EVE General Discussion

Yeah, the blue Stratios looks cool. Other than that, meh. Though even the blue Stratios looks a bit... unfinished and plastic. Like a Stratios was just dunked in blue paint. A lot of the custom skins feel that way. Doesn't feel natural. A side effect of a simple palette swap rather than a skin designed from scratch with intent.

Gallente with it's retro shapes could do with some custom skins with shark mouth and lady luck decals. Piratey types would probably dig that. Maybe an olive drab + aluminum skin to further mimic old bombers for ships like the Algos. Put a shark mouth up near the front. And a sexy lady in place of the Gallente logo. Also, I'm sure more police variants would sell well. And maybe a two tone skin mimicking 30s-40s hotrods ... burgundy top and grey bottom with chrome trim for the Domi or something.

Or some more colorful homeworld-ish skins for Minmatar like so. Or some skins for Ishukone ships like the Eagle that replace the horrible Ishukone fade with gold feather-like decals like the ones seen on this skin. Though something like that should have been the stock Ishukone skin IMHO. Full-body fades are just ugly. So is camouflage. Angels ships would look cool reverted back to their solid dark color, but with bold graphic angular stripes applied with white paint in a messy fashion, that somewhat mimic the faction's logo.

All good suggestions and I agree.

I have made progress on the design framework to convert the current player base to a free to play system so people would feel that the effort put into the game for the past 12+ years has been worth it and entire new combat system risk / reward.

Rough estimate is that Titan capable character with a titan would be worth 120 bil isk / GTC singles = 2400 USD dollars in value using this as a baseline for all ship costs. That is just the value of one ship and one character 1/3 of an account at current market rates.

Another interesting way of thinking about it based on server bandwidth if the current hardware can support 100k or X players on at one time, then the current design of the product is 33.3% of what it should be. If I was designing a modern day ps4 or PC game and only used 33% of the hardware capabilities I would get fired.

It is an interesting design challenge, the efforts might turn into a personal project.

Well I hope you have someone else in charge of the economics because your wild expectations of revenue generated by MMO games will leave you sorely disappointed when reality sets in.

Yet CCP are still in business, and they appear to be relatively happy with the money that they make.
CCP are well aware of this, I believe the general consensus amongst CCP staff is that they're not willing to "sell out" and change the nature of Eve in order to compete in the more mainstream market.

Niche products, they're a thing.

And they should be, they are making a good living. Why risk that on some get-rich-quick fad? Iceland want's long-term jobs, specialized jobs that don't come easy for a small country. CCP is basically an indie game company, no big investors or corporate publishing office telling them what to do and how to please those investors with quick money before a shutdown and move to some other job... which could mean ex-employees leaving Iceland to do so. They seem to like what they do just for the sake of doing it, sets them apart from most game companies of today.

You should look into owns and sits on the board of CCP, the Swiss banking investment firm is very large.

What you are talking about has already been happening to CCP employees for the last 6 years. Do a search for CCP games layoffs.

Also if you want to educate yourself more someone published an interesting article about World of Darkness development.

You can see the interviews with x CCP employees who have first hand knowledge of the day to day development process.

Read and listen to all that decide for yourself.

Having witnessed the game in the last few weeks I have issue with some of the decisions but also recognize the improvements compared to when I started.

When companies make bad strategic decisions (acquisitions, investing in new games that end up failing, over-extending resources) there are real world consequences. Lay-offs are the most obvious one to most of us.

The results of those bad decisions (that mostly did not relate to EVE) do not mean EVE, or the subscription model, is broken. They do mean that CCP senior management made some bad decisions over the past few years, many relating to other projects, and CCP staff paid the price. Welcome to the real world.

"Free-to-play" is totally different commercial model and one almost universally rejected by this community, mostly down to the "pay to win" aspect of it. Which even the most cursory of skims of numerous threads would show you. It could also introduce a potentially huge degree of volatility/variability into CCP's revenue stream, especially for a PC-only game. Investors (and accountants) generally don't like that. Bad for things like making payroll.

Double post

or get better friends