EVE General Discussion

That may be true.

But even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Great blog as always Seleene.

However reading it just makes me think even more that the suits at CCP simply are not interested in anything anyone, including Devs have to say.

"It's great to see again but what saddens me is how Greyscale's 0.0 road map reminds me pretty much exactly of stuff that was discussed between Dominion and Apocrypha (about 2.5 years ago). I could go back and pull out old emails and (if I still had access) meeting minutes on the internal CCP 'Trac' pages that had shitloads of similar trains of thought to them. It's all been updated and thought through again, but the core principals and goals are the same: iterate on existing crappy game play and make it more better good fun awesome"

This was happening 2.5 years ago and nothing has changed.

Why should now be any different.

Personally I think Eve is on the precipice of a slow and painful death similar to that of SWG yet ultimately it will not be decided by the players posting here on the forums, the devs, the CSM, any online gaming publication or anything else but by the suits at CCP.

They will keep on course until the income from subs/plexs decrease to a certain threshold for a sustained period of time.

The question is will it be too late by then?

My example of using SWG was that of people leaving over time due to game play changes and the change of direction to the point where it was a shadow of its former self.

For example Eve becoming less about spaceships but being more like Sims in Space.

It actually would be in CCP's best interest to do away with the PR disaster and nonsense that is the CSM. All I've seen so far of this latest batch is a bunch of e-peenery and self inflated egos over pixels that have actually no significance to anyone in the grand scheme of things.

The CSM is ******** and should just be done away with. This isn't like a labor union or political activists dealing with a government, it's a bunch of people playing a video game that can just go play something else when the game is no longer appealing to them. This whole business of the CSM is just silly. The onus is on CCP to figure out what the market wants and develop to that, not play this silly little game of "us against the MAN" every month or so. It's ******** and a really bad business decision.

Oh, I'm not disagreeing that he's right, but so were the hundreds of others saying the same things all Summer of Rage while Mittens was busy playing kissass and making videos with CCP in Iceland to appease the players.

I don't want people to mistake what i'm saying here, I'm one of the people pleading with CCP to change their ideas.

On the inside, to the CSM, you might see "lots of exciting things coming for FiS", inside CCP hq. You speak with CCP daily.

But what do us players get?

Soon ™


How long do CCP think people will hang around with that terminology. Only yesterday CCP Prism X stated in the Ship spinning thread that CCP are in a planning stage, 3 months after the old functionality was demanded. How long, after planning, can we expect the few devs still working on Eve to give us that back?

I guess my real question is

"How long should people expect to wait for something more than Soon ™"

Another 3 months? 6? Will CCP devote 6 months of resources away from another project to give to EVE? Will they hire more devs to fill the need?

It should be different now because incarna has been released and they can see the results. They can see that incarna is not that great of a draw to the game. Even I thought the subscriptions would get a boost from incarna.

However, now that incarna was released, it is clear that having that many devs assigned to incarna, for so long, is not financially justified. They need to find a sensible place to finish up with what they are working on with incarna, and then reassign the devs back to FIS.

They also need to let the players know they are doing this. Because right now players are leaving this game because they think it is abandoned. (and it has been since apoc 1.5.)

It stopped growing when they stopped investing significant developer resources into providing content and feature improvements. To make it grow again they need to reverse that policy and invest again. CCP's problem with the "new projects" is that they have probably underestimated the value of good-press from existing player base. Eve (as was) grew immensely from good word of mouth and players selling the game to other communities and circles of friends. Take away that aspect and reverse it - and you'll see Dust and WoD poisoned from the get go by people who have a bad tastes in their mouth from what CCP did to Eve.



Whats pretty shocking to me is how bad Incarna actually is from a technical viewpoint. It makes me feel that WOD is years and years away because what we see from the CQ test is frankly appalling. Compared to mainstream avatar based mmo's its like cavemen bashing rocks together to make sparks. This tells me that CCP is going to need to survive on Eve subscriptions for quite a while yet while trying to keep those WOD devs in salary. There is a balancing act sure - but you cannot afford to let your sole income source go.

I think there will come a critical point for CCP when (if they do not divert massive resources to eve) they will be pressed by dropping subs and lack of interest that will go beyond eve itself and endanger those other projects. I mean if what we're hearing is the case (that eve is basically 2-3 teams of number tweaking balance devs) then its on subsistence mode already.

Say the Dust launch next year is not a crazy success. (Which given bad word of mouth publicity from eve players and dropping interest in core eve would be likely - since a game built around interacting with the eve server is going to be a bit of a flop if the eve server is sliding to bored stasis) then with the continuing decline in Eve profitability the company will have to make some hard choices.

One of them might be selling WOD license, laying off a portion of their employee base and putting the rest back on eve to trying to recover the situation. This might sound apocalyptic - but such things happen in business.



PR without payload is an embarrassment. If its 12 months of "buy NeX/Plex" and walk around in your 1(4) rooms and dream of Dust then its going to do more harm than good.

What CCP need to remember is that their success was built on the goodwill, passion and positive word-of-mouth of their player base. I've never been the CEO of a big corp/alliance in Eve but I can say pretty confidently that I've delivered CCP several hundred subs for the best part of five years and thats because I love the game. Seleene and Mittani can make that claim with thousands upon thousands of players - they loved the game and convinced a lot of players to play. Every CEO/alliance leader/fleet commander/personality in this game can say similar really.

Take away those good vibes and desire to proselytize on behalf of this game and the decline will accelarate rapidly.

So do you think things are ok with flying in space right now? Because that's what you're saying.

Who else would you want to bring this attention to the gaming community? You? Who are you? In the context of the eve online community you are a nobody, just like I am. Whereas this issue is being brought up by the head of a group the Players voted on. He might not be who you voted for, but it doesn't make him any less the CSM chairman and the person that has a responsibility to get problems with things Joe the Plumber eve players experience which is flying in space.

Amen.