f13.net

Link (http://www.ccpgames.com/en/public-relations/press-releases/article/2990/ccp-focuses-on-the-eve-universe)


So yeah. Not cancelled but certainly not something I'd expect to see come to market.

Does this mean that Mittens has now podded 114 CCP staffers?

Damnit, beat to the joke.

 :why_so_serious:

As unpopular as this was to think, I always though the WoD game was vaporware :(

This is sane thing to do, too bad other companies (Blizzard, I am looking at you) are not doing the same thing and neglect their core product while chasing new releases.

Trying to maintain your single revenue generating game and generate two entirely new titles at the same time was pretty dumb / ambitious. And CCP are not fast, I shudder to think how much money the attempt has cost them.

I don't think any amount of refocusing is going to fix eve at this point. At least for me and the people I played eve with. You should realize that something is wrong when your game becomes more fun to read about than it is to play.

Um, that's always been true about EVE.

Actually that's enough for some people.

Maybe so, but I do remember having a limited amount of fun before they introduced POS warfare. It was all downhill from there.

Missed revenue opportunity:  news feed on the exciting happenings within EVE!  Sign up now for one low monthly price of $4.99!  You no longer have to play to enjoy all EVE provides in gaming entertainment.

What happens when everyone is reading the news feed instead of grinding through the boring game play eve offers? I guess they could just start making shit up and fire all the programmers and artists.

EVE's gameplay could probably be delivered through a facebook game.

Yeah, but they would probably screw up the storytelling too.

Hell I played an Ascii game that had all of Eves gameplay

Eve isn't an ASCII game?

All those + and [] sure fooled me!

I give a fuck only as much as this affects the venerable pen and paper WoD stuff, and they've been running on fumes for a few years now. It doesn't look like it's affected but there is zero chance the WoD MMO comes out now. That shit is never going to see the light of day now. And, since CCP is in the hole and the MMO is never going to come out, I wonder how long it takes before they sell of the IP.

When they say their Atlanta, GA office, do they mean White Wolf?  Or did they have non-RPG stuff going on there as well? 

I've heard Brian Glass is gone, and Eddy Webb and Rich Thomas are still there. Beyond that no idea, but most PNP RPG work is done by freelancers at most places these days, not in-house designers.

What Ingmar said. All indications are that Atlanta was just another big CCP hub, with the RPG operations taking up only a small section of things. You could check their job listings for Atlanta and it was pretty standard video game company fare.

Since CCP bought White Wolf specifically to get the IP for the MMO, and a skeleton crew of 20 guys working on a major MMO means that said major MMO is never going to come out, I figure someone sane in about six months has to figure out that the IP is worthless to them if they just sit on it. I'm sure there would be a buyer.

Really, I find the story of White Wolf and how it ended up kind of sad. I don't the guys still working IN White Wolf find it especially sad, mind you, but it seems like a cautionary tale, both as a corporate merger tale and as a signal of just how far RPG licenses (aside from D&D) have fallen in terms of moneymaking bang. Even the D&D license isn't what it once was, with Pathfinder increasingly stealing their thunder.

White Wolf ran a tight second to D&D for the better part of two decades. Now, the urban fantasy gaming thunder was stolen by games like Dresden Files while they slowly wilted, most of the core group of writers and developers who made the company what it was are long gone, and the thing they were cannibalized for probably won't ever actually exist. If it does exist, who gives a fuck? Every passing month means fewer people who even know what World of Darkness means, since CCP invested in an IP and then made sure that the only market penetration to SELL the IP was destroyed in a move to print on demand.

God, what a disaster.

Eve is more fun to read about than almost any game is to play. I'd rather read about the latest Eve drama than play WoW.

(but yeah it does also need to be fun to play)

Very sorry to hear about the layoffs and best wishes to those affected.

As for Eve I do find it fun to play and I think most Eve players do. I think there is a small core of veteran nullsec players who are very out of touch with the majority of Eve, very influential and not necessarily healthy for the game.

Sadly for you Mittani probably deserves some credit for pushing CCP into realising they were drastically over-committed and their dereliction of Eve was leading to an inevitable decline.

I find the whole thing pretty sad myself.  I was a big fan of the WoD, both varieties, and never got to play in the settings anywhere near as much as I would have liked.  At least I can fire up Bloodlines again, I suppose. 

The thing that gets my goat the most is that CCP was ramping up the WoD MMO budget at the same time the printing arm was shriveling. Some of that's the market at work, since RPGs are a different (and smaller) business than they were back in the glory days. But goddamn, if you're sinking 100mil into a game in the expectation of a payoff *you don't pull your best advertising out of stores.* It was insane. Take the hit in order to keep Vampire on store shelves. The visibility counts. If people don't see the books, they don't exist. It's one of the most gloriously mismanaged sure things I've seen since Warhammer flubbed it.

The thing is that I got my fill of WoD in the 90s and early 00s. It was MY game but it's a product of its time and I'm not certain it's aged well. It just makes me mad because it was the hotbed of freelance talent out there with a ton of high quality stuff. It could be, still, even if it's not my thing anymore. Despite the rosy cheeriness of the few left behind, there's no way to make this look good.

