f13.net

http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=914

Walking in a-small-room-making-no-contact-with-other-players.

On the upside the existing station menu is intact alongside the WoD tech demo, so the only impact is the inevitable extended loading time when you dock.The implication is that they'll only make you use the 1990s style buttons-hidden-in-furniture interface as they add new station functionality.


CCP are also claiming that the new 'walking' functionality is built on an extensible and well documented platform so they can additional functionality in future expansions. Laffo.

About time.

Add ability to be a furry or gtfo.

Those bastards are trying to nerf our station spinning!

The Future is Dark. And Brown! And Badly lit! I have enough money to buy a planet but I can't get the station cleaner to upgrade my light bulbs.

Pretty impressive that they are adding in a feature that makes me less want to signup again.

It's a "feature" that nobody wants, that nobody believes will improve the game in any way, and that is obviously sucking up a huge amount of Eve development resources for no purpose except to move the cost of developing the underlying technology from R&D for their other projects to the Eve budget.  Eve managed to dodge the bullet for a long time, but the inevitable decline has begun (it's just been plateaued for a long time before this).  Combine with the "fuck it, we'll just nerf Jumpgates" fix for what nobody thought was a problem, and this is how a game dies.

--Dave

Walking in Closets. Also it makes the install fuckhuge.

Maybe a decline for Eve was inevitable.  But this isn't that decline.  This decline was self inflicted.

In the end, they always are.

--Dave

Seems someone says this almost every patch.  I think this is the first time I actually believe it.

It is tech from their other game.  They had a graph at Fan Fest that showed 70%-80% of their tech is designed and built as MMO platform, (support, billing, accounts, patching, content pipeline, etc), that they will not be licensing out.

I am impressed they have 600 people working on three games, just off the income of Eve.  They want to spend tme and money on some of their own features so be it.  They already stated the future of Eve is not the players currently playing but the ones not playing and they need new features to draw them in.

As a game designer and businessman, it's hard to say they're making the wrong call, it long since became clear that the niche Eve occupies doesn't have any kind of explosive growth potential.  It makes sense for them to turn to other projects for their future business.  Eve's design clearly peaked with the expansion that brought in Jumpgates, although there were potential routes to move forward, either they just didn't commit the resources it would have taken to execute them, or they took a wrong turn, or they just weren't as promising as they looked, and Eve has been on a plateau of design ever since.  The sovereignty overhaul just didn't really deliver *new* gameplay, but it didn't take any away, either.  Neither did T3, or Wormhole Space, and everything else has just been fiddling in the margins.

And that's fine, and a lot of people have had a lot of fun with it in this form.  But the jumpbridge nerf was the first major step *backwards* in design, the first time they have outright thrown in the towel and said "we just don't want to deal with the complexity anymore, so we're going to simplify it whether you like it or not."  And Incarna is just fluff, it would have been a nice bit of ornamentation around the edges but as the focus of the yearly expansion (which has always meant entire new areas of gameplay being added) it's underwhelming, and becomes even less impressive the closer it gets.

Hey, it had a good run, did better than any other game of the type ever had.  And it's not going to die overnight, there will still be fleets flying around for years.  But this is the turning point, it's all downhill from here, and the days when legends stalked the jump lines and everybody had a chance to be the "first" at something are gone.

--Dave

Wormhole space introduced new gameplay.

And incursions are the only worthwhile group pve they've ever attempted.

Both features are woefully underdeveloped ofc.

No one wants to get out of the ships?

News to me. Its a main reason I don't play.

So walking around your captains quarters and a station will make you play?

Or is it that the game is "internet spaceships" and you don't like internet space ships, but not being a person based game is the symbol of that.

Plenty of people are going ape shit over how great this will apparently be.

My only particular gripe with it is the amount of developer resource being wasted on a project that has no actual gameplay even planned for it.

If the line was 'We're building an fps into eve, you play planetside as part of the station capture cycle', then I'd still think this is dangerously diluting the core game, but whatever, I can at least see the plan.

As it stands what is going to happen is that Vampires in Stations fans are going to get annoyed when they realise that this is just a buttons-in-furniture interface, and the rest of us are going to continue to get more and more irritated by the halfassed content being served up into EVE Online : A bad game about internet spaceships.

Iterative development.  They will release something sooner rather than wait till it has full complete game play.  Much like Sony with EQ expansion raid zones from a decade ago.

Contraband trading is going to be in person only.  Once walking about is in place they will be adding more gameplay to it.

When you compare them to the massive expansion of gameplay potential that accompanied T2, or capital ships, or the original Sovereignty introduction, or jumpgates....

Eve in 2003 was a much simpler, less exciting game than Eve 2005, which had the same relationship to Eve 2007.  But Eve 2007 and Eve 2010 were very much the same, and the nerfing of jumpgates is going to make Eve 2012 more like 2005.  But you'll be able to walk around in a closet.

--Dave

No one wants to get out of the ships?

News to me. Its a main reason I don't play.
[/quote]

Really? Methinks you looking for game that eve never was and never will be, avatars or not . If EvE had combat like in black prophecy I would sub right away.

The path to making you more than "Just a ship" is a good one. I love me some space flight games, but I am sick of just being a ship. It was cool when Wing commander was new. But even that series TRIED to make it feel like you were not just a ship. TRIED.

One of my other reasons for not playing eve is no twitch combat. But thats another topic.

Become a bad poster. Like I did.

http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=913

Microtransactions. PLEX can be turned into Aurum (latin for gold, really CCP?).

I don't think that will be in? And even if it was it is not gameplay so much as a bribe to use the new facility. Because they know that if they just release the "avatar spinning" expansion without it giving a benefit to gameplay people won't use it. Most games that have tried to enforce a social space do something similar (and XP boost in fallen earth, SWG Fatigue, WoW's original bonus XP).

Makes you think just how much money they are making off selling PLEX, dosent it?
Then again you have to remember that the Russian mafia started the second great war over the money they were making off RMT.

Speaking of which...


Hey, its even easier to sell real life cash...

The over-riding impression that I got from CCP at the winter summit was that they had no idea how to iterate on Incarna once it was implemented. Questions about 'what sort of content will be added to give this feature value' were handwaved away. You will have 'Incarna content' which will be extremely limited in scope and then you'll leave it behind whenever you take part in the core gameplay of Eve: A Game About Flying Spaceships.

The PLEX thing I'm not surprised about at all. A single PLEX is not a very flexible unit of currency. You won't want to swap ~$12 worth of game time for an ingame hat. As long as CCP stick to their word about it being for account level services and vanity items only I don't much care about that.

CCP:"PLEX prices won't be affected significantly."

PLEX just went up 10%.

The spike is being caused by pubbie speculators. It'll overcorrect downward over the weekend in all probability (all prices in EVE fall at the weekend).

So, how many additional developers/artists are being hired for EVE Online : A Bad Game? Because if the answer is zero (the answer is zero), then this is a lot of bullshit.

I think the speculation further up the thread is right: CCP knows there's no more growth potential in EVE (at least not a significant amount). The best they can hope for is getting people to sub MORE accounts, which seems to be past it's peak as well - the only way to increase multiple subs would be to introduce "features" that require multiple accounts to use most effectively.

Why are they trying to add tech from another game into EVE? Not for EVE, it's probably so they can test the new tech for performance and bugs on a significant pool of users readily available.

Best bet for them is to release a new game with a different focus targeted at gamers that don't currently play Eve (especially those that never will due to the nature of the game).

EVE 2: Tanks In Space.

You know what would help eve?

Allowing people to get out of ships, and adding customization options ETC....

Removal of drones and implementation of Twitch combat for the fighter sized ( AKA Drones ) ships. You can leave the spreadsheet to the cap-ship players.

How would this completely new game help Eve?

Meh, I still want boarding actions.

Failing that, I'll continue to manipulate currencies and bankroll dirty deeds.

Probably in a similar fashion that DUST is allegedly going to do...allow people to play a different game that impacts the other game.

So, Jumpgate with EVE DirectX 11 coat-of-paint?  I like it :grin:

For starters. It would be better. No one said anything about a completely new game.

In fact no-one said anything about *any* game.

 :headscratch:

My point is that literally no gameplay has even been promised for the vampire section of the game.

There has been a vague allusion to possibly forcing us to use the buttons-in-furniture interface to access the market for yet-to-be-introduced commodities, but that is it.

You lost me.

I'm not sure what is complicated, even when 'public areas' are patched in, the design so far is for you to walk into them, see other eveguys, communicate using the same chat channels you use today, and trade using the same market interface that exists today.

That is the entire vision at this point. There is no gameplay at all. Think Everquest, but without combat and in a setting where instant remote trading is already possible.

And unless they plan to turn it into a third person shooter, I can't think of anything I'd want them to add. All I can think of that they could do is maybe have location specific contracts and markets which would have no obvious value over the existing interface. Fedex quests for NPCs inside a station maybe?

RP weddings?

Ohh, Now I understand what you mean. You should have said that.

I would not wave my hand to the need of people to play dress up. Its kinda a big thing. Also, people have more of a connection to an avatar than a ship. I recall them talking about Casinos, Shops, Social areas and clan stations as some ideas for this area of the game. Apartment customization is also a big deal. However, it looks like they are laying the ground work down for the subsystems needed to do ANYTHING with avatars and interiors. This is a good direction, I understand you may wish for a larger game in this area, but behind the scenes, this is a ton of work just for what they have proposed.

Its very true if you don't care about such things, you won't care. I suspect many however DO care. Like myself. Or they would not be doing it. First with what is now going to be Dust, and now this. People do care.

Adding a shooter in the ground game would also be hotness. But with Eves click and Waite combat, its highly unlikely, hence, Dust.


When was all this talked about...like 2003? Better late than never I suppose.

I'm glad them spending 5 years of development resources lets you have the Mr. Potato Head experience you've always wanted.

In more recent news, today's patch was mainly a UI overhaul. The consequences however so far have been the inability to warp to moons without bookmarks and T3 ships flying backwards.

And I'd have no issue at all if CCP weren't using 70% of EVE development resource over several years just to provide dress-up-while-waiting-for-an-op, all the while raising expectations by implictly promising mysterious hotness which pubbies are already frothing about.


Casinos, ok, but why do you need avatars for casinos?

Social areas, definitely, but the real social aspect is the chat channel you talk in while stood in the appropriate area, and server wide chat already exists.

Markets, in practice you just mean an existing market that you have to stand in spot X to access? How do you sell this as an improvement over the existing market and contract system?

Clan Stations, isn't this just a room to stand in while talking in alliance chat (which is anyway obsoleted by jabber and voice comms in major corps and alliances)?

Oh, and viewing the logo of some random alliance in-game makes everyone's client crash.

Edit: And PI is broken.

The casino thing has always driven me up a wall. Real online poker doesn't have Avatars. And in real online poker, nobody tries to blow you up on your way to the table. (Well other than the Justice Dept.)

During development of magic the gathering online v3, wizards management honestly believed that what that game needed was 3d avatars to walk around between tables.

Incarna is Second Life for Eve.

I'm guessing this is the first you have personally heard of avatars for eve? Its not like this is a new development direction. (http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Walking_in_stations) Its not even the first implementation. (http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=401) I suppose if you like MUDS, then its fine in its current form, but no one plays muds anymore.

I guess you feel they could be doing something else for the ship bound folk, IMO, I'm not sure where you go after ships the size of plants that wipe zones out personally. Avatars have been request from the first day Eve was talked about. and was promised, or at least told about in detail sense what '03? And heavily in 08'.

Eve is building a universe, not just a space ship game.

Yes the reason no women play eve is the inability to walk around in a poorly lit shoebox I can see this now.

Or possibly the fact that I cannot make it rain penises idk.

It may help.

This is a pretty central case of an f13 thread.  Someone go back and collect all the "walking in stations will never be released" prophecies please.

I don't remember anyone really pushing that, I do remember a lot of 'meh - no combat' discussion, and later 'meh - no gameplay', and later still 'jesus christ how many man years of development time for this!?'.

People will vote with their money. I'm voting 100 bucks in favor of World of Tanks this summer.

I'm not really sure why these days the game content we don't want comes for free though, and the content we want is being sold separately, a là DoW2: Last Standalone + Wargear DLC sold separately (must own original or expansion depending on purchase).

Heard this went live today. Doom?

In a move that shocked everyone, the downtime was extended by 4 hours.

Another expansion, another new player experience overhaul.  I guess I could try firing this up again and see how far up the learning curve cliff I get this time before I say "F*** it" and move on...

Does your Corporation have need of a mission runner/cannon fodder person for stuff?  :grin:

They never let me in.  Bastards.  :heartbreak:

Although one kind soul from here gave me 10k to get started and I paid him back when I could.

Now I'm a multi billionaire, so ner ner...  :grin:

If these gits wont help ya shoot me mail IG and I'll give you leg up if you want it. It's a strangely addictive game and it's oddly satisfying.

You can't do much mission running right now I think if you are in the corp as they are at war. You are welcome to join the F13 in game channel and chat with anyone who is ideling in there. If I am there I am usually not afk. I have a little group of people hanging out in amarr empire space right now just sort of learning the ropes by scanning down anomalies and running those.

I think I need a bit more general game experience before I rejoin BAT, as I just felt a bit helpless and worthless down in 0.0. Yeah, I can tackle in fleets, but that was about it. I am currently up to around 5 mil SP, so still total newb, but I am able to scan down some decent stuff and my friend can tank most of the complexes we find in his drake or caracel.

There's also a huge brawl going on right now on the test server.  I got doomsdayed and went right back in with another capital.

Walking in stations indeed.  :awesome_for_real:  Now I can walk across a room to click on something instead of just clicking on my UI if I want!  I see they have a shop with AUR as currency where you can buy clothing for your character, 1 Plex for 3,500 AUR and a dress shirt for your character costs 3,600.  Just what I always wanted!  :awesome_for_real:

*edit*

15 fucking USD FOR A GOD DAMN PRETEND SHIRT?    :tantrum:

Don't miss the monacle that costs 4 plex.  :oh_i_see:

This stuff costs more than the stuff in my wardrobe.

Can I wear two monocles?

I don't think I've ever seen MT done so badly. A destructable eyepatch costing the equivalent of 4 months gameplay? They have to be delusional.

Incarna is exactly what I expected. A tedious and complex way to press the same buttons you used before. Attempting to sell this change with no content or gameplay, as a full expansion, will damage their reputation... which is a bit on the nose anyway.

Well I tried to reactivate my account, but because I can't seem to remember one of the names of my characters, I can't login to account management.  gg CCP, gg.

T3s are still backwards!

Press esc ingame, find button "Clear cache", press it and problem solved.

I think consuming all the "content" in the expansion in about 10 minutes is a new record. And a fair amount of that was double checking I'd got the aurum conversion rate right. It's now switched off so my hangar is a rusty metal door. Thanks CCP!

If they'd called this a foundation patch, admitted they didn't have the resources to do an expansion (with some meat on the bones) till WoD/Dust were out they might have kept player respect.

Never do this.

Backward T3s forever crew checking in.

So far just a massive performance hit (seemingly affecting EVE Online as well as the Vampire tech demo). Launch day went well by recent standards.

Utilmately it is other people's money spent on something that doen't appear in EVE online (except in the character portrait) so I'm fine with this except regarding how much dev and management attention it is eating.


Did they put in the RMT scorpions in the end? I haven't checked. Having the system create spaceships for real money is only thing that particularly irritated me.

What the fuck? Last I checked, monocles should cost 3 AUR or something. Either something got fucked up, or they've upped the conversion rate a lot.

Things on the test server are always far far cheaper than live.

Charging 3 AUR for a thing, when AUR are only about 100k isk each, would have been pointless.

There's about 5 items of clothing total in the cash shop. And most of them follow the aesthetic of the clothes in the character builder and are very plain. Apparently they had more on Sisi (which yes, had "test" prices) which they plan to roll out as once a week additions. Cheapest item is about 1/3 of plex (plain boots), a skirt is 1 plex, the monocle is 3 and a bit PLEX... which is pretty surreal.

I don't know that I've ever seen a MMO developer shoot themselves in the foot quite this efficiently. And the boards are on fire with the developers hiding, all very entertaining.

3 AUR for a monocle which can and will be destroyed is fine. Still a bit on the expensive side in my book, since it's about the price of a rifter (which I would've thought would require more materials and manufacturing expertise), but when it costs more than my fucking carrier (which I still haven't used because I was training up for triage; now I need to fit it up), I'll call it "over the fucking top".

Even by my low expectations, this is a dud. The avatar reminds me of Uru. It's completely lifeless and movement is painfully sluggish.

But at least they nerfed jump bridges. I understand their vast network guarantees the NC would have dominated nulsec for all time otherwise.

This ^^^

I always saw my ships as my avatar - I want to see them rather than a lifeless, badly rendered blow up doll in a 10x10 room.

TBH their tech doesn't bode well for their Vampire MMO and I think it's the straw that will lead to me unsubbing as I've just been logging for skill training again.

The question is "why was it so hard to implement hanger OR CQ as an option?"

CCP is not Blizzard. Blizzard can piss off 500 thou to 1 million subscribers with Cataclysm and bloody-minded decisions and still have 10 mill more. CCP doesn't have that luxury and should be doing all they can to keep their existing clientele happy.

It makes me wonder more about Dust. If their code foundation makes fairly powerful PC's chug while rendering a tiny room (captains closet) it should be interesting to see it trying to do 32x32 battlefields on a PS3.

