A clean and easy to understand system will not only help the marketing team, but also help players so they know what to look forward to.

I'm mostly concerned about the talk about character vs account age, non-tradeable vs non-usable etc.

In my opinion there should be a clear distinction between milestone and token rewards.

Let's start with tokens. CCP Navigator doesn't want the program to turn into a new NeX store, and i agree. However, I think CCP should take the opportunity and re-invent the NeX Store to become the token system.

Since tokens are the most likely candidate for tradeable rewards, and ISK/AUR/PLEX are already inter-tradeable, that seems like the best approach. Having AUR as token-rewards, will allow CCP to leverage the Nex Store and help keep it seperate from the milestone rewards.

This will enable players to support their token rewards with ISK/PLEX when they want to "redeem" something from the store, and encourage a healthy ecosystem for the mechanic. Let players decide if they want to spend the tokens on rewards to keep, or put the items on the market. This way, a new payer has the choice to use the tokens to help fund his first /next endeavor in EVE, or trick out his character/ship with clothes/monocles/fireworks/skins.

It's also a way for CCP to turn the stain on their reputation that the NeX Store currently is, into something positive.

So in short, token rewards should be the commodity CCP gives you a little of each month, as a reward, and at the same time work as a catalyst for the NeX Store. Which of course has to be expanded upon with all those nifty rewards that were suggested.

At reasonable prices CCP. No trying to gauge more PLEX sales out of people. It will happen naturally if you build a good reward system. Commodity rewards – ranging from clothes, skins and special ships to resculpt and character transfer tokens. Everything ISK and PLEX gets you today.

Milestone rewards, should be the "true" loyalty rewards.

This is where you can put the bragging rights; like forum badges, unique logos on ships, medals but also the rewards which can't be handed out on a commodity level where one can just buy as many as one can afford. Things like skill point refunds, subscription discounts and neural remaps.

Nothing that could possibly end up getting destroyed should go into the milestone bracket. Leave that for tokens.

Lastly, there's the question how this should be calculated retro actively.

For tokens, I think only active subscribed months should be counted. Tokens can be traded and we don't want people using Hours for PLEX to activate old unused accounts, stripping them clean and flooding the market, then leave the account to rot.

For milestones, since the rewards can't be traded, I think it should count retroactively from the day the account was created. Going forward, only count subscribed months. Who knows, might encourage some to reactive lapsed accounts, if they can get XYZ loyalty reward playing on it.

Player Experience
It would also be nice to have the option to see vector lines showing the magnitude and direction of the transverse/radial velocity in the zoomed in image.... sort of a built in tactical readout/heads-up-display.

In this case, it might be good to limit the 'dockable' portion of the station to the hangar area. This would also require warp-in in points for stations to be moved from the center of the station to the docking area. Of course this would significantly increase congestion and make for a narrower target area for gankers... whether that's bad or good is hard to decide. Also, since many stations have more than one entrance/exit, it might make sense for ships to exit at different points... with only the biggest ships using the big hangar.

Planetary Interaction should have a "mass select" (maybe even a click and drag select) and set up option, so that you can for example... select several advanced production facilities and set them all simultaneously to a new job type. And after that, set them all to route their goods to a launch pad or storage facility. This would save HOURS (i kid you not) of clicking on factory planets.

Marketing
Agreed, there's waaaay too much content that's just plain painful to grind through: scanning, mining, the canned content that is missions and complexes, POS management, PI click-fest...

The NeX store wasn't a horrible idea in and of itself... The horrible idea was to experiment in offering vanity content on Avatar clothing (which no-one else can see or interact with... I mean really when was the last time you admired someone's "Precision Boots"?) rather than on Spaceship vanity items like: decals, paint jobs, colored POS shields, POS pleasure hubs, custom-colored lazor beams, Golden Ravens, ect...

On the subject of the NPE, please consider reading my summary of the current experience, if you haven't already (I'd put it in my sig, but the signature editor appears to be hopelessly bugged in Firefox). There's a whole lot of work to be done there, and I didn't even get to the biggest problem, the "what do I do now?" question that comes up so often at the end.