Yes you're quite right. The existence of senior management hubris however doesn't negate the existence of a toxic community of bitter vets (of which Mittani is not one).

I think perhaps that the real difference between Vampire RPGs in the 90s and now is Twilight. It would be hard now to play a Vampire RPG without some dick occasionally going "Oh Edward!" and ruining the manly noir immersion.

Wait...I just realized that World of Darkness and The Secret World are two different games. Am I the only one who mentally slotted them into the same game?

The game wasn't going to come out in any sort of time-scale to take advantage of the RPG or Twilight. It was still in pretty early development, MMO's are massive under-takings and CCP are pretty resource constrained.

There's an interesting suggestion on an Eve forum that the "WoD cut" is really a smoke-screen for more general cuts in CCP forced by their financial situation.

I think WoD would have made them more money then the continuation of Eve will.  Even if WoD in itself isn't as hot anymore, it's still vampires, werewolves, etc.  As we've seen from Twilight that sill makes money.

It doesn't matter. CCP would have gone bankrupt before anyone would have found out. They need to cut costs now, and can always rebuild a WoD team once Eve stabilizes and Dust is a huge success.

The forums are discovering that large sections of the community team have been sacked, which should do wonders for CCP's ability to communicate. There's also enthusiasm to see if the cash shop developers got axed. I liked this one on the official forums:

It's not the vampires and werewolves that makes Twilight money.

I can't really see Dust being a huge success though. An FPS on the PS3? That's a title at the back of a long line.

Out of the two projects I see that WoD had the higher potential to make money than Dust.

This is a problem with MMO companies - they are (generally) completely dependent on one game for their revenue. That's not a great place to be for long-term survival.

Your other assumption here is that Eve stablises, which it may not regardless of what changes are made to the FIS component.

So: which publisher do you think CCP will sell out to? EA, or a cash-rich Chinese publisher looking to buy into the Western market?

Funcom, they need to keep the Norse insanity alive.

Eve stabilizing is a safe assumption because, if they don't, then all other discussion is largely irrelevant :)

It kind of is. At least part of the forbidden thrill for young ladies is, I imagine, the brutality and aggressiveness of the boys. If they weren't vampires they would be wife-beaters and the books would be much less romantic.

The game will survive. It's a money printing machine. The issue is whether CCP will survive or someone else will buy it.

Running Eve without doing all the other games would have had them rolling in money. They had until yesterday 600 staff. The FiS Live team until recently was about 20?

Hahaha, you're really expecting Dust to actually not be a complete flop because console gamers are a fickle bunch who aren't going to have anything near the staying power to actually stay and make a difference, once the next "ooh shiny" FPS shooter comes along?

No. I personally believe it's going to be a poor performer and damage Eve. But I'm pretty sure CCP expect a massive flood of revenue from it.

Not so sure about the damage eve part, unless we're talking about the money it's going to consume, and probably a few game mechanics which are going to make little sense after the FPSers go away.

I think they should probably just fold it back into EVE itself, and stop looking at the consoles as some place where moneyhats are made just because they release an FPS, but time will tell whether or not this'll happen, or indeed if my doom and gloom outlook on console gamers turn out to be true.

Dust 514 isn't just going to be a console FPS, it's going to be a console FPSMMO attached to another niché MMO. It's a double-down of   :ye_gods:

I don't know many people, who play FPS games, that would invest in Eve when they don't care about the other half of the game.

On Whote Wolf, I bought the books of their newish 'Scion' game and its really really good, at least to read. Their Ragnarok book in particular is absolutely first class. There's some serious talent still working there. If CCP takes out White Wolf in its death throws it will be yet another crack in this aging gamers heart.

Well Incarna was a huge fucking waste of time then! (they were developing an engine for WoD and Incarna was just a spin off product) :oh_i_see:

Must've seen how horribly their avatar engine performed in the most forgiving conditions(small room, no other avatars) and realised how much work it still needed.  Really sucks for people losing their jobs in this economy but I hope in the future that Eve gets the love and resources it enjoyed for expansions such as Apocrypha.

To be fair, what they did was launch captain's quarters with the details set to full or high, not medium or low depending on what the hardware could perform with. So people like me, who permanently run eve with all the detail settings set to low to be able to run 3 of htem at a time, with at least one of them at 2560x1600, got a shock.

However DUST goes it's better to have a game out and selling than in development. Release of Dust will be a huge financial relief for the company even if it bombs.

Depends on how much you really wanted people to stop asking when they can go walk in stations.

To be fair, that question still hasn't been answered.

Aside from Bloodworth and some CCP people I don't know anyone that even asked.

I used to talk about being able to walk around in stations. This was back when I mostly played solo and we never warped closer than 15km to a gate, so the game was a bit staler then than now, for me.

Yeah, they will have to catch lightning in a bottle.

Console-exclusive FPS games on the PS3 have struggled to find an audience. Even the top-tier titles like Resistance and Killzone are just moderate successes. I can't see being tied to Eve as a draw for most PS3 players nor can I see many PC Eve players getting the game just so they can play both.

An awful lot of PC EVE players would have to buy a PS3 first.

If they had put out a PC version (or if I had a PS3), I would probably have bought it for novelty value.


Fuck, if they'd at least made an Xbox version they'd have achieved more EVE-related sales.