Maybe they'll be the first to really unlock the PS3's Cell potential?   :grin:

I've always been an ultimate skeptic on the subject of Incarna. I think it plays to what people say they want from Eve (avatars), but not what they mean (a game that is about avatars, not spaceships). But even if I wanted to drink the Mittani's cool aid and go for Incarna as an idea, I can't even imagine what CCP is thinking rolling something out that is just that horrible in implementation.

The tech is really pathetic, and the avatars blow EQ2 out of the water on the uncanny valley. But it goes beyond that. Just really simple obvious game design 101 things like "everyone bumps into the coffee table, don't put a coffee table there" or "there is not enough room in the CQ to actually zoom out, game spaces need to be bigger than real life spaces to account for the camera."

Wow, what magical rendering game have you been playing. lol.

That's an April Fool's right? In game clothing, which only I can view, but not actually because the room is too small and dark to do so...costs more than my real life clothes?!?

I was thinking of coming back next week. Now I think I might just wait for SWTOR.

So, as someone who's not playing EVE and is mostly just interested in how this tech relates to the WoD MMO, can people elaborate on why the tech side of things is so awful? I need gory details. Also, have they publicly said that this roll out is related to the WoD?

"There’s probably some awful joke here about how Eve players spend so much time at their PCs they don’t actually need real clothes"

The model graphics are really lifeless, and the skin texture is pretty bad. Lighting is all sorts of wrong and plays oddly on the characters face. While I havent had any problems, a lot of people are reporting horrible performance in the CQ (captains quarters) even with pretty high end systems. The overriding theme is "if they cant make a 10x10 room with one character model run well, what hope have they of making a full mmo engine".

Incidentally, do i interpret these screenshots wrong, or is there even no option to preview your $60 monocle on your avatar before you buy it?

First, there's a noticeable "loading" screen that wasn't there before.

I didn't check the frame rates, but they seem fine. But when moving, control is very sluggish. There's a noticeable lag between when I press a key and when something happens and when I let up on a key and when the avatar stops doing something. This makes navigating, even in the 15' square box, pretty difficult.

As I said earlier, the environment isn't designed well. It's too small without extra space to account for the camera, so as you turn, it zooms in on your avie and you can't zoom out until you turn. There's also some kind of coffee table thing in the middle of the room and it gets in the way of moving anywhere--you bump into it and your legs just keep moving but you don't turn aside or go up on it. And when you turn or do anything else, your avatar stays bolt upright at a 90' angle with the floor and a straight spine.

That's what I noticed in the two minutes this morning before it restarted. It's all I really need to see to be honest.

I thought that stuff was bought with in game currency.

It can be, but plex can also be bought for regular money. That's how it enters the system in the first place iirc.

Cash given to ccp creates 'plex', an in game item in your character inventory. Plex can only be created by giving cash to ccp, though once a plex is created it becomes an in game item tradable like any other.

Characters can sell plex on the market, through contracts or in a direct trade for isk or space junk. If you are in Space Monkey's Alliance you can buy thousands of dollars worth, load them into a Kestrel and lose them all hilariously in pvp on the Jita undock.

Characters can consume plex in game to extend account time or create Aurum (a new currency, not to be confused with isk).

Aurum is used to buy pointless shit from the RMT store. All pointless shit originates from the store, it can't enter the economy through any other route.

Pointless shit can then be traded to other players for isk or other space junk, and can also be lost as a result of internet space combat like any other item in game.

Wait wait wait, i naively presumed these being cosmetic items they're permanent acquisition, but it being EVE... does it mean if you blow up the internet spaceship with someone wearing a monocle (and pod them) they need to buy another one for the new clone, like the implants etc?

If so, then wow... these prices... just wow  :why_so_serious:

Yes and yes.   

Clothing that is worn is indestructible, it's just if you carry it around in your cargo hold and get blown up. There's no reason to do so ever but you know someone will. It's like portable plexes.

Afaik pointless shit you are actually wearing gets transferred to your medical clone when you die, however, it can still be more expensive than you think, because pointless shit does not carry over when jump cloning.

You need an additional monocle for each of your jump clones.

That explanation sounds reasonable to me. Taken from here (http://kotaku.com/5814354/eve-online-is-selling-horse-armour-in-space?comment=40295777#comments).

I agree...this whole 'dress my captain' thing for RMT is silly.  I thought this game was about blowing shit up?

As long as we ignore it apparently didn't work out quite as they thought it would. (http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/06/21/controversy-brewing-over-eve-online-microtransactions/)


charging more doesn't really stop people who's been sitting on billions of game cash, and higher item prices mean they need more of the PLEX things to get their another currency. Ultimately driving the demand and prices along with it up just the same.

Im pretty sure its actually about how much $$ you can lose by getting blown up with shit in your hold.

I think that was just a little mini spike. From what I can see average prices are already about 2 mil lower today than they where on Monday. Holding around 380 mil, down from 382-384mil.

Poked my head in today to update my skill queue, and to check out the changes.  I didn't have any noticeable performance issues, and I may be alone in this, but I thought my avatar looked just fine.  Mind you, I still prefer my original avatar's look over the new one, but oh well.

My main gripe was with movement.  I'm used to normal WASD movement, so the whole swing the camera and right click to change direction thing was counter-intuitive to me  Also, not being able to move faster than a leisurely stroll was a bit off-putting.  I understand them adding it to test the systems for the WoD game, and it's sorta cool in some aspects, but I don't really think it adds anything to the game overall.

Plexes were around 400, crashed to 370 after the AUR prices were revealed, and has now returned to an almost normal of 391.2m.

Use left button to mouse look, not right button. Its stupid, but thats what it is.

Haven't bothered downloading the patch yet as I'm dreading being forced to make an avatar for the Captain's Closet.  Having way more fun riding the dramawave on Kugu, Eve-o and Failheap than playing could possibly be.  Latest bomb is some leaked CCP document (http://www.evenews24.com/2011/06/22/greed-is-good-purportedly-leaked-internal-bulletin-shows-ccps-refreshing-new-direction/) where they pontificate on new and exciting ways to wrestle in more microtransactions so you can sub while you sub.  Lots of skeptics on Eve-O but CSM Seleene seems to think it's real and recalls seeing something similar during his free trip to Iceland.  

edit: oh bums, fixed link

You suck at links.

http://www.evenews24.com/2011/06/22/greed-is-good-purportedly-leaked-internal-bulletin-shows-ccps-refreshing-new-direction/

This is all amazing. I can hear the corks popping from Funcom Montreal all the way down here.

I can't believe that. That is a joke right?


Well, I guess the good news is, that someone else is going to come and make an Internet Spaceships game and eat CCP's lunch. 'Corse, I've been saying that about a MMOG WW2 FPS...for a decade now. Ugh.

How curious. That leaked pdf thing has this morsel in it:


apparently someone literally didn't get the memo.

I think their original plan was that clothing would be destructible and lost with the pod. They went back on that a bit, though the jump clone thing makes it confusing, and thus probably felt they needed to boost the initial cost to compensate. I believe that concern is also somewhere in the document.

This is all somehow a plan by CCP Soundwave, also know as Goonswarm member "Stoffer", to ban all supercaps. Or Destroy the game. Could be both.

(http://i.imgur.com/HCSMe.jpg)

And guess what happens if you need to remote destroy a clone to install a new one somewhere else...

Also, turns out the monocle makes your character disappear entirely.

http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1533269

Some fucknut actually bought one? :ye_gods:

The Emperor's new clothes! Comes with a built in covert ops cloak! No testing has been performed on this device!

The Plex speculators are annoyed that plex prices are dropping and they're losing money, which is hilarious.

Though they are also suspicious that large buy orders (50 plex) at high prices could be CCP buying up plex, which is a little dodgy.

The roasting on the forums and CCP in hiding is funny.

I'm mostly doing my best to ignore incarna and just keep playing the way I used to.

Once they start adding poker etc, then we'll talk.

There was a guy on EVE-o forums who bragged about having two. His avatar was sporting one so he wasn't entirely full of shit.

So, strictly as an outsider who keeps one eye on EVE development just because I find its niche fascinating, I've always thought that EVE succeeded despite CCP, not because of them. They're so fucking incompetent at times, whether it's the cheating scandal or this or any number of other things, it really is breathtaking. I posit that if things had gone ever so slightly differently, if Goon Squad hadn't made it Their Game for so long or if that guy who made off with thousands of real world money several years ago hadn't hit the NYT, then this game is barely a blip. I'm not making a qualitative argument in this instance, so if you enjoy the game I'm not begrudging your fun. I'm making a PR argument, that there was a word of mouth factor that had zilch to do with CCP.

I'm mostly interested in how it plays with the WOD MMO, like I said, because I have a lot of friends at Funcom (only the WoD or TSW survives, mark my words) and because I'm a way old school White Wolf fan who's dumbfounded at how poorly that company's been run since CCP took over. This tech they folded in had a demo four years ago. They've been working on the avatar tech, specifically, for FOUR YEARS. I can't believe (well, I can, I guess) that a company can shoot the moon hyping their tech, put all their eggs in a different basket and have it sound so awful.

As far as I know, White Wolf wasn't a software developer, so basically what you have is a software developer (CCP) absorbed them and is using their IP to make a game.  Not sure what the White Wolf people are actually doing (what their job duties are).

As far as the Vampire game, they are NOT developing it from scratch.  As far as I know, they are trying to use EVE technology (Python, Stackless Python, whatever the database and server farm backend software it is that they have), which is why it's taking so long.  Because the tech is old or something.  This Incarna expansion is actually us having to beta-test the avatar technology for CCP (and from what I'm reading on the forums, it's LAGGY and as bug-ridden as everything else CCP).

They ARE trying to push cutting-edge - I think the avatars are supposed to have realistic clothing movement, but it's typical CCP.

Few things. One is that at least a few of the big WW RPG devs are on board with the MMO. Justin Achilli is the big name; he blogs about it. White Wolf now is... well they're not doing much. They were the number 2 (after D&D License Holder Du Jour) company for a decade and a half. Once CCP bought them, their output became less and less. Now they're strictly Print-on-Demand, with only a reboot of the Masquerade franchise coming out any time soon.

On this tech, I don't know any specifics on how it's coded or anything, but they had a tech demo leaked on youtube years ago of exactly this. Specifically, they were flaunting their clothing physics tech, which was impressive in this brief clip. But this all reveals a couple things. One, there's something demo worthy as long ago as four years. Two, holy shit it's had four years of development and it doesn't work? That's a damned boondoggle because nobody can wait forever.

The cutting edge thing, finally, is maybe the big takeaway. They've danced around saying it directly, but they're aiming for non-traditional gamers with WoD, at least based on last year's first big infodump: Twilight fans, LARPers, disaffected sandboxers, White Wolf nerds from 1998, etc. If the tech is trying to push cutting edge, and just looking at the bit available it sure as fuck doesn't look like it's going to run on an old machine, there's no way they're getting the type of people they may be banking on. Tack on what looks to be them pushing an obscenely expensive cash shop to play vampire dress-up and I think there's potential for a huge fuck-up here.

Don't mean to turn this into WoD prognosticating but I think Incarna has everything to do with WoD and not a lot to do with EVE.

(http://i.imgur.com/LptTo.jpg)

Without dark shadows, how are the vampires going to jump out at you?  :awesome_for_real:

It's obv. Minmatar station. Be happy there's any lightbulbs at all.

So you're saying...join Starfleet Dental?  :grin:

That's not a LITTLE dodgy.   That's the same as them flat out selling ISK for cash.   After seeing this shit I don't doubt it for a moment either.   It puts a sort of sinister edge on why they want some more ISK sinks actually.   It's really a shame nobody will steal this nice niche from CCP.   Space games are soooo CHEAP so it would be like taking candy from a baby.

I agree entirely. They were lucky there is no competition, that the older age of MMO's was more tolerant (especially if the Dev's seemed really earnest) and they got various player communities forming up to breathe life into it. Even then it is still a niche game and now they're "serious business" and want more. It's costing them a lot of good-will, which is required to overlook all their fuck-ups, but I tend to think they regard Eve as in inevitable decline anyway so no matter.

Heh, now CCP got Pann to post (http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1536065) in General Discussion to try to manage the "feedback" they're getting from their players, and if my calculations are correct that thread went to 90 pages in 10 hours.

EvE has always been the perfect example of a game you should Cash Cow.   There really is no reason it should of declined in such a clear niche.   There was no actual useful expertise inside the company either so they shouldn't of expanded.   If they actually let it decline now they are clearly fucked since they have no other product that's going to make any money.

They already got hammered when they admitted they didn't plan doing anything substantial for "18 months". Which is dumb to do and suicidal to say.

Apparently the leaked document said WoD doesn't yet have a game design document so it sounds like it's going to be a long time before that's out. Which also explains why their new engine is so resource hungry, it's targeted at a future system.

Jesus wept, if there's no design document then I don't even know what the hell they're smoking. Achilli's blogging like there's one, they sure tried to make it sound like there was one at last years White Wolf convention and (again) there's an already four years old and counting engine.

Pann is back? When did that happen...

(170 pages and counting)

The amount of teeth gnashing and angst on the official forums is quite amazing.

To be honest, CCP has been stretching the line pretty thin the last few years, and this last expansion is ... well, let's say, "underwhelming".

I heard they revamped the newbie tutoria awhile ago.  To help newbs and PvE explorer types, did they ever add the equivalent of a quest finder, or something to foster some kind of progress path?  

I know it's a PvP Sandbox game, but it always seemed like they could nab more lazy people like me to sub monthly if I knew in-game what there was to do.  The only path of "join-corp-get-podded" isn't attractive probably for everyone who's new.   If Eve were DAoC, it seemed the equivalent of "join-and-horse-to-Frontiers-for-Zerg", which would feel odd for non-vets as they drove by all the PvE content in their home region.

All the Eve contacts and PvE mobs just seemed like auto-generated filler.   The Eve player races (factions?) looked like they had a backstory, and there was an advantage to levelling up contacts, but I never could figure out what it was.  Maybe if they tweaked that, they might get new subs?

This feels like another T20 except it includes the whole player base rather than being concentrated around the 0.0 set.  Will be interesting to see how they deal with it because batten down the hatches and wait for the nerdrage to die down clearly isn't working.  Ironically people who were actually looking forward to Space Barbie seem particularly distraught with the paucity of this long hyped expansion.

Quick dissertation of AUR etc:

http://eve.beyondreality.se/NeXCQResponse.html

I was just coming to post this link. Its a pretty good read, although a bit overly long, on why people are upset.

http://www.justin.tv/deamosseraph#/w/1380742320/2

Demonstration in jita, they're shooting some sort of monument to burn eden or some shit.

They have now locked down Jita with numbers, and have fleeted up in Amarr (the system) and are podding anyone not fleeted with them.

I think this is the first instance of a successful in game riot I can think of.

Dev Blog post now up.
 (http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=932)


The blog post only made the rioters in game more pissed off. Hell, if I really cared about the stuff they are angry about, I would be more pissed too. That was pretty insulting. Considering they have CMs constantly talking about gathering peoples issues and how they are going to answer everything. They said nothing. They didnt answer a single question or concern the people are voicing.

Really to calm people down all their blog post had to say was "We will never offer items that provide in game benefits in the NeX".

Funny bits:


Yeah, that's going to go well. :awesome_for_real:

SWG announced *today* it's closing down this year.

Eve Online just pulled a SWG level extinction event. And I was going to come back for the Newbee drive too.

All the trade hubs are flooded with angry mobs right now and are basically locked down.  Don't think this is really the kind of emergent gameplay that CCP likes to boast about but it's fun to watch anyway.

They could easily pull back with a grovelling climb down unless they bet the farm on monocles.  But Eve-O is going to be popcorn worthy this weekend after that non-answer of a devblog.

That was one of the most amazingly clueless dev responses I've *ever* read in my 30 years of gaming. I don't even know fully what the fuck is going on with the clothing but "these virtual clothes are just like name brand REAL clothes" is fucking insane.

No shit.  I thought my eyes were going to start bugging out when he mentioned that shit.   My feeling of glee shot up with each passing word.   I wish there were some dev trackers for EvE.   I feel like I'm missing some truly good tidbits out there.  Every time they post something without even promising some changes is sort of hilarious in it's own way.

(http://oi53.tinypic.com/122g0eb.jpg)

Back in the day Soundwave was a Goonfleet director.  Turns out we really did ruin EvE!

They still are absolutely minimal effort and feel like they were designed on a spreadsheet. The sheer lack of effort in modernizing something that the bulk of their paying playerbase spends most of their time doing is why it is impossible to take CCP seriously.

I honestly don't understand what people are complaining about. CCP have been promising that Incarna would be a worthless piece of shit for months. To complain now that Incarna is indeed a worthless piece of shit seems a bit late.

I found this gem posted in one of the threads.   It's an employee review site.

http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/CCP-Games-Reviews-E159347.htm

Reading through the comments is pure gold:




Even the people who like working there are clearly bashing it. 

You know, other than the cash shop prices. None of this should have been a surprise to the player-base. They asked for better graphics, so they got them, and requirements went up. Players asked for avatars, so they added them, and again requirements went up.

Is this a case that the walking in stations was just not enough, as in should they have waited and not laid the ground work for all of it until the rest was done?

The issues I see people complain about are the increased requirements ( I can't run 5 clients anymore ), cash shop prices, and lack of "ship spinning" ( The old dock view ). Even though all of this was known and asked for by the player-base. I'm somewhat befuddled and can understand why they won't talk about it, they have been talking about it for years now.

I have just concluded they should have waited, and instead of adding the ground work ( Major engine changes ) they should have waited until they had more features. Other than that, I don't think any of this very loud group would have been happy anyway. There is a HUGE case of old timers simply resiting change here.

