EVE General Discussion

And this.

Software development is a rather complicated process. As developers we throw a lot of ideas around, and as projects evolve they seldom go according to our initial plans; project planning is just plain hard, and financial constraints and project deadlines often conspire against our efforts, forcing us to compromise or drop planned features altogether.

We're not privy to the development process at CCP, so all we can do out here is speculate. Perhaps the NEX items were originally slated to be manufactured by players, but if those additions would do little to add to the value of the services CCP provides (and lets be realistic, adding tens of player-manufactured items to a game that already has hundreds of them isn't going to add notable value) then what would compel CCP to follow through on their alleged, original goal of making the NEX items player-manufactured?


I'm not aware of any published or leaked data on the revenue generated by the NEX store, so speculation by either one of us on its profitability is meaningless. However, as the goal of any private enterprise is to make money, it's a bit silly to suggest that the goal of the NEX store was not expressly to add value to the service CCP provides. Note that this holds true even if the NEX store was a completely misguided effort and has been a total failure.


In a mature economy this is largely irrelevant. In the real world, almost everything we consume is created via processes which we need not concern ourselves with and which we seldom know much about; all that matters is that we can go to the supermarket and buy what we need. The same is true with converting in-game efforts to NEX items because the only external variable, PLEX, has long been a stable and integral part of the EVE economy.

Well by that point that means bounties should be removed for the same manner.

…and that would be fine if that was what they did. Instead, they took content that was slated for player industries and made them not-player-industries but they didn't actually drop the content itself.

It would add at the very least the same value as having the items in the NeX (viz. having the items in the game) and would have added the value of a new industrial sector. No matter how small, the addition would have been bigger than it eventually was and it would have reused existing mechanics that are proven to work, rather than the completely unfinished NeX.

So if the reasoning was that it wouldn't have added any value, they wouldn't have bothered with the NeX at all and just released the stuff as normal NPC seeded and as part of the normal economy. Instead, they reduced the value while increasing the work load.

I'm not suggesting that it doesn't add value — I'm saying that its value is not to generate income, but to reduce liability. Given CCP's economic situation at the time, that was more valuable than income because they already had a very stablie income and what they needed the most was external funding. Large liabilities is a black mark towards obtaining that.

The reasoning behind the speculation is that, if it was to generate income, they would have followed the standard model for doing so: large volumes of purchases that are so small that cost is no longer a factor in the decision-making process.
…but this isn't a real-world economy, and in isn't mature in this field either. It's a game economy where this one item breaks every guiding design principle and every balancing mechanic there is. Had it followed the rules, the matureness of the economy might have mattered, but since it doesn't — since it follows completely different rules — it is not part of that economy.
Not really, no, since PLEX does something drastically different. Most notably, they do not remove gameplay and they are (or were, before the NeX), in fact, economy neutral.

A compromise would have been to make it NPC seeded and then move to player construction, as they have with so many other items. This was something completely different.

Ok, fair enough. That makes sense. I somehow doubt that they were going for that, though, since they quite deliberately chose to go for very low volume (since the chosen payment mechanic would have wreaked havoc with the in-game economy had it been combined with a high-volume option).
PLEX are a liability on the CCP balance sheet — it's a contract for services paid for, but not yet rendered (30 days of server access). The NeX was a way to eliminate that liability by giving you something completely different and utterly worthless (in real-life terms) instead: 3,500 AUR. It's a PLEX sink that lets CCP not render the original service and instead just give you a couple of bytes in the DB.

Removing those “service not yet rendered” liabilities means their balance sheet looks better when they go to the bank/investors and ask for extensions on their loans or further funding for new projects: they still have (or had) a decently high, consistent income, and were developing new products that would pay themselves back Soon™ (and diversifying the company, which always good for the investor's risk). Since the subscription income was already steady (but came in small increments), it wasn't as necessary to boost as the attractiveness to investors in the form of offering of low-risk / low-liability, nor did it serve the purpose of that kind of large capital injection.
They have the potential to break it completely, should CCP choose to go down that road. They probably won't, but the option is still there. It's a mechanism that could completely obsolete the market and the industry of the game — hell, the IW Scorpion (which set off the whole débàcle) did exactly that: it added minerals in the form of a ready-made ship without ever engaging the miners, the researchers, the builders, and the traders who are normally required to make that happen.

Even with the things that are now in the NeX, we still have a similar (but far smaller-scale) problem: this stuff exists outside of the normal economy. Its life cycle is completely different to everything else in the game, and any interaction with the normal economy is largely accidental and incidental. It doesn't follow the resource limitations and resource destruction balancing mechanics of everything else, and therefore isn't subject to the same supply and demand as the rest of the game. That's what I mean by it breaking the design principles and balancing mechanics of the economy.

It remains a mystery to this day…

But even if that's ever fixed, it is still an illustration of how the NeX has the potential and ability to break pretty much everything in industrial/economy side of the game.

However anything else in the game can be made in a manner of buff or nerf to the point of breaking the game as well.

One example I know alot of players who'd quit if they made all of eve null sec.

Or all of eve high sec.

There's a pretty significant difference between making the game undesirable for some players and breaking game mechanics (in this case, removing all checks and balances that determine the supply and demand of items in the economy). So we're talking about vastly different types of “breaking” things here.
But that's not the argument — it's that the NeX items can only exist through the use of out-of-game means and that they therefore do not follow the rules and design principles of the game economy.

Whether or not they disrupt the economy depends on what the NeX allows you to buy, but the fact that they don't adhere to those principles means that it disruptive potential is that much larger.

Again, there are infinitely many ways CCP can potentially wreak havoc on the economy. I agree that as the NEX store grows it has the potential to cause significant damage to the economy, but it also has potential for growth that isn't problematic. While it's a good idea to make sure CCP knows that we do not want the NEX store to impact the economy negatively, objecting to it entirely on the simple grounds that it has the potential to do so is rather absurd.

What NeX Store item isnt "gettable" by in game means? If you can name one I'll get a goonswarm federation tattoo on my penis and biomass 9 toons.