Problem with xbox is MS and their policies though. At least that's what they keep saying.

I, too, might be inclined to purchase it if it was released on PC instead, but I sure as fuck aren't going to start with a controller-based FPS now after having yelled at them for years. vOv

So...the forum prediction is DUST is going to tank, thus dragging down CCP which will go bankrupt/get bought by EA/Acitivsion or similar...

Did I get that right?
How many months are you giving Eve?

I am trying hard not to panic now...  :why_so_serious: :heartbreak:

Cala

I would trust CCP to develop the WoD MMO more than I'd trust them to get a console FPS correct.

On top of which, CCP should really just change its name to "Mittani's Place" given how (publicly) it looks like he's basically running the company.

CCP never listen to the CSM anyway, they're just a PR engine and a sounding board for some of the lesser developers. The current action is all due to the sub curve going down when they need that revenue.

Dust will be a console FPS. The connections to Eve are flavor and meta-game, but if it's a bad shooter they're not going to matter....

I think it's probably more accurate to say that The Mittani is the public face of the general hue and cry from the 0.0 player base.  I'm certainly not hoping that the result of CCP's mgmt. listening to and acting upon the reasonable sounding suggestions from the players ends in disaster.

quoting is hard.

I wonder if they're contractually obliged to make Dust now it's a PS3 game.  I read On A Forum that Sony chucked a bunch of money at CCP to make it exclusive to their platform.  Would they stick that game on the back burner too given the choice?

Although it's fair to say CCP are following that cry like a little lost lamb follows it's mother's calls, which is close enough to make Mittens unusually smug.  Given Mittani is super smug by default that means we're at incomprehensible levels of smuggitude.

In public at elast he's not being smug. He appears to be pretty pissed off, not so much that he won't get to play a Ventru in real life, but because a lot of the people he thought were doing good work are amongst those who were let go.

Also, no, the CSM is not a PR engine for CCP. If they were, the whole program would have been scrapped as soon as it started publically slating CCP. I've seen the inside of the CSM process and I've also done some professional stuff with the CCP producers in charge of it.

Yeah I just assumed he was smug, sorry.  It's normally a safe assumption.  :cry:

I'm still trying to grok how some jackass seems to think it's a good idea making some random obscure fps title coupled to an old mmo in its death-throws instead of taking the WoD license and running with it.

I'd have ditched Dust, contracted Eve, and doubled-down on WoD if it were me.  Also, does CCP seem to think EVE can compete with the other big titles coming out within the year?   I think not.  The only way the company stays intact is if it develops another successful title, and that title was WoD.  Scrapping/shelving that pretty much spells their doom.

Such as?  EVE has got the PVP with consequences niche by the balls and I don't see any big budget game on the horizon that's even trying to do the stuff EVE offers.

CCP's problem is top management.   So if they got bought out by EA or Activision, it could remove the top management.   Even better we could see the whole operation moved to the US or Europe somewhere.

No. Don't even joke about EA.

If they moved away from Iceland just think of all the rotted shark jokes we'd lose.

If EA purchases CCP expect P2W cash shop withing couple month and likely F2P, elimination of 0.0 sec space and game largely pushed into "trading simulation" direction.

How would you "pay to win" a trading simulation? Buy more isk?

We have that now.

You'd be surprised how many 'wife-beaters' are actually the protagonists in romance novels.  :why_so_serious:

I agree that WoD has/had a brighter future than Dust - only because I can't see Dust succeeding. But I don't know what game you think is going to compete with EVE. It's the antithesis of most games on the horizon.

You are correcter (more correct?) than Ghambit but Eve always had minor numbers of normal people among its playerbase as well. Insfor it is not totally shielded from outside developments...for example, I think it's a safe bet to predict the launch of SWOTOR will have a noticable effect on subscriber numbers, especially at a moment where player satisfation is at a lowpoint.

My fear is that CCP might falter simply due to not having enough 'fat reserves' to sit out drop in subscription numbers or the sunk cost from a failed development (DUST, WOD).

Cala

Isn't dust going to be P2P?

F2P with micro-transactions for 'in-game items'. [1] (http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/50685/Dust-514-Free-To-Play-Supported-By-Microtransactions)

Cala

References

---

1. Dust 514 Free To Play, Supported By Microtransactions (http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/50685/Dust-514-Free-To-Play-Supported-By-Microtransactions)

External Links

---

• Eve Online (http://www.eveonline.com)
• Swotor (http://www.swotor.com)

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Sorry, that was a typo. F2P is what I meant.

Between Dust and WoD my guess is they picked Dust because it's closer to release than WoD.  Hilmar's blog mentions briefly that they've hired some professional management, so I guess that guy took a look at their finances and freaked out.  Their purchase of White Wolf was never financially sound.

Anyway, I guess we'll see.  I'm watching for signs that they're, what's the real estate word, staging EVE Online for sale, and if that happens then all bets are off.

Between SWTOR, Secret World, the new Warhammer stuff (PvP-angled), EoN, PS2, Firefall, and a slew of other cool stuff, you can pretty much guarantee they're gonna lose a chunk of their playerbase over the next year.  EVE had its year of "there's nothing out there to play, so let's play EVE."  Next year they wont.