I don't think many of the core multi accounting types were clamouring for WiS.  Most of them seem to dismiss it as Space Barbie and at best a distraction.  CCP only ever added this stuff as a spin off from their work on World of Darkness.  Probably to justify putting spaceships on the backburner.

Also live from the Jita riots: http://www.justin.tv/deamosseraph#/w/1380742320/3 GMs are gagging people fast but there is still plenty of rabble rabble in local.

This was all asked for, and being worked on well before world of darkness or dust. Years before. They have intended to expand into walking in stations since launch.

At this point, the main reason I really care about it is

1) The direction they're taking is probably a game-killing one
2) oh dear god the threadnaughts are awesome

 :facepalm:

Comet mining and system wide asteroid belts  :awesome_for_real:

Look it up. Its been something people have wanted since 2003.  Beyond that, They just put a completely different game, at least the raw basics, into another game. They have even taken great pains to make sure its not required, but is a supplement to the space game. Performance issues can be dealt with in time.

EVE Radio is great right now.

Look up how many people have thought for quite a while now that WIS is an utter waste and not worth letting the rest of the game decay over.    Tell me how that works out for you.   I thought you didn't play EvE anyways?

I do remember people on Blackrock (WoW) flooding the Argent Dawn server everytime the Blackrock server died in protest and refusing to RP. Much tears were had and many bannings took place.

bloodworth: I don't see the point in whiteknighting CCP at this point. Yes, there have been people asking for various things like avatars etc, but guess what? that doesn't matter when they manage to completely fuck up both their PR and their prioritization of features for several years in a row.

I don't ( Being just a ship being one reason ), but I have always watched it for various reasons. I did not see the reaction of utter waste of time when it was heavily revealed publicly in 2008. Let the game decay? Like the graphical overhaul, or the new turret enhancements? How many free expansions have happened in its lifetime? Hint: Incursion 1.1.0–18 January 2011, 14 total expansions.

The CQ is leggy, I get that. The whole thing to me reads as a very loud portion of the player-base is resistant to change that was always going to happen one day.

EDIT: I'm not white knighting anything, I'm just pointing out the backlash is rather absurd. Most of the threads I read: "Why did you put avatars in my space ship game". Like it was a surprise. Like they have not been saying for almost a decade they are making a universe that would include more than just ships in space. I understand portions of this patch are buggy, as for prioritization, I can't make that call, but considering the population has been increasing, they must be doing something right.

Best quote I've seen from the Jita Lockdown so far "discosheibe: peeps who are shooting the torps could have used the isk for a shiny monocle"

The last really good expansion was Apocrypha, the wormhole expansion, in 2008.  Dominion turned 0.0 into Supercaps Online and it's been downhill since.

This is CCP - do you REALLY believe that?  :ye_gods:

Right after they iterate Faction Warfare.  Juuuuuuust you wait.

Yes. I'm not saying that the avatar system is not ambitious, but its quality level of visuals that eve has always held and still maintains after the recent asset revamps. Its still one of the best looking space games out, and its a MMO, and on a single cluster.

After saying that, imagine if they had launched with all station interiors? I would think the measured approach in releasing just the base changes and one room would be welcome, it also happens to be the point of agile and "iteration".

The way Dominion "fixed" the lack of fleet lag in Apocrypha?

It fixed it so well that CCP has never been able to go back to Apocrypha's standards.

It seems the one major thing that people are upset with is not Incarna, its the little things in Incarna along with the leaked internal doc talking about RTM. Basically, people keep asking "Are you going to put in RTM for game advancement?" and CCP wont say no.

They are talking about adding the ability to buy skill points to a degree and faction standing with AUR.

Yes, you are, and you're wrong about what the backlash is about. Sure, some are whining about walking in stations, but they'll be proven wrong unless CCP actually finishes a feature for the first time in god knows how many years. What people are complaining about is the fact that CCP are not denying plex/aurum/whatever for skillpoints, even though they did a 180 less than a year ago the first time they tried to push this through, and after they did their :18 months: fiasco. And after the game was literally unplayable after dominion hit. I think it took them 6+ months before they began making headway there.

It all adds up. This, I think, is the culmination of all of that. with the major point being that CCP won't say no to trading money for game enhancing stuffs.

The "leaked memo" is a recent development. I'm talking about the expansion reaction before that.

The rage was built on a foundation of crappy updates, removal of in game features and wastes of everyone's time.

What ENRAGED the player base is the bald faced lying to their faces. The dev blog blew the spewing volcano sky high. Just SWG NGE betrayed the existing player base, so has Macro transactions and the future that it is Eve Online. Unlike the T20 disaster, CCP is putting all their money into macro transactions. And is STILL ignoring the demands of the player base.

So they added skills for sale already?

They talk about several methods of RTM in the leaked memo, and they wont come out and deny a lot of stuff. Personally, as a newbie way behind the curve, I wouldnt mind a few skills for $, or a race respec so I dont look like Senior Chang from Community. I'm just stating what this protest is about.

 That's 2008 and even then most logical players thought it was stupid.   Maybe a lot of people hoped it wouldn't be such a boondoggle but nobody said "Geee that's awesome and it's obviously what I want you to work on instead of all this other stuff".


It's most definitely not a vocal minority or anything even remotely of the sort at this point.  I don't think you really quite have a concept of how bad it is.   They don't even have strafing animations.   You can't even walk sideways while mouse looking properly.   You can't run either but that might be on purpose since the cabin is smaller than my closet IRL.

They haven't yet, no, but the soon to be 220+ page thread is basically repeating that question over and over, same with the soon to be 60+ page thread as a response to their last devblog. Apparently they're still not out and out refuting that claim.

There's probably a difference between "yes, I guess avatars would be cool" and "the whole expansion was one room, a cash shop and a less functional interface?".

Really CCP have been distracted by other priorities for a while and Eve is on the back-burner. They've pretty much missed their chance to address sov being shit and super-caps being imbalanced and lost thousands of subs in the process I'm sure. The PvE experience is terrible, the progression from empire to the PvP game is broken and null-sec is sickly. They've been losing "faith" for some time, this is just a trigger.

CCP thinks "nothing can replace them". But 70-90% of the players live in Empire. And the ship combat in SWTOR is going to be (well it looks like) more fun that running missions, or ratting, or mining. 

I'd like to know what Raph Koster thinks CCP is doing, and where does he think Eve Online will be in 6 months.

The ship combat in SWTOR is just a minigame basically, don't expect that to be the nail in CCP's coffin or anything.

Just posted on EveNews24 (http://www.evenews24.com/2011/06/25/ccp-hilmar-global-email-shows-the-reasoning-behind-ccp-zulu-devblog/). Is this the nail you wanted? Our old enemy Lalante cancelled his 9 accounts this week. The nails are being hammered in.


Mitten's was speechless. 8 Pages in 20 minutes on the Eve-O Forum.  No one is awake in Iceland apart from two graveyard GM's who told the rioting that no one else is paying attention. The forums are on fire and threads are going so fast they aren't being monitored.

Anyone who was playing SWG when NGE started remember if this is as big a reaction? It looks like it.

That letter can't be real, can it?  :why_so_serious:

The original thread I was reading got nuked from orbit which is basically confirmation.

wat

This whole email stinks of bullshit, but if it isn't, glorious.

I could imagine that becoming a classic... though mostly of self-delusion in the gaming domain.

 :ye_gods:

I need to stock up on popcorn.

CCP's stance to let player actions determine the future might have been okay if new stuff didn't keep coming out fanning the outrage of players.

Putting off their response until Friday afternoon might have been a really bad move on their part.

To be fair, the EVE ISK is (or was) probably more solid than the RL ISK.  :awesome_for_real:

And I'm out. Haven't really been playing for a while now, and this just gives me the final nudge over the edge.

If that email is real I'm defecting to the "this is thier NGE moment" camp.

Bloodworth:

The history of Incarna is an interesting one and you are missing a lot of the context as an outsider. CCP first revealed it at Fanfest in 2008 and said that at that time they had already been working on it for a couple of years. At Fanfest players were able to see some work-in progress environments and concept art and to have a quick hands-on with a multiplayer minigame that was going to be implemented in the shared areas.

The next year at Fanfest, CCP said that they were radically reworking Incarna and they didn't show as much as they had the year before. In both cases, the general public perception can be summarised as cautious optimism - if there was significant gameplay that could be added to the station environment and if the players who were invested in the main flying in space game didn't have their experience eroded as a result then it would be a generally good thing.

For the next couple of years CCP were completely dark on the project. All they would say was that they were still working on it and that they planned to reveal it when it was ready. At Fanfest 2011 - three years after it was first announced and five years after they started development on it, CCP gave some tentative details about the summer expansion. Limited to Captain's Quarters, no multi-player areas, no minigame, no social experience other than the chat. Players were less enthusiastic especially after the CSM open letter (which I was a part of drafting) had warned CCP that the CSM impression of the feature was that it was lacking in direction and that CCP's messaging fell hopelessly short.

So now Incarna has released. It's incomplete, shows schizophrenic design, is ugly and way behind the curve technically. 3D is a solved problem, Everyone except Obsidian has been able to produce quality environments, animations and models for a while now, what we see in Incarna is 2003 levels of technical aptitude. For Hilmar to call it 'beautiful' and 'redefining production quality' is either wilfully obtuse or simply delusional. There is no gameplay and CCP does not seem to have a plan to make it a meaningful part of the Eve experience except as a conduit for MTx. All it is at present is a clumsier and less functional interface for the things you could do already with a cash-shop bolted on the top and there has been no indication to the playerbase or to the CSM that this is going to change. At the December summit we asked CCP for the general direction of Incarna and what the long term plan was and they were unable to give it to us. For me and the majority of the CSM at the time the impression was that they weren't refusing to answer our questions out of a desire to keep things a secret but more because they simply didn't know. Questions on the actual function if Incarna were met with surprise as if it was inconceivable that players might want more from the feature than to simply see their character.

All the while CCP have been failing to manage the expectations or control the message regarding an expansion that they presented to the CSM as their 'bet the farm' moment, the expansion that was likely to be the most significant in their history and the most critical to the continued success of their flagship product.

 :awesome_for_real:

Oh shit we're about to see if their forums roll over when the threadnaught hits 256.

http://www.eve-search.com/search/dpf/dev (http://www.eve-search.com/search/dpf/dev)

There you go, although given the current level of communication I wouldn't expect too much from it.

(http://img811.imageshack.us/img811/6166/derpyu.png)

They are clearly overlooking where teh money is, though.

(pay with AUR to get a move on the jump-in queue)

CCP is trying to cash in on micro-transactions (M-T) while double-dipping with monthly subscriptions. Its a risky and bold move for a company, but whatever the outcome is - gamers lose. Next step is to slowly "boil the frog" to the point that M-T are considered mandatory and everyone buys couple 'monocles', because they have to.

Predictably steps to M-T milking are as follows: Get your players invested in the game during early progress, slowly introduce M-T as optional shortcuts around tedious parts mid-game to get them used to the idea, by the end game have M-Ts completely mandatory, with a model where you don't have any limit/cap on how beneficial they are - more you buy "better" it gets.

Can we stop calling these microtransactions, please? I think paying more than retail price of a newly-released AAA game makes them more some sort of...macrotransaction.

If you buy 10 legos for 1 dollar is that a macro transaction or a micro transaction under this new terminology?

legotransaction.

FTFY

$60 price shocker is just a failure of marketing department. It isn't that hard to create 60 different monocles (that you can wear at the same time) and charge 1$ each. CCP are amatures, pros charge less than "enrage price" and donate half to charity so you don't object as much. End result - you still pay for worthless pixels.

I believe the pricing was part of the attempt not to upset the market, as stated.

Sorry, what market? Monocle industry?

If the only way they can add monocles without upsetting the market is to charge $60 for them then they've done something wrong, surely?

Even so, I've resubbed. Got to be there for the next glorious phase in Bat Country's story.

You pick the weirdest goddamned things to be an apologist for, Blood.

Honestly, it's much easier (and probably more correct) to just assume that they're either incompetent or just plain greedy/out of touch with the world. Occam's razor and all that.

Let's go through what CCP has been doing the past 2 weeks.
1) Golden Scorpion. Pay AUR, get ship with paintjob.
2) $99/year "commercial license" just to connect to their API.
3) $70 monocles
4) Devblog from Arnar, senior producer (http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=932)
5) Alleged (but seemingly verified as real) global email from Hilmar, CEO (http://www.evenews24.com/2011/06/25/ccp-hilmar-global-email-shows-the-reasoning-behind-ccp-zulu-devblog/)

Just to emphasize parts of that last URL:


Combine all that with what I believe is very little denial that this is actually the case, and well... yeah.

Edit: Oh, and before I forget, no more shipspinning :ye_gods:

You forgot the line: "After 40 hours we have already sold 52 monocles, generating more revenue than any of the other items in the store."

If you're taking monocle sales figures as proof it's a success, you were not planning on lowering that price quickly. You're pretty much going "jackpot!" and extrapolating sales figures to see if you can maybe sell a few extra lows or mids on ships for $40/pop.

Yes, yes I did. Thanks.

CCP Zulu responds to player concerns (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AObrlCf3Dcs) Via Youtube, from this eve-o thread (http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1538232)

The players reaction is exactly what mine was. I guess the price of pants in Iceland is a lot.

Pfft...figures.  I finally get the gumption to try this game out again and it has to go all 'Viva La Revolution' on me  :awesome_for_real:  At the very least the game's still here, unlike some other sandbox game that recently called it quits.

Still having fun noobing it up, but depending on how this pans out, I guess I'm back to waiting on TOR.

It's really amusing to me because microtransactions were originally about selling things that cost really tiny amounts of money, aned the problem people discussed was that you need some kind of new payment system to handle them, since credit cards don't really work for a $1 charge. The idea was that if you got payments sorted out, you could make money by selling stuff so cheap no one would really notice the cost, and since it's all digital stuff you don't have any per-copy cost. Now they're charging more for one item than the base game costs for a single item, but calling it 'micro' because that's a buzzword.

Also, I have to thank this thread for sticking the phrase $1000 pants into my mind, I had no idea that Icelandic trousers were so expensive.

Mega-transactions.

(http://go-dl1.eve-files.com/media/corp/Entity/distortionfield.png)

One-off profit from selling 52 internet spaceship cybermonocles @ $70 ea. = $3640.
Monthly profit lost from ~1.5K ex-players cancelling their ~3.5K accounts (http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1536495) @ $15/mo. = $52, 500 per month.
CCP = $1000 pants-on-head retarded.   :awesome_for_real:

It is unlikely that ccp are making anything close to that amount of revenue from monocles.

Only veteran empire pubbies with limitless isk are going to be buying them, and they'll be buying plex from the market.

 
CCP will only gain any revenue if there is enough of a material impact in the plex market to encourage more newbies to purchase plex from ccp and sell them for isk.

Personally I can't see there being an impact for years, as plex stocks are enormous - and prices are driven by a very sticky community opinion that 30 days of eve are worth around 350-390Misk. Massive oversupply has not impacted pricing, I doubt that insignificant extra demand will have an impact either.

I don't totally disagree with you but you're forgetting that people can just buy Plex directly and turn it into monocles.   Their end goal is actually to make sure the price of Plex's doesn't go up much at all.

Except bitter vets would never do this because 350Misk is trivial to them and not worth $15.

Cute newbies would never do this because a vanity item means little in a game you have no attachment to.

The only way to break this stalemate is either to burn through the plex stockpile so that prices rise, or introduce non-vanity pay to win RMT so that cute newbies might be tempted.

The market price of plex has been tumbling as speculators had been getting plex ready for a brisk trade in relisting aurum items. Instead the market is very slow, most people just put their plexes back on the market.

I bought a monocle a blouse and a pair of boots and marked them up at 20% over the isk value. The blouse has sold and the monocle has got close, it's been the cheapest a couple of times after other monocles beneath it sold out.

One of the problems is that this monocle is a huge POD ME sign. It's as if CCP looked at the broken bounty system and made it work as long as you voluntarily spend a billion and a half isk to get on everyone's list as primary target.

I hope the next cash shop features includes the ability to put a monocle on another player. I'd love to turn up to the jita protest and stick one on some unsuspecting person then /popcorn while they get devoured by an enraged mob.

Discussing who would buy it is  :uhrr:.   If any of you entertain the notion that you understand with accuracy who would buy one of these things: SEEK HELP.

The monocle costs about the same as a faction BS + fittings, or a few supercap mods. Plenty of people can afford that just for shits and giggles.

I sold a blouse for 600m isk. Looking at the bio of the person who bought it she's a low-sec pirate who just wants to look cool.

The question is how many of the monocles are being sold to troll the people upset about it. It's sales are being assisted by it being the focus of the debate.

... must say though, it also looks really crappy. If I was paying 1.2billion in in-game currency I'd want something that looked a whole bunch more flashy and less like someone had punched a cheap digital watch into my face.

Personally, I give zero fucks about the pricing. I have no plans to use $s to buy anything ever in eve, and ccp's piss poor marketing will slow the inevitable spread of RMT into pay to win items (and therefore delays the day I unsub), so it's all good.

Nobody really cares about the monocle other than as evidence CCP have lost the plot. It's their support for the eventual progression to performance enhancing RMT goods that has people up in arms.

Someone posted on a random blog that Sony is in talks with CCP to buy a controlling interest in the company. NO further information, the blog's been cleared of the text already, and nothing anywhere else. Could be a troll, but the Eve-o forums are flying with it. Smedly did say he was going have to big news on the sandbox front shortly...could this be it?

I see MTs in sub mmorpgs like commercials on cable - greedy suits will push it until it happens, consumers would rather not have it and  when it finally happens it will change entire mmorpg scene for a decade. Just like I don't subscribe to cable, I won't be subscribing to MTs mmorpgs, unfortunately I am in minority.