Aside from that simple fact, it's an old game based on a steadily decreasing niche playerbase.  Sure, they've got great concurrent numbers historically, but that's it.

So my guess those 'fat reserves' will not be enough unless they just plan on skeletonizing the game and cashing-out.
What they should've done is skeletonized it, got a new capital injection, and focused on WoD only.  At this point it's too late for that though so here's to hoping they sell the IP to someone who wants to run with it.

They wouldn't be de-emphasizing WoD if they were moving towards selling Eve, as there's no point in developing Dust if they no longer own Eve.  They'd be going the other way, dropping Dust and starving Eve even more.

--Dave

As someone who only reads about EVE: a PC version of Dust which allowed you to fight boarding actions which bore out in EVE proper would have been fucking awesome.  The current form is much less awesome than vampires, werewolves, and hunters.

They can't afford not to release Dust, they can't afford to finish WoD.

They did skeletonize Eve and it was a dumb call. They had a fairly steady, committed user base they could have kept milking for years with even a moderate size live-team. But then they said things like "18 months" and all the Eve content was assumed to be WoD testing. They worked pretty hard to drive Eve into the ditch. Of course it is much harder to rebuild numbers and enthusiasm because it remains a dated and niche game. Trying to do two other games simultaneously was hubris.

Dust  is micro-payments and digital download so I'm not sure if that counts as fully free to play. You have to make a relatively chunky investment in the cash-shop up-front to play. Having seen their approach to MT in Eve I look forward to some new comedy coming out of Dust.

I found an image that sums up my Eve experience pretty well.


It would be a great game if that was a bit more balanced.

Yep. It's more exciting in concept, potential and high-level view than the actual gameplay.

Of course there is the perverse element that tedious game-play can amplify the payoff when something good happens.

More likely they are staging for a sale of CCP.

1 solid cash cow product with a few experienced guys working on it, and a development with IP and basic groundwork started, all in a company short of capital.

On paper ccp should be worth more as a unit than broken up. But not sure there are many obvious buyers out there. Too niche for someone like EA, too established and set in their ways for someone like valve to be interested, too disparate for some random VC to be keen. SOE might be interested, but because of their 'we buy anything' strategy.

Given all of that, sale of WW & WOD is more achievable. But it would be at a loss, given the running down of the brand, and with vampires being already a good way past the peak of the cool cycle.

Also who would be in the market for a TTG property except possibly WotC?

Eurogamer interview (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-10-21-eurogamer-interviews-ccps-hilmar-petursson-interview) has a bit more, but not much.

My hope is that a dude already in the TTG industry (or dudes) make a pitch for it when and if the time comes. I know for a fact that individual pieces like Trinity were bid on in an attempt to snag it away. There's actually a history here, when White Wolf sold off Ars Magica back in the mid-90s.

edit: And Ethan Skemp was let go. No line developers left. No authors. Just three guys, mostly web related. Trying to get any sort of discussion going on RPG first sites is ludicrously annoying, as the least mention of this maybe being an extremely Bad Thing long-term is shouted down with "NO THIS IS JUST HOW THE INDUSTRY IS NOW AND THEY'RE SECURING THE FUTURE OF THE LINES!" Which is arguably true for, like, a year. Then all bets are off. Plus, there's an obnoxious lack of recognition that White Wolf is playing by video game company rules now, not RPG publisher rules. And video game company rules say that everything eventually has to go because the whole shebang is run by fucking retards.

Some self flagellation & lots of onwards and upwards, pretty much what you'd expect.  Although this question was interesting:


From my perspective it seems like the CSM was 100% focused on trying to make CCP understand they were going in a bad direction ignoring spaceships and being completely retarded with their communication - nullsec vs highsec didn't come into it at all.  I can only assume Hilmar didn't appreciate the CSM going public with concerns or speaking to the media to try and pressure CCP.  He'd prefer a pliable PR mouthpiece rather than well organised player advocates.

His answer to the second question is total bullshit. They just needed someone to take the blame. They were all well aware that the players were are not happy. They just choose to ignore community feedback. Maybe they think the problems will go away on their own?

Looks to me like he's trying to cook up the usual 0.0 vs Empire rivalry as a distraction.

Only a small percentage of eve's population lives in nullsec. Each of them has 20 alts that are perfectly happy mining scordite in empire. I don't hear the thousands of isk farmers whining either.

If you're trying to tell me I'm spending my "20 alts" in empire mining scordite, then Imma cut you.

I have 2 alts I use in 0.0 and 3 I use in empire. And I use the word "use" lightly, since 2 of them are just used to check the prices in various market hubs, and 1 is actively used  for market fuckery and, soon, light manufacturing.

I would not be remotely surprised if the CSM is scaled down or removed entirely. They were a reasonably good PR move when Eve enjoyed being "indy" and having close interaction with the players. But now that they're a serious game company they're just an annoyance. And there's enough anti-goon sentiment on the forums to provide a good cover story.

White Wolf did have a card game called Vampire: The Eternal Struggle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire:_The_Eternal_Struggle) but it was discontinued last year.

Yeah I played this for awhile when it first came out, but I was still shoveling money for MTG cards at the time.