CCP epic clusterfuck is nothing but a gift to gamers, its effects will make suits pause and perhaps offer gamers lube before ramming MTs up our asses.

(http://www.frogfear.com/monocle.jpg)

I know who

CCP Fallout: i can confirm that SOE has not purchased, nor are we discussing a buyout, of CCP.

http://twitter.com/#!/CCP_Fallout/status/85041773906374656

However, in a different context...

2 Days from now in Iceland

The Mittani: CCP Hellmar , Did you order the Gold Ammo?
CCP Zulu: You *don't* have to answer that question!
CCP Hellmar : I'll answer the question!
[to The Mittani]
CCP Hellmar : You want answers?
The Mittani: I think I'm entitled.
CCP Hellmar : *You want answers?*
The Mittani: *I want the truth!*
CCP Hellmar : *You can't handle the truth!*
[pauses]
CCP Hellmar : Son, we live in a game that has servers, and those servers have to be paid for by players with money. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Selenne? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Eve Online, and you curse the developers. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Eve Online's death, while tragic, probably saved my ability to buy pants. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves games. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at Kugastman, you want me on that Blog, you need me on that Blog. We use words like honor, code, honour. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and posts under the forum of the very game that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you start up a game company, and make your own game. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to.
The Mittani: Did you order the Gold Ammo?
CCP Hellmar : I did the job I...
The Mittani: *Did you order the Gold Ammo?*
CCP Hellmar : *You're Goddamn right I did!*

So they're going to blow more money paying last-minute airline ticket prices to fly people to Iceland than they could possibly have made on monocles.  That's smart.  It wouldn't be a bad investment if doing so would make the disaffected players happy and come back, but I can't imagine anything that they could tell the CSM that would un-clusterfuck this at this point.

Well, wait.  If they told the CSM, "We've hired the best coders in the industry to fix one long-standing problem a week for every week for the next year, all paid for by monocles."  It might work.

But the fact that they haven't done fuck all to fix huge gaping problems in the game for years but still spent the resources to foist this shit on players is just a pure insult to everyone who pays them to play this game.

I love the idea that they have asked people to drop whatever they were doing (such as going to their real workplace) and take a plane to Iceland in the middle of this coming week so they can discuss video games for two days. I'm sure the CSM will turn up though.

I did hear that at least one of them has retired and bought a house with cash, also a puppy.

And a sabre.

The scenario is only missing the local volcano there going active for the third time and grounding all flights, turning these two days into couple weeks. :grin:

Why on earth would you fly a mess of international people over on short notice plane flights to chat about something that could be cleared up in minutes if you'd just give straight answers. Pretty much any answer I can give to that comes up with "we need to get the CSM on message, because our straight answer would cause more rioting"

Maybe they want the CSM to meet the man who owns 30% of CCP, and is undoubtedly driving a lot of this. A convicted criminal and a taile of intrigue, bribery, murder..and Illinois Nazi's. i am not kidding. Mitten's needs to be careful. Or be on a mission from God.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCP_Games (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCP_Games)

CCP hf or CCP Games (Crowd Control Productions) is an Icelandic video game developer and publisher, majority owned by the company's staff and founders, Novator Partners and the American investment fund General Catalyst Partners.[6]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novator_Partners (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novator_Partners)

Novator Partners LLP is an English private corporation, specializing in telecommunications, pharmaceuticals and financial services. In addition, Novator operates a Private Equity Fund and a Credit Opportunities Fund. The company is based in London and led by Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson from Iceland.

The owner or owners of Novator are hiding behind a web of companies which includes companies in places such as Cyprus, Cayman Islands, Delaware, Gibraltar, Tortola (British Virgin Islands), and Luxembourg.[1]

Investigations published in Denmark suggest that the underlying companies are linked to Russian companies.[2]


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B6rg%C3%B3lfur_Thor_Bj%C3%B6rg%C3%B3lfsson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B6rg%C3%B3lfur_Thor_Bj%C3%B6rg%C3%B3lfsson)

Novator Partners, which is managed by Björgólfsson, has bought assets around Eastern Europe. The company's owners are unknown.

Two of Björgólfur's companies, Landsbanki and Straumur, left the Icelandic people with several billions of dollars in debt, when they went bankrupt following the Icelandic Financial crisis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straumur_Investment_Bank (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straumur_Investment_Bank)

The company was mainly owned by Björgólfur Guðmundsson and his son Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson. The latter was also the chairman of the board.

On March 9, 2009, Straumur was nationalised by Icelandic authorities; according to Straumur, its "liquidity position was no longer strong enough to sustain activities".

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-1644916/Icelandic-billionaires-face-the-crunch.html (http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-1644916/Icelandic-billionaires-face-the-crunch.html)

Investment company Samson Holdings, in which Thor and his father were equal partners, owned 41% of Icelandic bank Landsbanki, which was nationalised by the government in Reykjavik last week. The bank stake, worth about £415m, was Samson's only asset and with that investment now thought to be worthless, Samson has been put into administration. The tangled web of Icelandic banks and business means the final price to Thor and his father could take months to emerge.

Later that year during a radio interview, former Icelandic Prime Minister David Oddsson accused him of offering a 300million krona bribe. Bauger refuted the claim. Last year the Icelandic Supreme Court found him guilty of false accounting and passed a threemonth suspended prison sentence.

Landsbanki is the parent of Icesave, the internet bank whose collapse last week threatened 300,000 British account holders, with £4.5billion assets. Mr Gudmundsson's wife, Thora Hallgrimsson, 78, was once married to a Nazi, former US Marine George Lincoln Rockwell.

They were married by her uncle, the Bishop of Iceland, in 1953 and moved to Virginia where Rockwell founded the American Nazi Party. When Icelandic paper DV tried to reveal the Nazi connections in 2005, Mr Gudmundsson tried to buy it in an attempt to stop the story.

http://eyjan.is/2008/10/20/umfjollun-um-tengsl-islendinga-og-russa-ur-russnesku-dagbladi/ (http://eyjan.is/2008/10/20/umfjollun-um-tengsl-islendinga-og-russa-ur-russnesku-dagbladi/)

(Translation, so dodgy to read):

For example, in December 1992, the FAC St. Petersburg mayor’s office has registered a company CJSC «Boltik International» (registration number 3303-AOL), founded by Victor Anitsev and steel company Baltic Group Limited, registered in the anonymous mailbox in the town of Kin Town – the capital of the British Virgin Islands. Virginia offshore belonged – Attention! – Bergolfuru Gudmundsson (Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson) and his son Bergolfuru Toru Bergolfssonu (Bjorgolfur Thor Bjorgolfsson). Now, father and son headed the list of the richest people of Iceland: a son, according to the «Forbes», was the first dollar billionaires and – again attention! – Co-owner of two (of three) grohnuvshihsya, banks Iceland: «Landsban ethicists» (Landsbanki) – desolate, and «Kaupting Bank»-take control of the state.

In March 1995, was established by another company – OOO «Mall« ROSA »(Liteiny Ave, 41), which is less than a year, in February 1996 th, changed the name and address – became known as OOO« Bravo »- and Remmehzavoda moved into the territory, and its leader became Magnus Torsteyns-son, friend and companion is already familiar to us Gudmundsson and Bergolfssona. The next step was the establishment in August 1996, OOO «Bravo International» (December 1997-JSC «Bravo International»). Co-founders made 6 registered at the same address in the Cyprus town of Limassol. President of the company – all the same incredibly active Icelander Tor Bergolfsson.

Finally, in March 1997 the first was established yet and CJSC «Bravo service» (founders – the company «Hyudzh Holding Limited» (one of the same six-Cypriot) and «Bravo International». Gendirektorom the company was Sergei Sanne, now occupies the post of Director Social Policy Ltd. «Evrazholding». Firma «Bravo International» successfully varila beer «Bochkarev» and had no problems in St. Petersburg, and after Anatoly Sobchak in 1996-m lost the election, but Vladimir Putin moved to Moscow. A So those of competitors Icelandic-Russian breweries, however, problems arise time and again. And how! 10 January, 2000 fell victim to killer deputy director of «Baltic» Ilya Weismann, but was killed before the Director General of the dealer company «Baltic» Aslanbek Chochiev. (edit- Holy shit).

A Icelandic businessmen meanwhile shown on Russian soil, all new successes. In March 2000, in St. Petersburg was opened Honorary Consulate of Iceland. And honorary consul was appointed … surprise, surprise! – Yes, the same son-billionaire-banker and president of «Bravo International» Tor Bergolfsson. Honorary Vice-Consul became Magnus Tor-Steinsson. At the ceremony on 10 March was attended by Foreign Minister of Iceland Halldor Ásgrimsson and St. Petersburg Governor Vladimir Yakovlev.


------------------------------------------------------------
Well...that goes down the rabbit hole dosn't it.

Yeikes, I think this explains a lot dosn't it. I'm surprised Evenews24 hasn't done an expose on this before...though maybe they don't want to have to meet the mysterious Russian backers of all this.

Hey Comstar, why do you need to be in Bat Country if you're just contracting things away and unsubbing again?

So I can get go to some stations and check what the fittings are before I give them away.

That and I think I want to fly one more in the defence of Goonswarm - 555t 555 555 5 Command Ship Pilot. At least while there is drama and hilarity to be had. I bought a PLEX card, might as well get some use out of it. Please accept my request? I have some ships I want to lose rather than just give away ALL of them :)

And I just got done purging you.  Fine, you're in again.

psycho

Holy...well. I keep getting amazed this week.

Big new news.

Someone went and got the Official CCP Financial for 2010 from the Icelandic government here (http://www.megaupload.com/?d=F6YJU9QD).


No wounder they felt betrayed.

But don't worry, it gets far far worse.


Ah ha, the pennies drop (http://209.130.195.20/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2522&start=160). I think this explains everything. When in doubt, follow the Money. Unless they convince a bank that investing in an Icelandinc Business is worth while, this thread will end November 1st.


I wounder of CCP is willing to the get the CSM to come to them, so they go into detail of "If we don't charge 25 dollars $US a ship, the game will not exist in a years time. Either support our plans, or the company, game and your free trips to Iceland, are dead by November".

The thing is that even if that comes to pass and they don't get another loan to cover their cash position EVE as it is is still making a profit. More than half their company is not working on EVE and so if they really wanted to they could lay half the company off and just develop EVE.

EVE is beyond a cash cow for them, its the money they're dropping on Dust and WoD that are eating up their profits. If they end that they go positive immediately.

I would actually happily go along with an increase in monthly sub fees to $20 or something to keep up with inflation if it meant that they wouldn't fuck up EVE.

30% of the company is owned by the Icelandic bankrupt, and another 30% by an American Venture Capital corporation. Why the Icelandic convicted criminal is trying to save his house and yet NOT sell his CCP stake must be a very interesting reason. If CCP promised the VC's their money back based on DUST AND WoD coming out AND an X level of money from Eve, and now X is dropping rapidly, the VC's may have given CCP no option but to try to gain as much money from their...customers...as they can.

The Mittani on Eve Radio sounded mystified why Himlar and CCP Zulu was acting the way they were. Perhaps they are acting that way because they have a metaphorical gun to head - Increase their cash flows by a massive amount in 4 months, or company goes bankrupt, and their jobs and positions with it. Desperate times have called for desperate measures, and paying for the CSM to fly to Iceland, rather than just fold to the player demands like they did not 2 weeks ago, is a sign of that.

Friday's meeting is going to be VERY interesting. The Mittani now has their financial records to look at for a day beforehand and may have to make a choice- does he do what his players want, or does he allow CCP to survive?

Someone should get John Grisham to write this as a novel.

Is there a recording of this eve radio session?

As to CCP's actions, they've changed radically the last year, so I wouldn't be surprised if they really are in a pickle, but it annoys me that, if it is a question of money, they haven't just gone out and upped the subs by, say, $5. It has been a while since they set that price, and inflation has happened, after all.

Exactly. If they are not willing to do that, I am sure Icelandic Bankruptcy courts will be happy to do that for them.

Plus, having existing player base that already maintains profitable title, pay for development of new titles via directly/indirectly increased costs is bad practice. Where is added value to existing customers?

Eve is not worth $20 a sub.  It is not our responsibility as players to bail out CCP.  Years of bad practices may at last cost the company.  I do not especially desire CCP's failure.  They have simply burned all the trust and good will on my part years ago.  For me, EVE is broken and shows no sign of improvement.  Why would I help bail out other projects which may not be of interest?  What incentive is there?  The promise of a better tomorrow?  Plenty  businesses have failed for lesser reasons.

I would happily point and laugh at the flaming corpse while pulling faces. CCP brought all this on themselves, it's nobody else's fault.

*shrug* I would assume that I'm not all that representative of, say, the active empire players, but I think the majority of the 0.0 holders would probably have no major issue with $20. On the whole, however, your reaction would probably be the most common, so I guess that CCP is just hosed with the direction they're taking both EVE and the company.

I'm waiting to see what they've got planned for the winter expansion, or at the absolute latest, next summer's expansion. If they still haven't fixed the SOV system so that a proper strategist can out-feint his opponent (instead of just stuffing a system full of people, grind through 4-6 timers (I forget the exact number), and move on to the next system), and supercapitals continue to be a growing problem, then I guess this is an MMO that has gone past its best-before date. Oh well, guess it's time to go back to being slightly more hard-core about photography again. I'll probably spend way more in petrol and road taxes etc than I did on EVE, not to mention I'll be ~polluting more~. vOv

CCP your RMT is killing the planet.

I doubt if $20 would make a significant difference to the current playerbase, but it would probably grind recruiting new customers to a dead stop unless the rest of the industry followed suit.

You are fooling yourself if you think CCP is going to fairydust fix SOV or anything else actually wrong with 0.0.  The system has gotten worse, not better.  The entry barrier keeps getting higher.  In 0.0 people just get used to living in shit and roll up an alt or two for empire funds.  Why would CCP change anything if people tolerate it?  They get more subs and 0.0 sits there unfixed.

The thing is, they have hinted at changes. God knows what those changes are going to be, however, but I'm going to keep the bitter from taking over until after we've seen what those plans are, and more importantly if they can actually be arsed to follow through with it instead of just going "ooh shiny" and adding a new incursion-like feature instead of adding treaties.

As I said, my patience isn't going to be boundless, if they do not fix the SOV system etc within the next 12 months to make it as strategic as it used to be, with a tug-of-war mechanic (some have suggested DAoC's model) for taking over systems, then chances are I'm going to take a break for a while and see if things still keep deteriorating.

You're chasing rainbows Tgr, no offence.

I'm well aware of the rather high likelyhood of that being the case, which is why I've set a clear criteria for not unsubbing. I'm not going to go all superbitter and rageunsubbing right now, but I'm not going to stick around forever if they insist on careening down this path.

If it's true it's pretty silly to run your company into the ground over something in the end you can't even show the design doc for.

If they screw over EVE doesn't that screw over Dust as well since the big selling point is being tied to EVE?  If EVE numbers drop that's less people interacting with Dust players and it just becomes another cookie cutter fps?

I would say so, so I would say that it'd be in their interest to not fuck this up more than it already is.

While I can sort of understand where the angst is coming from, not having been a part of EVE over the years myself, I find most of this rage a bit out of proportion.

I mean, people on the forums are going way to far. I was reading the newbie forum and here is an example of the crap people are spewing.


This is just silly, yet I see this attitude represented time and time again. Do these people not realize that due to PLEX pretty much everything you can buy for Isk, is also RTM? It is just sort of boggling to me.

I personally hope they do implement a few things like maybe remapping, and/or bloodline respec for AUR.

If you thought people on the internet wouldn't overreact, then I have a bridge in San Fransisco to sell to you. :grin:

CCP

The Mittens interview & ex-CSM discussion is at http://www.eve-radio.com/podcast-download (http://www.eve-radio.com/podcast-download)

Eve's official forums are even worse than most official MMO forums. It also has a culture of trolling (even more than others), so some people will be trying to provoke particularly insane outbursts from others for their own amusement.

But you're right, the rage is quite a sight to behold.

The rage is a combination of the normal rage of "you want to put microtransactions into my monthly fee MMO?!" that would die off in a week, and the pricetags involved. RMT is always going to cause a minor shitstorm when announced, it's just stupid to announce it and flagship the product with a $60 item. And then respond with the absolute worst PR statements in the history of community management (why are you so upset? Idiots buy $1000 designer jeans!) and the dumbest internal communications ever being leaked.

Basically, it would have been a week long ragefest followed by $$$ from vanity microtransactions to pimp your spaceship... but ::CCP::

Are they selling any ship decorations yet? I really would spend serious money to paint my stupid freighter. :awesome_for_real:

Exactly. Sell ship details and paintjobs for $1, and you'll be fucking RICH. Sell monocles for $60 and you'll.. well.. you'll be CCP.

You can skip the first two hours of this. It only gets interesting around the time Hilmar's email leaks.

The email is mentioned at 2:25.

Good luck to you sir.  'They' have hinted at changes for YEARS.  There are piles of backburner, unfinished and abandoned projects.  Hell, they do not even have documentation.  Ongoing developments have convinced me even beyond the '18 months' bit that they have no plan to address anything on my own concerns list even if they say they do.  If the game remains fun for you keep playing it until it is not.  Do not play a game for years that you do not like hoping that it gets better.  It won't.

P2W or PfA is significantly different than RMT. Real money transfer is not an issue for the in game economy, things have to be purchased and the automatic stabilizers that are present within the system [specific NPC trade goods] makes a stable price system that RMT cannot disrupt. The long and short of it is that with automatic stabilizers, so long as everything that is bought and sold is created within the system, "real money" is just another currency.