Re: The WW history lesson. I know all of that, I still have my copy of Ars Magica that I bought and ran back when it was published by Lion Rampant (before they became White Wolf). My point is that none of the current crop of TTG publishers could afford to buy the IP with the exception of WotC who probably wouldn't want to.

My point is that it doesn't have to be part of the current crop. The longer it goes, the less it's worth. Maybe nobody's interested but if I were a freelancer or former WW big from the glory days, still in the industry and wanting an established IP, I'd be looking for the price to bottom out once the WoD MMO finally get the official ax. And it will. I don't think it's worth a whole lot NOW. They're not even top five in sales anymore.

One of the conclusions I've come to is that it's a bad idea to be more than a one-game MMO company.  That's counter-intuitive to normal business logic, that says that you want to diversify and spread your risk, but it's that very spread of risk that seems to kill a company.  When you work for a company that has only one product (that may not even be released yet), you have no fallback plan, no room for an agenda that doesn't focus on making that one product as good as it can be.

As soon as you have 2 games you've got a competition for resources; money, talent, executive favor.  You've got people trying to get off the old projects and onto the new hotness.  You've got empire builders with no talent sabotaging and driving out the people with talent because they don't want the competition.  You've got people working on projects they don't believe in and don't give a shit about.  You've got games being warped by a desire not to compete with prior titles, or a misplaced desire to limit costs by re-using technology not suited to all the games it's being applied to.

The right way to develop a new title would seem to be making only one game per company, spinning off new companies for new titles, and making the old company a senior investor in the new one (who will get paid first out of the proceeds of the new game).  No more 500+ employee behemoths trying to run old games while simultaneously working on new ones.  It just doesn't *work*.

--Dave

Why?  CCP management is far worse.    EA would of made the same mistake with WiS.   The difference is EA would of gotten a buggy working version of it out the door in a quarter of the time.

It's probably also a bit of "We've declared we're moving on, we've promised features, now stfu and be positive" while the current reaction from CSM and the playerbase is "yeah yeah promises, let's see results, let's see things implemented."  To me it sounds like he's very much afraid that if he doesn't deliver in the winter expansion he'll be roasted alive for another 50k subscriptions lost, and he'd like the CSM to placate people rather than agitate them.

I don't even think EA would bother to buy CCP.

I like the idea. And Fallen Earth was somewhat there in having a "engine" company and a "game" company as somewhat disconnected elements. But effectively I suspect CCP is in a massive cash and time crunch to get Dust out. So that it stops costing them a fortune and starts generating some revenue. Having that side of the business take 10 years due to not being able to spend most of Eve's revenue, go under while funding development, or not release to the deadline are all flavors of bad. So it was inevitable resources would be taken from Eve.

The mistake was over-ambition in terms of developing two new titles at once, being too agressive in draining Eve of resources (and doubly in telling the players you will not have meaningful resources to use for 18 months) to push those titles and CCP generally being bad / slow and Eve quite buggy. Maybe if Eve had been healthy going into it, a working faction war and null sec still vibrant they could have got away with it better.

Yeah, it's too late for such a radical re-org for CCP, they'll have to gut it out as they are.  The time to do it was back when they bought White Wolf, they should have told them "You're a separate company, we own you 100% but that doesn't mean we're going to keep fronting cash forever."  And make an all-new one for Dust.  There would not have been that constant desire to trim *just a few more* people from Eve to put onto the other projects.

Maybe take it a step further, spin Eve off into its own company, with its own management whose future is inextricably tied to Eve's success.  The way corporate politics work, it would have underlined the fact that Eve was the cash cow and needed to be maintained carefully if the overall complex wanted to keep milking it, EveCo's management, even though answerable to CCP as the owners, would be powerful advocates for not starving their game of resources.

Look at the way that major movies are made: Each one is an independant corporation, owned by the entities who have put money into it (and shares set aside to individuals for their value to the enterprise, such as the director and any major stars in the cast).  A Warner Brothers movie may be almost entirely owned by Time Warner, but it is possible for a half-finished movie that is running over budget to go to other sources for more cash.  Or Warner Bros. might fire the director (change management) and continue on their own.  But they don't actually *make* movies at WB, they make deals to form these single-purpose vehicles that will make the movies.

The vast majority of the people who make the movie are just doing a job, and have no incentive for any agenda that doesn't focus on doing their piece of the job *well*.  And the non-monetary rewards tie into that, it's not common for an otherwise crappy movie to get an Academy Award or Golden Globe for Best Special Effects, Best Music, and so on.

--Dave

Can't you just do that by organising the company different? I don't see how Activision/Blizzard would become better by dumping all games that aren't WoW for instance.

Also betting everything on one game assumes the game will never decline or accepts that your company is a temporary thing.

Regarding nullsec v high sec, it rather depends which forums you read. On Kugu and Failheap defending mining and missioning against nullsec shennanigans just gets you laughed at. On Eve O there are tons of posts about nullsec dominance of the CSM and pro-nullsec anti-high sec changes. For example:
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=18519&find=unread

When CCP talks about the community what people here think they mean is Kugu/Failheap but what they actually mean is Eve O.  Half those guys at the bitter vets forums don't even subscribe any more and the rest never pay a penny.

If you can't accept that your company is temporary, you're in the wrong business.  They don't hand out pink slips at launch parties...they usually wait until the next week.

The reality is that the way we've been doing business isn't working.  It isn't making good games, and it's not making for financial success.  And Activision/Blizzard hasn't tried to make another MMO yet, let's see how they're doing after pouring half a billion or so into World of Starcraft or whatever.

--Dave

The problem with the old "video game production should be more like movie production" argument is that movie studios are often in financial trouble, plenty of movies go way over budget and most movies are bad.

There are parts of the model that work but I don't think movies are some sort of slam dunk. I bet there are plenty of people in movies saying "man, we should really be operating more like games!"

There's going to be failures.  It's a creative, "artistic" business and sometimes (often [usually]) projects are going to fail.  But as we do it now, those failures are dragging down games that went before them.  No matter how bad a movie sequel is, it doesn't usually damage the value of *previous* movies.  But when an MMO gets starved of resources in order to pour money down a rathole chasing the new hotness, it irrevocably compromises the revenue for that earlier game.  UO never recovered from the neglect caused by UWOO, EQ1 from EQ2, the list goes on and on, the list of "first games" that never recovered from the damage done by the loss of resources to them by their developer's decision to shift all resources to newer ones goes on and on and on.

And it's not like those later games have a great track record, on an ROI basis or just general "survived to launch" stats.

--Dave

There's going to be failures.  It's a creative, "artistic" business and sometimes (often [usually]) projects are going to fail.  But as we do it now, those failures are dragging down games that went before them.  No matter how bad a movie sequel is, it doesn't usually damage the value of *previous* movies.  But when an MMO gets starved of resources in order to pour money down a rathole chasing the new hotness, it irrevocably compromises the revenue for that earlier game.  UO never recovered from the neglect caused by UWOO, EQ1 from EQ2, the list goes on and on, the list of "first games" that never recovered from the damage done by the loss of resources to them by their developer's decision to shift all resources to newer ones goes on and on and on.

And it's not like those later games have a great track record, on an ROI basis or just general "survived to launch" stats.

--Dave

EDIT: Okay, forget movies, because those are discrete packages of content more similar to single-player games.  Take TV: This is like launching a spinoff series and trying to use common sets, actors, camera crews, directors, and writing staff for both of them.  Not only is the new one probably going to fail, but the original is going to get so fucked up that it won't survive either.

Freelancers get paid almost nothing, even for the big companies. There are only a couple guys out there who can get away with not having some other job besides freelance RPG design, and they're not exactly living in luxury. I don't think it is really possible for the WW IP to get cheap enough for one of them to buy it, unless they're independently wealthy or something.

http://www.robertjschwalb.com/2011/06/crapping-on-your-dream-freelancing-101/

The problem with the eve-o forums is that while they're the majority of the huggy-feely playerbase, I'll bet the vast majority of them are there because of the epic stories CCP keeps telling about players fucking other players over. Then they come in-game and learn that losses actually hurt.

I'll ask what I asked of pripyat on kugu, what do you think CCP should do to the empire pubpies then? Completely disallow ganking in hisec? Add more missions? Boost mining more?

Keep in mind that while they're doing this, 0.0 degrades even further. In fact, I'm still not entirely convinced that 0.0 can be saved in time, but I'm willing to be pleasantly surprised.

One of the problems with the balance of 0.0/Highsec croud is that CCPs answer to it has always been "NERF HIGH SEC MISSIONS!!!" While any suggestion that high sec missioning is not a golden goose machine gunning golden eggs to fat and lasy highseccers will draw the fire of 100 frothing 0.0 neckbeards, the reality is that if you starve high sec people of cash they won't have the resources to go out and play in 0.0. Hell, Most high sec people I met recently when I flew around in high sec were dirt poor, and many would love to raid 0.0 occasionally for some fun PVP, but losing any kind of decently fit ship would break them.

The truth is that if you want more people in 0.0, then you have to boost peoples ability to make money to give them the ability to compete with the rich boys. If you are making less cash then your ability to absorb losses is less as well. Starving them of resources actually encourages them to stay in high sec, as after you have worked for weeks to get a HAC you are less likely to risk it in PVP. Nerfing high sec missions again and again like CCP has been doing to "encourage people to go to 0.0" is actually counter productive, in my view. And that could be the fault of the CSM or the general attitude of 0.0 players, or the fact that CCP are still a bunch of UO griefers at heart.

Maybe Activision instead, then. Bobby Kotick vs Hilmar - whoever wins, we lose.  :why_so_serious:

Metzen writing EVE lore. :uhrr:

When did they last actually nerf hisec missions to anywhere NEAR the level 0.0 got buttfucked?

Your kidding, right? High sec missions are worth less than a quarter of their worth to when I started. The rats, the loot, and the payouts have all been slashed. I could earn 80 million in a night of grinding on a crappy system in 0.0, I'd be very lucky to earn 10 in a night of high sec missioning which would be a hell of a lot less enjoyable. And you have to grind for months to be able to do level 4s at all.

But the point is, to get people into 0.0 you need to be able to make them survive. As it is they might innocently wander into low sec with their newly tricked out ship they sank a months worth of effort into, get ganked by pirates, die inside 10 seconds and be broke afterwards. How would you feel if that happened to you? How is this nerfing encouraging you to wander out and take on bigger challenges?