But it is not the case with P2W. In this case, if in game advantages can be purchased outside of the game economy then you have significant disruption in the distribution of advantages. Specifically what will happen is an increase in the price in plex as the supply for consumption relative to demand dries up. But more importantly, as the price of plex increases the relative price of paying real money for advantages decreases.

The prospect of this, to people who finance their in game activities with in game activities is that, in order to keep up with the rest of the game [and let us not kid ourselves that a few % points of advantage, stacked on top of each other, in a game of real losses are entirely significant] the cost of playing will rise substantially. [edit: sentences added] The simple act of trading isk between people cannot do this. All that happens is that one persons accrued advantage is transferred to another person. By adding purchasable advantage to the other currency [and only the other currency] you now allow prices to reflect the relative marginal advantages. And with EVE, the margin of advantages is increasing.

These players are EVE's greatest assets. It is not the players that play casually that make EVE what it is, because players that play casually do not create the drama, they do not provide the experiences that others crave. It is the people who take time and plan, who "play seriously". As you implement P2W you make it more difficult for these players to play the game and that is a seriously foolish situation.

Don't get me wrong, there is a place for a cash shop in EVE. But its simply will not happen in the way that it ought to. The majority of players who will purchase items are "peacocks". They buy because they want to look cool. But creating materials for peacocks is not cheap, it is in fact quite expensive because you have to commit yourself to continually create new art assets. [edit: sentences added] These resources do not exist within the EVE team. Art asset creation is almost exclusively for Dust and WoD. In order to make this happen there would need to be a radical shift in the structure of CCP or new hiring. Hiring that they don't have the money for[end edit]The next player after that is the one who is in it for advantages. But creating advantages are cheap, they require few, if any art assets, and are relatively easy to implement.

If there were no plans for a PfA/P2W cash shop then it would be no big deal, but there clearly are. We have their internal documents which show there are, we have reports from people who have worked there that confirm that that is the way they work and we still can't get a confirmation as to just where the cash shop will end. I mean, if they came and said "we are going to sell you a new paintjob for your thorax for $1" it would have been a big hit. But they didn't, they came and said "we are going to sell people advantages, such that keeping up will become ever more expensive".

I agree with some of what you said, but at its core the fact that PLEX = Isk means that everything in game is P2W(to a simplified extent). Now, if they remove AUR from being able to be purchased with PLEX, then we have a real problem. But the fact is, right now, anything they put in the cash shop is still purchasable with Isk.

They have already said "No gold ammo". Also, I think you are putting words in their mouth to an extent.

Now, I said I understand that people are upset that RTM is getting mixed up in their subscription game, and CCP has handled this HORRIBLY. Like about as bad as they could handle it. But really, I can buy a rifter with Isk, or Isk I got from a PLEX which I paid for.

If they price this stuff out of reach of the pure Isk buyers, then thats a whole different issue.

Except that no, its not. The ability to buy isk with money does not make it P2W, the same advantage is accrued, the only difference is to whom it goes. Arguably it is a better situation because it allows those players who would otherwise not be able to play the game for free, to finance their play by trading some of their advantages. [and this is a very strong argument in this case]

But that is not the case when the items and advantages are created outside of the game world. That breaks the "strict transfer" situation that is going on. This is because no longer does the advantage need to be accrued by someone playing the game, but also the ability of those people who do play to trade their effort for advantage is lessened.

It is, in all ways that are important, significantly different. The fact that "some people pay money to others" doesn't matter. Bitching about that is like bitching about "welfare queens and their Cadillacs". The issue is not that "someone else got something for free" [not that they do, they clearly paid for it]. The issue is the effects it has on the economy and the players.

They can't price stuff in reach of pure Isk buyers. It is more or less impossible.

Advantages in EVE are of an increasing marginal kind. The first 5% of advantage is not nearly as strong as the last 5% of advantage. This is both because advantages are multiplicative stacking and because the advantages are more or less binary [I.E. you die or you don't] and can even be recursive on top of that [I.E. the number of times you survive].

This means that every small advantage is insanely valuable, its why 5% implants are so much more expensive than 3% implants, its faction ammo(and t2 long range) [the kind you can actually acquire in enough quantity to fit into a ship] is the defacto ammo despite being the most expensive ammo that you can purchase in any quantity.

If they make the advantages that you can purchase cheap in terms of real dollars then the people who would otherwise sell their plex for ISK are going to slow the rate at which they do so. Why will they slow? Because why would they sell a plex to attain isk advantages when the advantages from direct purchase are stronger and also cheaper? At the same time, those people who want to purchase these items[and will be almost required to do so because of their relative advantage] will want to buy plex. So we have increasing demand and decreasing supply.

Do we have a guess at where the prices will equalize? We can guess by other comparable bonuses and a theoretical dollar cost of the item. [the higher the dollar cost and higher the comparable bonuses the more isk we assume to cost]. If something costs $5 then right now we have 1/4 of a plex in cost, so 100m isk. But do we really expect prices to stay the same with increasing demand and decreasing supply? No, we don't.

TLDR:

If you use Plex to buy ISK to buy ships, your still limited to the number of ships other players can make.

If the CCP RMT store sells ships directly, they can sell you infinity ships.



Did I get the jist of it?

Holy Crap, I ignore this subforum for a few weeks and I miss such a delicious boil of hate!   :drill:

Must digest information, will have comments later...

That is certainly a large part of it, yes. 

Skill points for isk....that would give them a nice short term income.

My head hurts trying to figure out what that would do to the game.   The whole plex->aur thing makes it really convoluted.

Everyone with disposable incomes will rule New Eden.  Every other player will either quit out of rage/despair from no longer being on a level playing field or will say "Challenge Accepted" and keep playing in an attempt to beat the rich folks.  The rich will either win by using their money to buy power-ups and advantages that overcome their inability to play Excel In Space, or will complain to CCP that they'll take their money and run if CCP doesn't fix the imbalance of how they're loosing to these 'chump players'.

Increase the price of PLEX but not much else. You're basically advancing time for you and no one else, so it makes it easier to be a newbie.

Also reduces the value of characters heavily[since if i want a minnie BS 5 pilot i can just trade in the plex to get the skills instead of finding a character that has what I want]

It is kinda strange since training is one of the main advantages of subscribing. It might seriously reduce alt-accounts [at least ones that don't need to multi-box, since you could just buy the skills on your other 2 char slots]

It will also make anonymity much easier when you can whip up a fresh new character with no history that has the skills you need.

Theoretically, as a newbie I would spend some dollars to buy all the skills needed for T2 everything and carrier pilot, then some more dollars -> plex and try to sell the plexes for ISK cause now I need the ships I just trained for, then some more dollars -> plex cause I undocked and lost the ships due to being clueless about game mechanics, and then in a week or so when I realize that none of the major alliances or good corps will have me, I'd quit.  Because the EVE game itself kinda sucks, and is not really worth paying a subscription for if you already "have everything."

CCP would get a huge influx of cash now, but everyone who's currently emo-raging about how they suck would be able to actually cancel subscription once they get the skills and ships they want.  Then CCP would have to deliver content and quality in order to keep people playing.  Or, if it's the community that's making the content, CCP would have to keep the community happy.

That's oversimplifying.  A bunch of stuff would happen.

- An amount of people would rage and quit.
- Plex prices would go up by some amount due to people buying them for AUR.
- An amount of people would quit due to plex prices going up.
- Plex prices would go down due to all the people that quit not buying them.
- Plex prices would go back down due to people buying more when the isk value is higher.
- Some new/old people would try out the game if they could buy skill points with isk.

I seriously doubt they'd just sell raw skill points of course.   They'll probably sell skill acceleration or some such though.

What it would also do is ratchet up the supercapital arms race in 0.0 to a ridiculous pace, unless making a specialized 30m sp guy costs more than a few thousand dollars.

The only thing stopping 300 vs 300 supercapital fights is mineral supply.

EVE guys to fly the supercaps are already ten a penny, so is production capacity. The only constraint is the cost of materials (and the fact that DBRB is allowed in capswarm).

Uhh no. Demand shifts do not cause supply shifts. [re the second point]. And demand shifts that increase demand do not cause people to buy less. People may get pushed out of the market, but only because they're replaced by others

Why?  Because if you get more ISK per plex then you need to buy less plex?  I guess it is a bit more complicated than at first thought.  That's why I said this makes my head hurt.


That's exactly what I said.   They'd quit (get pushed out of the market).   Thing is in this case they won't come back if the price drops again.

Slopes for the slope throne!

(https://www.eveger.de/serverstatus/serverstatus_p_month_server_1.png?date=050002)

CCP won't be happy to see that that after such a well hyped expansion.  Looks like all the forum raeg has followed through to player actions for once, sorry Hilmar.  Although the decline might just be players who had their video cards melted by the Captain's Quarters.

I wonder how the Perpetuum subs compare to that graph.  Tried it myself but didn't sub, it seems really....not good. (Insert joke about EVE being terrible here.)

The newbie systems are currently flooded with new players right now. I don't know if its normal, but most of the "secondary" newbie systems, the ones with the 5 newbie agents seems to have around 200 players in local at prime time. I was in one of the Amarr systems and the Minmatar one. Both flooded with new players.

I think EVE might have gotten a bump from SWG closing down.

A demand curve, if you want to be very technical, is a set of people and their corresponding preferences. The amount the set is willing to purchase at a price is what makes up the curve.

A demand shift to the right [or an increase] occurs when either people are willing to buy more plex at any given price or when more people are willing to buy at any given price. So if we have a situation where we have increased demand we are explicitly positing that there are now more people that will purchase at any given price.

So when we say that people would get pushed out of the market, we aren't talking about a price decline. These are people who no longer purchase because someone else is buying what they want at a higher price. But definition their exit cannot reduce the price because they must have been replaced by someone willing to pay more.

E.G. lets you are buying good X and there are a total of 2 units for sale at price Y. Someone else comes along and offers a Y+1. They buy it and now you no longer have that good. The fact that you no longer are in the market [at price = Y+1 ] doesn't matter because someone else is there and paying more.

Lets say that there is someone else willing to sell good X so long as the price is Y+10. And then lets say someone else comes along an offers Y+10. Again the fact that you left, or that that person entered the market, as a result of a price change cannot lower the price.

The only people who will be entering the market to sell plex as a result of price increasing will be demanding higher prices than the current price and therefore this cannot cause a price reduction. If they were not demanding higher prices than the current price they would already be selling plex. The only people who will not be purchasing plex will not be purchasing because someone else was willing, for more money, to purchase that same plex. Thefore the increase in people willing to buy plex cannot have any effect in reducing the price.

Draw an X, supply is the upward sloping, Demand is the downward sloping. Move the demand curve to your right. The interception is the price and quantity. The supply schedule doesn't change, price increases, quantity increases.

The newbie systems are pretty perpetually busy, those numbers don't look out of the ordinary.

Cannot reduce the price in the present you mean.   In essence in this case a temporary demand increase could lower future demand.   Like if you were a food seller it would be rather dumb to starve a large chunk of your customers to death even if it somehow gave you a massive short term gain.

Considering Eve's reputation as  sandbox, you're probably right - CCP will grab a few subs from those who can live with Eve's "different" take.

You're positing two shocks to demand and using as an example shocks to supply... you should quit while you're behind.

The price increases from people wanting to buy more cannot "starve people out of the market" because it is achieved by people willing to buy more stuff at any given price. They were bought out of the market and will continue to be bought out of the market.

You can search for #csm6 on twitter to follow the CSM meetings going on right now at CCP if interested.

Why?  The example we're discussing is only a temporary increase in demand by definition.  How can you possibly make some argument like you KNOW with 100% certainty that the price will not drop down to normal prices again in any example anyways?   Also I'm not arguing I don't know that much about econ I'm actually asking about all this so there's no "quitting while I'm behind".   If I sound like I'm arguing I'm merely totally baffled how you keep discussing econ like it's a science.

I'm no expert on designing hardware but it strikes me that if you design a video card that can melt if it's fed the wrong instructions by software, the problem really lies with the card.

Relevant: http://treborofthecsm.blogspot.com/2011/06/peace-talks-day-one.html

It's a mixture of both, likely it can fixed easily with an Ati driver update but CCP need to at least warn people in big letters to update these drivers before patching. If they didn't then they are a really fucking irresponsible shower & it's just boot.ini all over again. Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice..

Yea, we had this talk with CCP about many issues.  We cannot talk about it but you should feel better.  Expect a devbog sometime.  We will talk more tomorrow.

Lots of words to say they are discussing all facets of the issues and CCP will be blogging again soon.

The only reason I can think of that the first question wasn't "is PaytoWin coming", would be if the CSM is going to surrender the Sudentaland tomorrow.

There's a setting in the EVE control pannel that lets you specify "Interval = immediate" and I'm guessing it forces the drivers to bypass some of the "protection" measures built in.  Hardware has no choice but to execute software commands, and you have the card manufacturer being a separate entity from the DirectX spec designers being a separate entity from CCP.

Turns out surrendering Czechoslovakia takes more than 1 day - it's going to take an entire extra day to write the final text.

Thats funny, it took me 30 seconds.

"Don't worry. We're here to tell you that CCP listened to us. Everything is fine. Trust us. Trust CCP."

Never has such a half assed company demanded such quasi-religious levels of trust.

They're going to take all this time to carefully write this reply that's supposed to fix everything and then they'll discover that:

- it takes way more effort than one blog to fix the crap they've gotten themselves into
- just like they ignore the forums and look at subscription numbers, we also don't trust them and will look at what they do not what they say, and not in 18 months either

So, yeah whatever.

This and other posts inspired me to make this:

(http://i.imgur.com/gdFpV.jpg)

1) Economics is a science. It follows the scientific method. It is as much a science as any other science that must use possibly unreliable readings, such a climate science, or physics. The difference is that with economics, contrary to physics, you cannot ethically build experiments, which means you must use natural experiments and statistical analysis, precisely the same way as climate scientists use natural experiments and statistical analysis. You not understanding what science is does not make it less science.

Now it can certainly be harder to get precise measurements but again, that is like saying that physics wasn't a science 200 years ago because they couldn't measure as precisely. Or that we can't look at the constant of gravity because the mass of the earth is constantly changing as material is added[asteroids] or subtracted[venting/launching stuff into space] which will change the mass of the earth and therefore change the constant of gravity.

2) You have posited an increase in demand because people are willing to buy more and pay more. The people who "leave" the demand curve cannot have an effect on the price due to those shifts, because after the shift, they aren't buying anyway. Its as if every WoW player who did not play EVE said "MT in EVE, well i never. I will no longer play that game!". They aren't playing the game anyway, so it can't make a difference. People who have been priced out of the market for plex not buying plex doesn't change the price of plex.

It is only if you can posit why people who are explicitly willing to buy more plex would change their behavior after prices rise. This doesn't make sense because we explicitly listed their changed preference to buy more plex at a higher price in the assumption of demand increasing. If they were not willing to why would they do it originally?

Now it may be the case that demand doesn't increase and supply doesn't decrease. But there is no reason to suspect that, it is certainly less likely than the other theory that demand will increase and supply will decrease if you can buy in game advantages with plex.

http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=935

I dig how the first few comments in that are spinning new conspiracy theories.



BTW, no streaming client? For shame. Took me hours using steam.  :oh_i_see:

Economics is not a science. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics)  It is a social science (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_sciences) (ie applying scientific rigor to something that's not science).

This is what I mean and am saying poorly I think.   They won't change the price of the plex later.   I don't know what marketing terms you use for that.   The market can go back down and they won't be there anymore.   They will have quit and thus the theoretical demand that they once represented will be gone.

Hmm why doesn't it make sense?   We're talking about them selling skill points right?  Again I don't know the marketing terms but isn't that clearly a case where demand would spike then drop down?

Seeing how the various WoW databases can pull it off, I reckon they could make it a web applet thing. 90% of the playerbase wouldn't likely miss the rest of the game attached to it, anyway :why_so_serious:

Social sciences are science! By your definition, phsyics is not a science because it is applying scientific rigor[formal science] to study something not science [natural science], and neither is biology[life science] or engineering [applied science]. Actually out of all of those fields, the applied is the only one you might have a chance of arguing as "not science".

What makes something science is not what is studied. What makes something science is how it is studied.


If that is what you're saying then you're not saying what you think you're saying.

If they are pushed out of the market it doesn't matter. If the market goes back down. Wait, why would the market go back down? Didn't we just say that people would be willing to buy more at any given price? Why would people stop buying on their previous demand schedule? Except for another shock to the system?

And why would people not come back if it became profitable to do so, you can get a free 4 hour resub to get plex and apply it to your account. Why would people not restart if prices fell?

Now we were not talking about buying skillpoints. But that should not matter anyway. Since people would expect a demand spike they would be able to prepare and ride it out. I.E. if people think prices are going to fall and they will, then they won't leave the market, they will just delay purchase

What we were actually talking about is selling advantages. Things like "+5% damage for your account for x time"

Only casually following the whole mess, but 70$ for a virtual monocle? What the fucking hell? Also, the leaked CEO e-mail was fucking hilarious.

Read the CSM/CCP joint release today.  Talk about some killer brainwashing  :uhrr:.  The CSMs even acknowledge the leaked email about the monocle success and how it reeked of pure evil, but then everything else is candy-canes and gum-drops?  All is forgiven?

/cave johnson

"We're done here."

What?  Science means natural science in this context .    You can't honestly claim that you don't know what people mean when they say economics is not a science.   You've clearly heard the point before based on how defensive you got over it.

Ahh but that's all I was talking about.    Your points on what they could do instead are well taken.    Some of it I hadn't even considered obviously and that shows Economics is not totally a waste of time at least :).   As to why they won't come back that's a pretty huge topic but there's plenty of research to show that players who quit on bad terms are far less likely to return.

Biology is not a "natural science". You cannot seriously claim that people don't mean "science" when they say "science" because I am pretty sure you said "science" and not "the natural sciences".  It means study by way of the scientific method.


fair enough. But again, if people have a reason to think its temporary they will smooth their consumption.  That is to say that if they think the price will be lower in the future they will buy in the future. And while "selling skillpoints" may push people out of the game, it is not the demand shift that would do it, at least not as it makes sense to think about a demand shift.

A good way to think about it would be like this.

Let us call demand at t=0 to be d(q)=q [where d(q) is the demand function generating price from quantity, and q is quantity, and t is time). and demand at t=2 to be d(q)=q+2. If we are saying that t=1 is the event that causes the shift, I.E. the introduction of selling skillpoints then we cannot disentangle the effects from people saying "fuck this" and quitting with the effects of people saying "well, i kinda want to buy skillpoints" and then doing so.

The sum total of those effects is made up in the "+1". Because they happen at the same time, and are "one off" effects, it is actually impossible to tell which effect is which (statistics! :argh:) But what happens at t=1? Well, if people expect that the price at t=2 is going to be "q+1" then they aren't going to pay more for it at t=1 and so we expect that d(q) is going to equal q+1 at t=1.

Now this ignores present value discounting and some amount of irrationality. BUT we can say that the people who quit because of the "fuck selling skillpoints effect" aren't going to be those moderating the strength of the temporary demand shock. The entirety of the people who are moderating the strength of the temporary demand shock are doing so because they want to keep playing the game, they just think the price is too high at this moment. This gives us some amount of leeway in our expectations, we expect a spike then falloff [because of present value discounting] and we expect some amount of volatility from irrationality [I.E. some people not realizing the price will fall and what this means for what decision they should make]

If selling skillpoints was only a temporary effect then I could see your point[there would be a spike and then prices would eventually return to normal as things corrected]. But we don't have a good reason to believe this. Skillpoint selling would be useful not only to people immediately, but also to people in the future. For all the people who don't know what they want to train and then figure it out, to all the people who join later, to all the people who do not need fully trained characters now, but might in the future. These people will mean that after some initial shock of backlog, there is still going to be an increased demand.

And because of it we can still expect increased prices. And we don't expect it to fall in demand because we have "pushed people out of the market". Those people who are pushed out of the market simply don't matter anymore since someone is there to buy more plex in their stead. [that is, so long as we assume the net shock would be positive]

Biology is barely a natural science.  I say barely only because you need to constantly remind those guys that they can't go applying their specific case data/models all over the place.

Not when I'm looking down my nose at you it doesn't!  You social science people need to learn your place!  :why_so_serious:  Seriously though my original point with the Science snark is you say things like they are fact or easily predictable in a way that breaks down my ability to even follow what you are saying.

Like this.  You've stated as fact that people wouldn't be pushed out of the game via a demand shift.   When you do this my programmer brain just says Garbage in garbage out.   I don't think you mean to do that but what does thinking about a demand shift mean in this context?   Why does doing that throw out the central point of the argument?

Isn't this going to introduce a huge degree of error?  I mean that makes sense in a market situation.   This is a cash shop though.   Extremely high financial irrationality is guaranteed.

Not to be rude, but if you knew anything about statistics and measurement you would know that what we can determine empirically about social behavior is no more or less "easily predictable" than what we can do with physics. [part of this is a problem with determining precision within systems that operate in two different units, the other part is a remark on the problems of precision with regards to the truth]. The world is not likely to be an invertible function. Once you accept that there can be multiple theories that can explain the recorded data[either due to imprecision or due to simply a plurality of possible situations] the "natural sciences" are just as wobbly as the rest of the group.

Now, we may not view them in that manner [for a number of reasons, both good and bad]. But formally? We don't even have a way of saying whether or not one is any more or less true than any other, we can only make judgments within relate-able units[which we don't have]


So how about we think of supply and demand in a different way. Do not think of them as functions, think of them as sets. The demand set consists of ordered tripples. The information recorded in the first slot, is the person, in the second slot is a price, and the third slot is the quantity that that person will purchase at that price. When you call the "demand function" you are simply getting the number of people and quantity that they will purchase at that price.

If we mapped that function we would have a curve. The supply set is the exactly the same way except that it relates the quantity people would be willing to sell at any given price.

The demand curve will tend to slope down because there are few goods where people want to buy more as the price gets higher. Individuals might, but as an aggregate, very rare. For the same reason, supply slopes up. People are operating under constraints and so no matter what the last good is more expensive than the first.

A "Demand shift" can be thought of as sliding the curve or changing the components of the set. This is what is important in this context. "Selling Skillpoints" will have two effects. It will cause people to say "fuck it" and leave the game immediately and it will cause people to want to purchase more plex at any given price level. The people who get "priced out of the market" but didn't leave because "fuck selling skillpoints" are still in the set. If the market changes so that their price returns, they're going to start buying again.

What you seem to be saying is that as the price increases, some of those people will leave the set and not return. I.E. lets say that you will buy plex so long as they are under 300m isk. And the price moves to 350m isk. For what you say to be true, you would have to say "350m isk, no way will i pay that, since its so high right now, i will only pay 250m isk!". Otherwise, once the price fell from 350 to 300, you would start buying. If you're not, we are left to wonder what happened to change your preferences.  The current price should not have any effect on the price you're willing to pay.

Now, it may not be the case that something has a net positive demand shift. But we don't have any reason to believe that this would not. Do you really believe that selling skillpoints will cause so many people to leave that the people buying skillpoints with plex would not flood the people not doing so? If so then we aren't talking about a positive shift, we are talking about a negative shift and its not because of prices, its because the effect of the change was actually negative.

aside on equlibirum:
So if we combine these two aspects we are left with the price and quantity in the market being roughly a function of the sets of supply and demand.

And we are comparing demand tomorrow and supply tomorrow with demand today and supply today.

So if we are explicitly saying that demand is increasing [and we are] and we are explicitly saying that supply is not increasing [and we are] we can explicitly determine that prices will rise, and not fall.

The question is simply "do we expect demand to rise".

You seem to be implying that we cannot determine that, or that we cannot determine what demand will look like in the future. This is not true, we may not be able to determine precisely the price and quantity, but we aren't trying either, we just want to know if its going to go up or if its going to go down.




Irrationality has a very specific definition which is not easily achieve. We may think that people are behaving irrationally because we see them make "stupid" decisions, but what we are observing is probably not irrational. Irrationality has much more to do with inconsistency than it does with making stupid decisions.

Irrationalities are much more akin to inconsistencies. For instance if you measure a persons discount rate for a future month, then measure it again some time in the future[for the same month you measured earlier], its probably going to change [change that cannot be attributed to changes in the general condition of the world]. If you ask someone if they prefer x to y and they tell you y, then adding z to that set and asking them to choose between x, y, and z may yield the answer x. If you ask someone the same question, but frame it in a different way[with regards to profit/loss] people will change their answer. People also seem unable to comprehend very small or very large probabilities[but are very good at dealing with probabilities closer to 50/50] so long as they're not actually zero or 1. They overestimate small probabilities and underestimate large ones.

These are irrationalities. "Bad decisions" generally aren't.

The fact that we are dealing with a cash shop doesn't matter. The irrationalities we would deal with would have to deal with how people discount the future value of products and how that discounting value changes.

You don't know anything about my knowledge of statistics and measurement.   *I* haven't even discussed that topic or even said anything to imply my knowledge of that topic.  So yea stop being rude for no reason.   

That's a point I'm not willing to agree with.   There is far too much evidence showing people who leave under duress will not come back to an MMO without the passage of a lot of time or a large incentive.   So thus they are not still in the set.  They will not return if their price returns.

There are so many things causing a possible change of price preference here.   Social implications of leaving a group and being out of touch with it.   Anger at being forced to leave.   Getting out of the habit.   Desire to see friends you haven't seen lately.  Nostalgia.  Some good some bad.  The list goes on for a long time.   How can there possibly be any wonder at the concept that their preference will change.   Considering our lack of brain reading devices we can only fall back on empirical evidence which says many won't come back.

Honestly how many times on this specific point do I have to agree with you before you'll stop rehashing it?  I've agreed like four times now.

Jesus fucking christ please stop the Goumindong mirror match now.

Maybe you two shousl start your own thread about abacuses and internet space ships and have yoru discussion there? Just a suggestion.

The rest of us just want to enjoy the rage and suffering. Is that too much to ask?  :cry2:

Yes.

They stopped raging at EvE Online since they're a bunch of muppets so I had to create more suffering here.  :why_so_serious:   I'll stop though.   On a new topic why the hell is Mittani ok with this nonsense where they are going to keep working on Incarna instead of spaceships?

His statement was something along the lines of, "Nothing is going to stop CCP doing it". It's effectively a tech demo for their new Dust/WoD engine and they're deeply invested in getting those two flops products out to market.

I decided on the ragequit thing (in as much that I didn't really rage) a few days ago, I just don't trust CCP and will wait it all out a bit to see what happens (and if they actually do bring a hanger back in).

Now, with my $45 that I don't spend on 3x Eve subs anymore, should I buy a WoW sparkle pony and vanity pups or a fair few TF2 hats and weapons? :D

I guess if they are so invested they can't even take a break in this crisis I'm going to stay unsubbed too.   It will be interesting to see the server activity in a couple weeks.  Seems like most of the muppets are resubbing though.

Yeah. Seriously the words "battered wives syndrome" kept coming into my head when I was reading the threads on EveO

I got that feeling from reading the CSM statement even.  Did they even accomplish anything or did they just go and get drunk and sent home happy?  Most of the statements are things that had been said before anyways.

They do seem to have got a guarantee that CCP aren't going to sell items in the cash shop that give an advantage in-game to the owner. That was the main concern for a lot of people.

"an unfair advantage". :awesome_for_real:

Except that they didn't, they got told they currently have "no plans to introduce any game-affecting virtual goods".  So if tommorow they make plans to start selling gold ammo they never lied.  That CSM/CCP joint statement was really dissapointing.

From his column (http://www.tentonhammer.com/eve/spymaster/61), he seems to have drank the cool aid in terms of its ability to bring new players to the game. I've never bought that, but at least when Incarna was a fantasy that we hadn't seen, it was a plausible position to take.

What I can't understand though is how anyone could look at the actual product and think it had any future. To me, with the clunky performance, massive card melting system requirements, and obvious bad design elements (like the coffee table you bump into) it looks like a system that needs to go back to a blank sheet of paper. If this was an alpha and I was an investor, I'd take the loss as a writeoff and shut it down.

Eh, it's not that bad. Settings that cause performance problems can be optimized/deselected, and small niggly things like the coffee table can be designed out if they're made aware of it. Literally the only thing that annoys me about CQ is 1) it's not voluntary, and 2) WHY CAN'T I RUN.

You have to learn to walk before you can run  :why_so_serious:

and, well

Whoever came up with that, kudos.

The big problem with Incarna as new player draw is that the players who'll be attracted by this shit will have a continual big interest in the avatar part of the game. And most importantly, like to customize. If you're being taxed a Jackson for every pair of virtual socks, they'll be put off.

If there's one thing other games have proven it's that there's no limit to the willingness of people to exchange their money for pixi-crack. Provided the Nex is stocked with a "prices for all" range it'll work.


Mittani's column was spot on for me. The message of "adapt or die" is clear. I've had no problem with either performance or "card melting" but I understand that others have. As a first step, Incarna must be taken as such.

I'd rather CCP worked on a more accessible Eve and tolerate the development bugs (like an mmorpg) than have them bury what is a great game even deeper in its corner until no “outsider” can see nor would want to see through the dense shadows.

All this discussion of what Incarna is going to do feels awfully optimistic.   The idea is fine but CCP seems to have an institutional problem with creating good client code.   Space stuff is easy on the computer specs at least.

Asking your customers to upgrade their equipment for great new gameplay graphics is one thing. Forcing an upgrade for a cosmetic and useless addition to the game that your customers want to be optional anyway is a poorly managed transition. But then isn't that CCP all over.

The ideal way to do it (and tbh I'm not sure why they didn't do this to start with) would be so you dock and retain the shipspinning/etc interface, and you can select to disembark and enter the station interface.

Best of both worlds.

(Additionally, I'm not sure if having the CQ interface set at MAXIMUM QUALITY as default is exactly the best strategy ever to take, maybe have it set to whatever your other settings were, or ... dare I suggest it ... ASK the first time around?

You think they have anything coded that lets you turn down the quality?  I don't see any settings and this is CCP.

Suggested several thousand times, officially proposed by the CSM, consistent with the "lore" of Eve such as it is, convenient to give a window for people to upgrade their hardware and allows those who don't give a shit about incarna to opt out.

And of course the last one is the problem and reason it did not get done that way.

"Interior quality" definitely turned down the detail when I tried it.

Yeah, I kinda figured. :oh_i_see:

Best way to turn quality down to a sensible level is to untick 'Load Station Environments'.

Wait, I assumed this is always how it would be implemented.  Why in the world would they do it any other way?

There is no cool aid in that.

I booted up the client this weekend. CQ is very cool, and its quite easy to see its the first step in something larger. CCP has allays insisted they are building a universe, not JUST a space game.

The performance was not bad at all ( I was running at about 45-60 FPS ), however I could see if you were a multi-boxer or have a very old system you may have issues. Once CQ is likely more textures and ploys that most who have been playing eve have ever seen on one view perspective. Space is cheap to render ( Sky box + some sprites + a handful of low poly ships + Normal map/shader overhead ).

Personally, the interaction in the CQ is likely how eve should have launched on day one, instead of eleventy billion windows and simple functions buried 4 clicks deep ( There seems to be 3 ways to do everything ). I found clicking on the screens, mirrors and ship hologram much more intuitive then using the old methods. If they hold this path they very well will increase the player base more than they have now, being just a ship is a big turn off to those not already of the converted.

All and all, IMO, what I have read, and seen in game, is an old player base adverse to change. From what I can see, if you are new, you won't care you will likely even bee more drawn to the game, if you are years invested, you take the development of the toon portion as a slight. Even if on the whole its going to improve the game. Of course, i have found out while there have been improvements in the new user experience, it still needs work. Eve is just as much a browser game that happens to have ship graphics as ever.

*shrug*

Whats with the computer lady not saying the same thing in the tutorial window? And also, her timing in conjunction with the missions you get from the various tutorial agents leads to a bunch of confusion point IE: Shes ahead, talking about things not even granted to you until you complete the mission. I do agree, in the CQ a more brisk jog may be needed. I also agree, leave pod should be an option, as it stands now, sometimes you don't need to go to your room.

To force people to use it. If they did it the other way people would just disembark once or twice just for the OOOH factor than then never bother with it again as the old interface fast faster and a lot less awkward.

And then you would never sell monocles, cloaks, wizard staffs, anatomically correct penises and gold cufflinks.

heh toon.

I'm of the vocation that if they actually expand upon it and build the station interiors up properly with shit to do etc, then fuck yes this'll be a good thing. As it stands, however, forcing us to experience it just means that we've lost features which make rather important things like seeing which ship we're in more of a chore than it really needs to, for no real gain.

Agreed, and agreed. But these are things that, if they listen to the playerbase/have usability tests, they'll be able to iron out in due course. That's a big if, though.

"The old methods" consisted of clicking on large icons grouped together on a side of the screen. Essentially a classic UI toolbar. You really found it more intuitive to hunt with your mouse some elements of the 3d scene instead, that might be interactive?

If you are having trouble with the menu, you can expand it (click the arrow top left) so the icons have labels saying shit like 'fitting' and you click on the bit that says 'fitting' to go to 'fitting'.

Just on the performance thing, it is fairly obvious this is a bug/compatibility issue which affects some and not others. I say this because...

1) It isn't exactly Crysis 2.
2) It effects people arbitrarily with no obvious pattern on the age of gear.
3) I get issues on a 12 month old Nvidia system.

Regarding Mittani's ~words~, people at this point are just projecting whatever they want to see. CCP said the most they reasonably could on RMT, and there really is no point screaming blindly at CCP about how retarded further Incarna development is if you want to influence them. They are wedded to this nonsense and there is no point pretending this will change, the only real option is to hope they burn out on it soon and keep reminding them about gameplay issues.

The act is getting old dude.

I'm not white knighting shit. Its just my take. Feel free to disagree.

CQ as it is now is, without question, shit. It adds absolutely nothing but some eye candy and a less effective duplication of the existing interface for a cost in hardware resources that far outweigh the visual appeal. The defenders tend to base their view on "what it will become" to which the answer is 1) CCP and 2) then why release this token effort now?

As far as the playerbase being adverse to change...  of course they are.  EVE is as much about spaceships as a chess game is about medieval combat.  Try to introduce avatars and a 3d interface-in-a-room to a chess tournament, see what the reaction is.

You are projecting a belief of competence on CCP that's beyond simply drinking the cool aid though.

Without wanting to offend, I'd suggest that it's the cool aid that CCP pissed in and then marketed as the new Coke.

As a new player, the CQ doesn't bother me that much.  I like how there are objects that bring up interface windows (and all are still accessible as buttons on the side).  It adds to the sense of being in a world.  Even if I mostly use the buttons, it has a more natural feeling to it.

I don't like having to awkwardly walk for a minute to actually get into my quarters every time I dock.

Mind you I never knew the old way.  One pitfall of UI redesign is regardless of the qualities, people grow accustomed to what they've been using.  I'm rather glad I didn't know the old way to have to relearn.