They're nerfing both I suspect, because Isk inflation scares them.

Using PvE advantages to get people into PvP territory is a pretty questionable mechanic anyway. It tends to mostly get used by renters funneling insane amounts of Isk into the wallets of their landlords. But then the other mechanic is moon mining and it's even worse.

Yeah, I totally dig. Don't misread me there. I know what the freelance payscale is like. Believe me, I know. I'm just anticipating a fire sale at some point in addition to thinking the WoD IP really isn't worth what people think.

Yeah, you're probably right in all that.

The Jovians are secretly the Scourge! (http://i.imgur.com/D6dwO.gif)

Oh well, no risk and not quite as much isk. I'm literally crying inside.

I'd take that as a lesson in not going into 0.0 with an expensive ship unless I had the means to replace it. Or, I could of course cry like a little baby over how unfair it was.

As to "need to be able to make them survive", what does this entail? Having multiple billion isk before going out there?

It varies hugely from alliance to alliance. Last time I was out in 0.0 it was like, "ok stealth bombers tonight, zealots tomorrow" and we were expected to fly and have available ships for probably about 10 different doctrines. It kinda killed the fun for me. I actually had the isk but not all the skills and the logistics was a pain, especially when I brought out a load of ships (several hours work) and got told we don't fly those.

A player who just joined a very strong elite pvp corp posted yesterday as follows:

http://jestertrek.blogspot.com/2011/10/crossroad.html

He goes on to add that he then carted out modules to refit and a second wave of ships.

I've tried the Just Come in a Tackler approach. Very few alliances are laid back. Every nullsec alliance I've been in has at some point had someone in authority absolutely furious that not enough people are flying the right ships fit the right way.

From a game design perspective the main thing I think need to happen is this:

It needs to matter less about what you fly. Groups of 20 players should generally beat groups of ten players. Possibly also with some kind of diminishing return on blobbing.

I don't know how to do that but that's the reason high sec players don't move to null. We're practically useless and will be useless for years. The only useful people have been cap pilots. With the cap nerf the only potent people will be blobbers.

It's just not attractive if the most you can realistically aspire to is to be cannon fodder for a pet.

I went into 0.0 after 2 months in game, in T1 destroyers and Hoarders.  "Surviving" in 0.0 is flying what you can afford to lose, even if that's tin-can pieces of shit.

--Dave

I know this might sound radical, but perhaps the game is different now from when you were 2 months into the game.

We still have uses for newbies in rifters. We may prefer people who are in maelstroms, scimitars, claymores, hurricanes etc, but we'll always take a pilot in a rifter along.

If the alliance says otherwise, then they're probably more focused on ~elite pvp~ or small gang pvp, where a small rifter may or may not survive to be remotely useful.

I'd just like to quote myself...


 :why_so_serious:

EVE is fucking weird in that not only do the 'hardcore' blame the Victims, so does the game design.

Oh yes, that was me being a frothing 0.0 neckbeard.

I'm sorry I want 0.0 to be enticing the empire dwellers to move out there and stake their own claim and reap the rewards of actually forging their own path in the gameworld. Because mining and blowing up mission rats is sure to bring new blood to the game, the 0.0 drama is just such a chore.

I suspect that most empire dwellers on reading your last few messages would find the idea of going out to 0.0 to play with a bunch of people with your attitude anything but enticing.

0.0 could be nothing but hookers and blow and empire players still wouldn't go out there because of what 0.0 is.


Most people just want to play the game they wan to play, without someone else's games fucking up their own.

Except 0.0 encompasses what 10% of EvE at best? Obviously mining and ratting is interesting for the 90% who keep EvE alive in the first place.

What incentive does the game offer a new player to try 0.0 pvp?  None.  In fact you will be punished.  Low sec is broken.  It does not function as a transition.  Go to low sec, get ganked by pirates on the gates.  What did you learn?  For vets to spout advice is helpful, but it is not always enough.  What is a frig going to do under gate guns in low sec?  You have to fly something larger and more expensive.

Why would they?  What incentive is there?  The untold riches of 0.0?  Living freelance out of npc 0.0?  The learning curve is murder and the rewards are slim.  If you were hyped about pvp in the first place incentives would not be as important but that is not the majority of players.  So they stay in high sec because it is familiar and safer.  There are still risks and jerks, you are simply better able to control your risk factors.  

I was lucky enough to start in a comparatively robust low sec area.  A handful of us ran about chasing hostiles.  I learned a great deal and it transitioned me into 0.0.  I get the feeling that kind of transition has become much harder to find.  There is certainly a lack of npc and mission incentive through most of low sec.  

One thing is certain, the fix should not involve nerfs of other income generation.  

This doesn't solve your problem. You still have two entities competing for resources, but now they are actively poaching them from each other, plus the extra costs of running two businesses instead of just one. I've bolded the relevant bits that would still apply. Plus if the New Studio Game flops, it still hits Original Game Studio hard because there goes their money, same as before.

What doesn't work is MMOs taking 5 - 7 years to be released and costing US$50m+ in costs at launch. Companies need a portfolio of titles to diversify their revenue streams and insulate them from any single failure, but this means running their old games while building new ones and it may mean a smaller budget for a much shorter time frame. It also means you start work on your next title pretty much as you launch a game, and would probably require better division between the Development Team(s) and the Live Team(s).