As for my opinion on Incarna itself, it's just half-assed. What did they do all these years? I mean, they were demoing station interiors already two years or so ago, including bars and what not. And what did we get the last big patch? A captain's quarter. And only of a single fucking race. What's the winter expansion bring? Another race's CQ? I'm willing to bet that station interiors don't come before Christmas 2012. If that were the case, it'd make this project even more of a farce.

There's a tidbit in their recent blog (http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=925) which sheds some light on why the current version of Incarna is probably the way it is:


Apparently they're only now switching to upgraded tech which allows to avoid this minor issue :why_so_serious:

I don't even think eve had an animation system before this patch.

It did to a certain extent. Take a look at a mining barge the next time you pass a macrominer. All turrets turn and point in the direction of a target if you have turret effects on. Tower modules spin and do stuff. And Rouge drones have little legs that claw at the air. Gasses vented from stations.


Anyway I had a quick look at youtube for old videos on Ambulation. These are from 2008.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeanIPs0yws&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoOyvRTA2Ps&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5l_ZjVyRxx4&feature=related

Basically they had the Caldari captains quarters... erm..

This was a teaser from November 2009

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8sfaN8zT8E&feature=related

So you tell me what the hell they have been doing. You had a promenade with shops and lots of players in Air Rivals, a free game I played a bit in 2008...

My guns on my SPACESHIP were animated. They twisted and turned and did all sorts of shooty stuff.

I don't understand how anyone can seriously argue that the introduction of walking avatars has added any gameplay to Eve Online. The room with the little holograms and screens to click on might be a nice touch, but you don't actually need to include a character who walks around with the WASD keys to have that. In fact, it would be easier if I actually didn't have to walk down that ramp thing to get to the room with the shiny stuff in.

I do like the screen that flashes up news. That does add to the immersiveness of the game imho.

I'm not sure anyone really disputes that walking avatars could potentially be fun if some sort of fun content is created for them, but the problem is that this is supposed to be a major expansion, not a demo of something that might one day be released properly.

Also, it's just wrong to claim that the anger among Eve players is all about disliking change, if by change you mean avatars. It's about not trusting CCP's plans for RMT.

Where I think some people are being silly is in complaining that CCP should be investing resources in the spaceship side of the game "instead". CCP are investing resources in Dust and World of Darkness, which is what the avatar technology is all about, and if they didn't try to bring that technology into Eve then it wouldn't somehow free up money for spaceships. They're making their other games no matter what.

Think that was a simple rigid body animation system though, quite different kettle of fish from the skeleton/weight/skinning approach. Way less hungry for processing power, too.

I mean, it's really hard to walk. How do I get my guy in the middle of my screen? When I zoom in, the camera moves so he is on the left.

That's just object rotation.


Yep.


Due to the technical undertaking, we should be thankful they did NOT just slap in all of this stuff. The measured approaches was a good call. Adding an entire animation system to an existing platform is no small task.


Had not seen that one before. Thanks. Looking at it though, its clear to see the avatars have been revamped a number of times.

It obviously didn't have an animation system for people before it had people.

With this blog about how key input drives the pressure on the system through the roof i'm mostly surprised they went with WASD rather than click to move -- the latter works well enough for the korean MMOs and is more inline with the spaceship part of the AV control.

There is a setting for camera location/offset.

As I have shown they had the animation pretty much locked down 3 years ago and it still looks pretty much the same. So the deal breaker was not animation code.. The rest is network code and code to display the stuff you buy with your real money.

And as for grafting this onto eve, they did it the same way they always did station spinning. You log off the session in outside space and you start the internal station session. all this is is a fancy wrapping for the buttons you used to press.

And as I mentioned there was a lot more than just object rotation in Eve.

Fuuck I'm falling for your trolling...

Yeah the Free korean MMO I mentioned before simply had click to move and it worked pretty well for what it was. Everyone understood you were just there to shop and then get the hell out killing wasps and penguins.

Do you really move your character up and down that ramp? Be honest, how long have you actually spent moving your character? Not clicking on things on those holograms (which are pretty cool actually), because you could click on them whether the character was mobile or not. I'm asking how long you have spent actually doing stuff with the character.

He (or she) can sit down, he can stand up, he can walk around a small room and he can walk out of that room on to a ramp. Has this given you minutes of play, hours of play, days of play? I am asking for firm numbers here, precise figures please.

(If you are a male player who has made a female avatar then your answer is suspect and you need not respond)

Python biting them in the ass! Well I never...

Seeing how much performance issues they're having, while the same time trying to maintain an one shard maximum people per system mantra, why don't they just fucking ditch it and start converting their code slowly towards some native language that compiles down to machine code? Like C++? That language seems to work for almost all other recent and not-so-recent games in existence. Unless they're making heavy use of dynamic code generation, I don't see a point at all in using an interpreted language, even if only as glue between native components. Stackless Python's task system, which they're regularly praising sky high, is nothing special that isn't available elsewhere. And no, Stackless doesn't JIT.

Nine times out of ten when I log in it's to do PI stuff. To do this I need to open the cargo hold of my active ship. There are two ways to do this; I can either open the ship hangar, right click on the currently active ship and then select 'Open Cargohold' or I can mouse over the little hologram then click on the AR elements that pop up. This last option is much more convenient however when I log in, my character is stood behind a sofa that has an interaction volume blocking access to the things on my coffee table (the agent finder and the ship hologram). To interact with those things I need to walk around to the other side of the almost entirely pointless sofa and its equally pointless interaction volume because CCP have no idea how to write user cases. The sofa is doubly pointless because I can't interact with it from behind, I need to walk around to the front of it anyway if I want to use it so the interaction volume it has serves no purpose at your login position except to prevent you from being able to do common tasks without moving first.

Yea I'd feel a lot better about Incarna if it meant they were essentially throwing out Python.   I can't even begin to imagine how many man hours they've wasted over the years because the original devs were too fucking retarded to know you don't make an MMO in python.   CarbonIO sounds like a step in the right direction at least.   Essentially they've got a bunch of C++ modules that they've probably made since they hired some real programmers.   Those modules were still fucked though since they had to do IO through python.   So now they've got this system that can go around python for small IO at least.

So in the background at least something good came from Incarna.  In the future they could phase out python even more if they use this system as a stepping stone.

Thank you for your

Thank you, but I am looking for someone who actually enjoys moving their character around. Who feels that their walking avatar actually adds to their enjoyment of the game, rather than taking it away. I'm wondering how long they have spent enjoying this new gameplay element. Do they spend hours moving their avatar around their small room, carefully avoiding the sofa? On the ramp, off the ramp? Sit down, stand up? How many minutes of enjoyment has this given them?

In your case Iain it seems to have generated negative enjoyment so I am giving you a score of minus five hours and 37 minutes.

CCP devs could reply... you never know, this is a dev+ haven.

They have got this far without them, why start now?

I haven't played CQ or Incarna and yet all you say doesn't surprise me, CCP have always thought cockblock is a good thing. Adding to this I have no idea why they are trying to tap into the console market, cause no-one will buy their games with these design philosophies.

It's still nothing to write home about. Their dev blog is a lot of blahblah that essentially means "We've implemented send and receive queues".

The only marginally interesting thing is this layer 5 (or whatever) routing they've implemented. But that's only useful, if they actually manage to hotswap solar system sessions to other servers (to keep forwarding user connection data until they've negotiated a connection with the new server).

That was just the end goal.  The important stuff is what they had to change to put that in.   Concurrent access to blocks of data is not fun.   They should have done it long ago though just to save money on server costs.  

Shud of

should've or should have

Is there a setting to not make it a terribly built, shittily implemented waste of development time and resources?

As someone who's a relatively new player I agree broadly speaking with Bloodworth - it's an astonishing explosion of conservativism in reaction to changes with negligible impact.

- Monocles. Well what's hilarious was the initial outrage was from people who clearly hoped to buy one so as to lord it over the peasants then realised to their horror that they could not comfortably afford them and would in turn be lorded over by more successful players. (In-game success, I doubt more than a couple have been purchased other than with isk).

- Incarna. I like the idea I could be an Amarrian prince, walking down the concourse of a space station with loyalists bowing to me and perhaps a Minnie, in disguise as a slave, waiting to take a potshot. It's a massive project that will take at least a decade at the rate they are going but quite a cool one. It of course has synergies with the Vampire game and DUST and so on but even just in Eve terms it is an interesting line. Considered in those terms you can see why it's not optional, if in some future Eve I can wait for you in a dark corridor of your station when you dock up it would be lame if you have the option to not see the Walking in Stations feature.

- Player power. I think where they messed up was giving the CSM a quasi constitutional role ("a partner in development" was the phrase iirc) which they never intended to honour. And I don't think they should. Imagine if a work of art, say the Mona Lisa, were designed by a committee of thousands of nerds. "Give her bigger tits", "Make her blond", it would not have made a better painting. I think the whole industry is just plain daft regarding placating the customer base, imagine in football (soccer) if strikers could debate when caught offside and lobby to get the rule changed. Players are possibly the worse people to design a game and it was stupid to tell us all we're "partners" because the player base as a whole has taken that to mean "in charge".

- Bitter vets, rage quits. Probably healthy. The ship certainly seems to have righted itself and it's good for the newer players if old isk rich high skill points players leave gaps for us to step into.

Playing Eve - I'm having a lot of fun just now. I just participated in a Live Event that was brutal. I flew a Logi and like most of the logis who turned up lost my ship. It was brutal. Fortunately incursions are an isk treadmill.

This would possibly be valid if CCP had been in touch with what makes a good game. If CCP had been making the Mona Lisa, it would look like

(http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-FFUajDR7Kmw/TcG5EgGqPwI/AAAAAAAACVc/oxfOW-aFV0M/s1600/UglyBetty1.jpg)

and the CSM would probably be telling them to make her prettier for gods sake.

I don't think thats true at all. I think CCP has done a marvelous job creating a very cool niche game that has become more and more popular over the years. It is at the point now where it is much bigger than it was even 3-4 years ago, and they are going to have the same growing pains any company has as it shifts from young immature company to one that employees hundreds. The pain you are seeing is simply the inexperience showing as new folks are hired to fill the gaps in their growing company org.

While that could be fatal to EVE, I except them to get over this rough patch and continue to perform strongly. Now DUST and Vamps might be a different story, but we haven't seen much of those just yet.

I think it's just Hubris. Eve survived despite them because of a novel setting and mechanic which allowed a interesting user community to crystallize giving meaning to the terrible game-play.  Now they want to transition into being a serious game company with multiple titles but they're not that good, their talent pool is shallow, they're letting Eve rot and they're dangerously over-exposed to Dust and WoD. Incarna failed as an expansion because it did not address serious gameplay concerns, antagonized the player base and added nothing significant (future potential doesn't count, Eve has always had lots). That failure is reflected in server activity which should have gotten an uptick from new content but instead is trending downwards.

Dust already has two strikes against it. It is aimed to tie into the Eve Sov system, but this system is already sickly. It was also obviously intended to be on the Xbox but they didn't do their research in terms of microsoft's limitations on the platform. It's also going to further antagonize the Eve community who will now find their gameplay linked to events outside their own game. I mean the idea is novel, and intriguing from a game design perspective, but good luck on selling it as an advantage.

CSM has no power. It's just PR for when they shoot themselves in the foot. That's why it was created after all.

It is a very cool game, I wouldn't be playing it otherwise. It's not a good game, though, and its quality went down when dominion came out and supercapitals were buffed (instead of given proper roles) and the SOV system became a matter of just punching through 4-5 timers in a row (or losing one of them and being reset all the way to the beginning). Wars, which is basically what 0.0 lives off of, and which is the majority of EVE's advertizing, has gone from being a proper brawl where there's give and take because one side has the upper hand at different points of the campaign, to a brawl which is decided in 1-3 fights with supercapitals. Most wars since dominion was released has been over in almost always literally 2-3 weeks, and our fountain campaign against IT and their pets was no exception.

It's really just like going to a restaurant and expecting a hearty meal, only to be presented with a small appetizer. :oh_i_see:

It's not just the monocles. Pretty much any customization items will be in the 10-30$ range. That's fucking stupid, considering real life counterparts cost pretty much the same. That's why people are upset at NEX.

The new blog is hilarious.   A full low-tier outfit is 1 plex.   Mid-tier outfits are supposed to cost 3-4 plex. 

These are the people that were charging $120 dollers for a model of a battleship

(http://store.eveonline.com/Assets/ProductImages/11139_left.png) (http://store.eveonline.com/Assets/ProductImages/11136_left.png)   (http://store.eveonline.com/Assets/ProductImages/11137_left.png)   (http://store.eveonline.com/Assets/ProductImages/11138_left.png)

Good thing they learned their lesson on that. They are now only $75.  :why_so_serious:

Are those things plastic or metal?  If they are plastic then:  :uhrr:

Heres the blurb

http://store.eveonline.com/Amarr-Apocalypse-EVE-Battleship-Collection-P122.aspx


To be honest if they were $20 I might be tempted, but at that price its  :pedobear: territory

Heck, you can get a real life monocle for as little as 17$ (http://www.gentlemansemporium.com/store/002550.php?__utma=1.75672146.1310139106.1310139106.1310139106.1&__utmb=1.3.10.1310139106&__utmc=1&__utmx=-&__utmz=1.1310139106.1.1.utmcsr%3Dgoogle%7Cutmccn%3D(organic)%7Cutmcmd%3Dorganic%7Cutmctr%3Dmonocle&__utmv=-&__utmk=158061882) :why_so_serious:

Awesome.  They chose the ugliest of the Amarr ships.

Hmm these ships are priced at $75. The shipping costs are pretty crazy but i suppose that's not exactly in CCP's control?

(the price isn't too different from plastic model kits of similar size, and these you have to assemble yourself. On the other hand, that's part of the fun)

They aren't even *trying* to pretend that walking in stations is going to be a good addition to the game. Good luck with walking around the casino and everyone wearing the same clothes.


On the other hand, the new Incarna trailer is like watching a propaganda movie to join Goonswarm. Back before they changed probing, you COULD be that Interceptor pilot. I ever flew that mission, though I never managed to be the fleet warp in. These days, the FC will be using his own alt account to do it, no one uses Blasters for close range work and 200km Sniper Battleship fleets are laughed at as obsolete.

It would have been true 2 years ago though, back in the 1st and 2nd Great Eve Wars. These days...supercaps online, all the time (though ALPHAFLEET is pretty cool to be in when the jammer stays up).

And there's deluxe tier clothes, where a set will cost wayyyyyyyy more than 3-4 PLEX. How much dollars is a PLEX anyway?

But this is just an analogue monocle!  :oh_i_see:


vvvv Does CCP have a casino license?  :why_so_serious:

You just know their Space Casino will only accept bets in Aurum  :awesome_for_real:

To be fair, thats for an entire outfit. slots: Footwear, Bottoms, Tops, Outer, and Eyewear slots. So, 1-5$ an item, roundabouts.

I said outfit in the first place.
...

I just checked, a PLEX is 15 bucks. 45-60 bucks for a fucking virtual outfit. Yeah, that's sure reasonable.

--edit: And it's a total of five slots, where one is eye wear. So you're looking at an average of 9 to 15 bucks per slot item.

... for a medium range outfit.

That nobody else but you can see if it's below nipple level.

Meaning 1B in isk. Meh. Whatever.

I'm just concerned that CCP are still wasting time on this.



People who have seen the ship models irl report that they are pretty cool and if you are at a place in your life where public display of an internet spaceship model is not going to reduce the chances of you having sex then you could do worse with $75.

In the comments thread for that blog the CCP guy says not only they don't have fixed amount of slots that go for every "entire" outfit, they haven't even decided anything in this regard, yet.

(http://www.clownshoes.net/clownshoes.gif)

It's still only upsetting if you wanted one. I wouldn't buy a cosmetic item to wear for $2 because I don't care what my character looks like.

I could see using them for game advantage. I toyed with the idea of putting a monocle on a character in a tanky ship, sitting him outside Jita 4-4, neutral remote repping him and salvaging all the concorded people who attacked him but it didn't seem I would recover the cost of the monocle from the salvage. Plus you can never take it off afaik so once you use it you have a toon who is only usable as bait.

I imagine some sort of Pink Slip Strip Poker could actually work well. Send the other guy/gal naked and crying *and* take their precious clothes for yourself.

Well yeah, individual prices are sure to vary. How much is a banana suit in free Relms?

Apparently a Purple Frog Mask is 6$.

You should be able to take off and switch items, but they're not regular ship/character cargo. That means they survive podding, and they're available everywhere at all time, as soon you're in your CQ. If they wouldn't survive podding, that'd be really fucking stupid. Then again, they're already putting insane prices on that stuff.

It doesn't follow you when you clone jump (get a message to that effect) so I imagine it is removable. I believe if you ship it as cargo it goes down with the ship, if you have it equipped you retain it on your med-clone. Which is a bit weird.

The whole thing is just silly though. They're losing the faith of their player-base and looking like greedy fools more than anything else. That or really desperate for any trickle of cash they can manage. And the clothing is really IKEA level boring. The stupid mount in WoW was functional, visible and fancy... these are invisible.

What? You have to take your shit with you in ship cargo? Hell yea, I can't await all the whining about hundreds of dollars being blown up by pirates or stupid bugs that by chance haven't been logged (like about everything else).

Reading through the forums nobody is actually upset that some item they want costs too much.   That should tell CCP all they need to know.

I agree with most of you on the clothing. Even if other players were more than just a talking head the clothing seems more or less the same as the clothing in the character creator.

I suppose the big thing is that effectively we didn't get an expansion. Previous expansions have added major features like wormholes or supercarriers. This introduced CQ which almost everyone has turned off, a cash shop no one uses and not a lot else. Plus there's the prospect of several future expansions that also tweak Incarna without giving those of us who play internet spaceships any additional gameplay depth.

Even the PI expansion was a better addition to Eve than this. Apart from the rage and forum drama we got nothing. And the prospect of future expansions proudly unveiling more nothing.

No, you have to buy two copies :oh_i_see:

One copy of each clothing item per jump clone you care about.

If they tried to sell this idea when there was a social space, and people could see your gear, it would look a *little* bit less insane. My avatar is currently a tiny little box in local. Even if I was determined enough to buy all this stuff I'd never see it.

(Obviously I have CQ turned off, like most of Eve I suspect).

Exactly this.

Now if they allowed you to buy nipples...





CCP would make a fucking fortune and be able to fund Dust, WoD AND EvE!!!!!


95$ for one - deluxe or standard???

It's been a long time since I scrutinised nipples on a regular basis but I seem to remember them coming in pairs.

That's an inside joke with several levels of subtlety:

- they wouldn't be selling breasts, just nipples
- it would be typical of CCP to sell ONE breast/nipple for $95 (and, yeah, expect people to buy 2)
- currently the tatoo and facial scars systems are set up to let you choose a tatoo or scar on the left side or right side of your face, but not both (and there's no option to position or adjust the scar or tatoo).
- they prefer non-symmetrical ship designs, so perhaps that extends to avatar chest designs too (and single breast/nipple allows for the greatest degree of freedom in choosing placement etc)

So what you are saying is, that CCP sekretly worship Slaanesh.

There's actually at least one who's suggesting to implement item wear in the EVE forums, that can be repaired for AUR  :uhrr:

--edit: Also, the "exceptional" tier above mid-tier is apparently starting at around 220€ for a set.  :why_so_serious:

I admit I'm really curious as to what this exceptional clothing looks like. For that money it better be more than a black swishing vampire cloak.

For that much they better have shoulder pads which spawn strippers which pop out of my monitor and dance on my desk.

Doubt they can do that, but they COULD have clothing that comes with 2 scantily-clad NPC escorts that follow you around everywhere you go.

Rather clever.

The Door is Real (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hivuFa3hH4).

It's likely a very large codpiece.

I always thought it's late blooming was caused by NGE so possibly you're right.

I think it did, but their sub numbers have always trended up. For good or ill, there's just not a lot of competition for EVE. It's...unique.

I just had an email from CCP. Which included this:


Thank you rioters! I guess there's no calamity so bad you can't spin it as something good.

When I got that newsletter, I read, YOU ARE SO RIGHT TO CANCEL YOUR SUBSCRIPTION.  It was bad enough when they blew off their shitty behavior as a "misunderstanding" and made no apologies to anybody.  But when they made the Jita protests into a cheery point about the server stability, that was an outright fuck-you to the players.  My money's better off going to other companies.

CSM minutes from May posted (http://www.eveonline.com/council/transcripts/2011/CSM_CCP_Meetings_18-20_05_2011.pdf)


WTF. Titan's shouldn't have the tracking to hit anything smaller than a Carrier, little lone my poor battlecruiser sized command ship or individual logistic ship. With the 30-50 Titans our enemies can commit, able to kill 30-50 ships every 10 minutes, see you in empire I guess.


Well, that didn't work out according to plan now did it.


If I can get a magical sparkling pony in my captains quarters, I'd buy one. Though a stripper pole might need to come at a discount. I can call her Twlight Sparkle and read fanfic about it on equesteria.net.


I think this is a big reason the NC lost to the DRR. Not only were they selling their supercaps to the DRR, the DRR was an inherently stronger position anyway. The DRR if they want to, can both sell supercaps, and keep a power advantage over the rest of Eve. And they own the tech moons as well. This isn't like BoB who owned 3 regions, the DRR and their DOTDOTDOT lackies own 1/3 of Eve, and the richest 2/3's.


Who could have foreseen that low level alliance grunts would not be able to make money if you take the money away and only give it to people running carriers or tech 3 ships already!


Oh yes, so much pent up demand for a WORSE interface and knowledge by the players than CCP is lying and shows nothing but contempt for their words. Actions may speak louder than words, but the CEO telling the players they don't matter is a whole lot of words too ya know.


So much for hoping Incarna might be a replacement for OK Cupid.


Well that explains a lot. Much like SWG had no one actually caring to monitor combat, so did Eve.

Who is CCP Tallest, and what broken crud has he fixed yet?


Because nothing in fleet warfare is as broken as that no one flies Electronic Attack Frigates!

If it's assault frigates, I'm cool with this.

The hell? Have yet to meet a hobbyist who, given choice between getting the shit for free and shelling out some hard money for it would be all "no, please take my money, the more the better; i desire it and i look forward to discussing this purchase with my spouse once she hears about it." Specifically desiring and looking for ways to spend money so one can then feel good about it ain't being a hobbyist, that's being a walking bucket of psychological issues.

CCP really do know their playerbase.

CCP's own Reality Distortion Field, emanating from Hilmar himself!

Don't think that's what he meant.   I think he was saying hobbyists want more stuff and are willing to pay for it instead of not get it at all.

It is absolutely true that hobbyists will value certain exclusive prestige type items more than their 'real' worth (say, something like a Black Lotus card in MTG) but the problem with applying this to virtual goods sold by CCP is that the prestige and price with those sorts of things is essentially created by the secondary market. CCP is trying to create 'prestige' by selling something for an outrageous price that they've set themselves, rather than doing it organically through rarity and letting the secondary market decide. That's what they don't seem to understand (from my outsider perspective anyway.)

I would like to add that the prestige MTG card has potential resale value.

Don't I know it. I sold my Beta Lotus along with UL Moxen and Lotus, my multiples of the rest of the power 9, 3 sets of Dual-tap lands plus an entire set of Arabian Nights, Juzam Djinn sets etc and misc uncommon, rare and common beta cards to put a deposit on a house, :D Admittedly I sold off my first run Star Wars CG cards at the same time.

After that I didn't follow the prices for fear that they went up.

I can't see myself doing that with Eve.

If the CSM minutes are to be believed, then this winter's expansion is going to be the most hilarious one yet.

This is not really pressing me to resub.

In fact, the whole bitching about the interface is making me a bit leery -- and I've been missing my internet spaceships.

Lots of 'we cannot do that because of (x)' and 'hey check out this upcoming Incarna stuff!'

Mucking with Local is bad.  If the Sov revamp uses Dominion as a foundation it will be awful.  Eve needs a better UI, it needs lots of things.  I wonder how many more monocles we get instead.  Oh, and that thing does not even look like a monocle to me.  It is ugly.  I wonder what the upper tier pricing will be.

And prepare for Dust to fuck with your game in hilarious ways.  CCP are going to force that shit on you.

It does - but since in eight years CCP have been unable to figure out how to increase the font text size above 13 point, I have trepidations about any such "upgrade".

The hotkeys they added are amazing. You have to click on the Overview window, before the hotkey will actually do anything.  :why_so_serious:

 :oops:  :facepalm:

EvE's UI is so bad that a command line interface would be faster to use.

This is true of every GUI in the history of computing.

No I'm pretty sure only EvE could make targeting and movement so annoying that doing it with a CLI would be better than the mouse.    I suspect it's a good thing Dust isn't coming out on the PC.    I can picture the menus for changing weapons/ammo and reloading.    They'd map the mousewheel to weapon zoom only.   Mounting a vehicle would involve targeting via mouse then clicking on a UI element to mount which would bring up a submenu to pick which seat.   Throwing a grenade would involve first a submenu to select throw distance then another submenu to select priming time.

All of this would be in 10 point font and higher font sizes would get patched in 6 months later.

And the zoom would be backwards from every other game in existence.

I knew I was forgetting something. :why_so_serious:

Ahh, so thats where Steve Jobs got the UI designer for OS X Lion.

I was imagining something like.


You see 1 - Serpentis Frig, 2 - Serpentis Frig, 3 - Serpentis Cruiser,  4 - Serpentis Battleship
> lock 3 4
> ammo factionmulti
> fire 4
> drones 1

Sad thing is that probably is better than the Eve UI  :why_so_serious:

Knowing CCP, more like...

You see 1 - Serpentis Frig, 2 - Serpentis Frig, 3 - Serpentis Cruiser,  4 - Serpentis Battleship

> using sensors
sensors> initialize
sensors> target 3
sensors> store
sensors> target 4
sensors> store
sensors> exit
> using rack
rack> select high
rack high> select slot 1
rack high slot 1> clear
rack high slot 1> select ammo faction multi
rack high slot 1> fire
rack high> exit
rack high> select slot 2
rack high slot 2> ...
...
rack high slot 7> exit
rack high> exit
rack> exit
> using bays
bays> select drones
bays drones> select drone 1
bays drones drone 1> release
bays drones drone 1> attack
...

Reading that made my eyeballs bleed.

Welcome to Eve?
 :awesome_for_real:

You guys forgot to put in the error messages.  And the UI wouldn't use fully-spelled-out words, try snsr, rk, by, and drns.

Dust is out soon but, "CSM asked questions about the proposed design, and how EVE players would be able to interact with
DUST. The design of the link is still in the initial stages". I can't tell if they're lying or winging it. Surely that's one of the things that should be sketched out well before you go ahead with it.

My guess would be 'winging it' At the December summit it was clear that they had no overall vision document or design roadmap for Incarna and when I asked specifically about this kind of thing they seemed surprised that I would expect such a thing to exist. They reacted as though I'd asked if there were plans to include different varieties of cheese to the moon minerals table, it was a fundamental OCP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outside_Context_Problem#Outside_Context_Problem).

It is painfully obvious that eve has never had any kind of roadmap for any feature beyond which entirely independent team is working on the current and next patch, doing whatever the fuck they like.

Senior CCP management appear to believe that having no plan and not requiring any development to consider expandability is the same thing as being "agile".

The whole thing is an amateur hour production and it is honestly pretty impressive that they haven't fucked up much more often.

Evidently CCP start as they mean continue - the eve.com homepage now asks eager pilots to "STEP FOOT INTO CAPTAIN'S QUARTERS" (my emphasis).

 :facepalm:

Haha - I like it.

They are "agile" like a good slapstick physical comedian is agile - so all over the place and usually making a bloody mess.

That would be awesome. I can see the Brits massing to seize the Stilton moons while over in the next region TCF are defending the Camembert moons to their last ship.

See their WoD game still lacking the design doc after x years of sinking money in it.

I remember when CCP was telling the RP community in eve ( a good friend of mine was deeply involved) and they were telling them they had plans for a coherent storiline and a storybook of ideas. Then a member of the Intersteller corrispondents got a look at it and it was a bunch of random ideas scribbled down without any kind of coherent storyline at all. granted this came out when he was thrown out of ISD for refusing to obey a member of BOB, so it might be slightly suspect as he was mightily pissed off at the corruption, but the fact indicate that CCP has never had any design document for anything at all. its not the CCP way.

It works somewhat with Eve because they borrowed the basis, space is relatively undemanding to represent and there's nothing remotely like it. I think they believe the same will happen again when they release a console shooter.

Well lets face it, there is nothing like an FPS on a console  :oh_i_see:

I could take a knife to the face, it'd be just as pleasant.

CCP basically never left the garage when it comes to game design.

Yea, I think some people at CCP take special delight in shafting the RP community.  No content at all for years so we craft a ton of it which they then lock down and destroy.  It got so bad I simply started ignoring big chunks of 'new' PF because the retconn was overpowering my brain.  We got the shaft on faction warfare too.

In this (official EVE forums) thread (http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1553881):  people complaining that CCP recently reduced the prices of the monocle and misc. virtual clothing items and are not giving the money back to those who rushed to buy them things on the first day.

Looks like many of the shirts and skirts have dropped from the equivalent value of a faction fit command ship (measuring 243k m3 and carrying a crew of hundreds) to the about the cost of a faction fit heavy assault cruiser.

I just checked in game. Monocle is still 12,000 AUR.

They're probably going to have to drop the prices at some point. Outside of trolling the number of people willing to give up months of game-time for a boring looking and barely visible cosmetic modification to a irrelevant part of the game has got to be fairly small.

Yeah, I didn't verify the claims in that thread, I just summarized what the thread was about.  Why would I fact-check random whining/trolling threads?

Entertainment?

Ok I've finally downloaded the client (12 freaking hours) and I played around with the character generation. I actually was fairly impressed by that. It does seem to give a fairly decent amount of freedom in customising your "look" and the use of shadows on the face was very well done in my opinion. Wish it was a standalone ap so you could play around with it to be honest. The fact that your avatar was breathing all the time and kept moving his eyes was a pain in the ass though for capturing a good looking shot for your portrait.

Then of course I got to my cabin...

You have got to be kidding, right? They cant have risked their buisness and pissed off their playerbase for this. Its basicly a nothing. You walk around this dark room where you can hardly see anything, your avatar is bland as hell and moves like a zombie, and you can look out the window at your ship. Woohoo! The ONLY thing that impressed me is that poster on your wall showing events, like incursion stuff. I thought that was pretty cool. And the little hologram of your ship. As for the rest you must be joking.

And why the hell are those ugly monocles still the most expensive thing on the NEX board?

Anyway I undocked and flew about a bit but eve is still a terrible space game.

We're not the only ones who are terrible at this game. So are the designers.

They seem to have given everyone 1000 AUR - which has about the same value as a tier 2 battleship, or to put it another way, almost enough for a pair of shoes.

What I've heard (and this is probably fourth-hand) is they have milestones with their museum thing.  At the end of it we should have about 5400 AUR.  So enjoy your fleet of battleships.

I had a laugh when I went into the store and all they had was an ugly pair of boots at that price.

This is going to flood the secondary market with Nex junk, creating a stock of cheap crap that will need to be eaten through before people start buying plex to convert to aur.

The logic is sound on the basis of "The first hit is free", but they severely over-estimate the attraction I think. Cosmetic additions to your character can be fun but they're certainly not enough fun to justify the costs they seem to expect. Especially when there is no social space in which those additions are actually visible.

How many people do work on Incarna content, anyway? Crappy mod teams can churn out the same quality at way faster rates. Why aren't the other race CQ's still not released? Why are there so few things in NEX?

Waitagoddamnminit.  Does all this bitching and moaning about getting stuck on sofas and coffee tables  mean your character can't jump?  :ye_gods: What do they think this is? 1999? What the hell good is an avatar in a spaceship game if it can't jump around in it's closet like an over-caffeinated 4-year old driving a night elf? ? ?

Have they implemented their version of ship spinning yet? I'll be damned if I resub until they do

They have, it's called character spinning now, and you can buy stuff in the NEX store so you'll look flabulous when doing so. :awesome_for_real:

I wonder if I should send CCP an accounting of the games I have bought with the money that used to go towards EvE subs?

As far as griefing them, that's an awesome way of doing it.

But, whichever GM is the recipient of your email or petition can grief you right back by releasing your account information (name, address) to the internets.

Can't jump?  You poor stupid bastard, jumping isn't even something that one can conceive of yet.  Your character can't run.  Not so much as jog.  It's a slow amble in every direction.  If they can't handle jogging technology, weep tears of blood for anyone hoping for a jump.

And then you can have that GM fired in return for releasing information to the public he had no right in releasing. Or sue CCP, I dunno.

Even if you could jump over the coffee table, the thing is so sluggish it would take several tries to get to the right spot.

But if you are right behind the couch and you click to sit on it you do pass through the couch, so there are some Vampire features in there.

All there's in there is rather generic greyish stuff. Apart from the basic T-Shirts.

--edit: And if there's actually something worth looking at, it'll probably cost 10 PLEX.

Holy shit, I only found out now that if you buy clothes, they'll only be available in the station you've left them. If you wandered to somewhere else, you can't change your outfit. You actually need to haul that shit in a ship. And if you get shot and killed, the stuff goes *poof*. What the fuck?! Especially at these prices!

That's hilarious, also so-Eve.

It works a bit oddly (and I don't really care since the whole concept is silly) because even Eve, "pain is fun", people balked. I believe it stays with the character but doesn't follow on clone jumps. Get an irritating pop-up to that effect even though I own no clothing. So the idea is you should buy one outfit per clone, and only really be shipping it around if you are moving it to a market to sell.

I want a walk in closet for my Abaddon! Second Life anyone?

This is no different to what happens if you blow a billion isk on a t3 ship or something.

The one thing they do seem to have screwed up is that if your pod gets blown up clothing miraculously follows your mind through space and back to your new clone.

It's automatically recreated when you dock, along with the captain's quarters.

I mean, have you seen the goop you swim in while flying in space? That is literally hell on clothes.

Can you purchase these clothes with ISK? I thought they were RMT only.

I think you generate them with aurum, but you can sell them on with ISK.

No idea what Aurum is & I don't see what any of this has to do with spaceships.



 

Aurum is the currency that you get when you trade in a PLEX.  It literally means Gold.  Eve Gold.

WTS EVE GOLD

Except all that can be achieved in-game. With the NEX stuff, you're paying real money, and a relative lot of it, just to get it potentially blown up. Since just playing the game and actually getting access to the NEX store both involves having a subscription, you can factor that monthly real money sink out of it.

It's stupid. If they want or are making me pay ten fucking bux for a pair of socks, they better be indestructible.

In reality, people who buy clothes from the store do so to sell for isk, people who buy clothes to wear do so with isk.

Also this is eve, and ccp staff need to buy more pants.

Game is popular. Game adds pants. Game is still popular, ergo pants are popular.

Except change pants with hats.

Fify.