Why did those 90% join? How many of those 90% are 0.0 alts? And what part of the game needs improvement the most for the entire game as a whole to stay healthy, viable and growing unlike what it has done the last year?

In fact, I'll go so far as to say that there's not much incentive to go to 0.0 at all at this point, except for all the drama. If I hadn't been in goonswarm already (or any reasonably newbie-friendly alliance, for that matter), chances are I'd just say "you know what? Fuck this nigger game", and moved on, because you can only really mine or do missions for so long before you start to /wrist.

Feeling a little racist this morning, eh?

Haha, really? Really?

Well, they did move all the best quality agents out into low sec. All that happened is nothing because oddly people didn't like coating their ships with salt and vinegar and serving them with chips.

Choose your LP rewards carefully and 60 mil an hour is very doable casually running level 4s. 
Mindlessly running the same shit everyone else does(eg Navy missions) and yeah you earn a pittance.

The best incursions are in low sec, no idea why there is only one of them ofc.

Simply moving around existing resources is NOT the solution.  You would think after all these years of spreadsheets CCP would figure that out. 

Last I heard, "best quality" doesn't exist anymore. I can't be arsed to run missions, so I couldn't possibly say either way, but I seem to remember CCP readjusting all agents to basically be a -20 agent, and that at least a few level 4's were still in hisec systems with nothing but hisec systems around them.

+20 for rewards, -20 for standings needed to access them.  Right after nerfing the shit out of 0.0 anomalies!

For all sorts of reasons, it's a sandbox. Some people really do play Eve to fly around collecting screenshots or to roleplay.


I'd guess most 0.0 players spend 50/50 time between their nullsec characters and their high sec money earners. In many cases they'll be flying with the fleet with a miner or trader in a second window. Leaving 80% high sec only.


CCP's answer would be DUST. The Dust-Eve relationship has to be really exciting with people playing Eve thinking I wish I played Dust, people playing Dust thinking I wish I played Eve. Their best case scenario is each game advertising and energising the other.

From my point of view I'd like to see young alliances viable for nullsec. It's a closed club. Goons were the last new alliance to force their way in against hostiles, some younger alliances like Test have got in on someone else's coattails. If someone works really hard to get 500 newbs they should be able to carve out a corner somewhere in some out of the way and undesired part of nullsec.


You're wrong. Casual, low stakes gameplay is the majority way of playing video games. Eve can be played as a low stakes casual game. Speak for yourself by all means but don't generalise that no one can play a video game unless it's heart thumping sweating tension and frenetic action.

EVE can be played as a casual low stakes game, but mining and missioning isn't it. In both cases the stake you put up is worth months of 'work'.

The only genuine low stakes casual games I can think of immediately in EVE are PI and flying with an alliance fleet in a tackling rifter.

Neither are especially easy for a newbie to chance their way in to.

Okay. EVE is doomed.

This is why I've been harping on and on and on about how the SOV system needs to be revamped AND 0.0 needs to be lucrative as fuck. Most likely not through pure isk rewards, because oh god the inflation.

I want more people in 0.0. I want more people who go out there all wide-eyed and full of zeal for making it in 0.0, because they're so fucking :shobon: it's not even funny. Of course, some of them are going to get their balls stomped on, but they either harden the fuck up and improve, or they go yelping back to empire like a whipped dog. But I want more than the more or less 3 coalitions that are the main coalitions in eve, because right now they're all so huge that any war between them is liable to contain trillions of isk on the line in fights that not just break the servers but anally rape them. And SOV is such a ballstomping affair to take unless you have a fucktonne of people, that it's just not going to happen for that reason either.

Jesus. I'm not even talking about "heart thumping sweating tension and frenetic action". I'm talking about a friend of mine who's been a miner/builder/inventer for over a year now, and his corp has been mining and building carriers and dreads from scratch. FROM SCRATCH. They're 5 people. They're fucking sick and tired of mining, and they're tired of doing missions as well. You can only mine and do missions for so long before you have to start doing other things.

But sure, since I'm in an 0.0 alliance, all I can think of is PVP.

To be honest, the first thing I would do is scrap low sec. You have high sec and null sec, that's it. Right now so many people get their balls smashed in in low sec that their enthusiasm is killed and they never bother with null sec ever. At least without that they would get their balls smashed in in null sec. and have a chance at Syndicate grade rats, which are better than low sec ones by far.

You don't *have* to mine in a barge with 2 alts for hauling.  Or run level 4's in a pimped-out HAC.  You can build your way up to those organically, using lesser versions.

--Dave

No. The idea of low sec is a good one. It's the execution/current state that sucks. I am not going to go all armchair developer and bring up my patented how-to-fix-low-sec-in-3-easy-steps-plan, but again, the concept of something more dangerous than high-sec full concord protection but not quite 0.0-sov-cap madness is sound. Eve needs some shady back alleys.

They tried that, insofar as less Concord ships show up in 0.5 than in a 1.0 system.  But it turned out to be a binary protection, either anyone who attacks gets concordokken, or they don't.  You can't be a "little bit" protected from ganking.

--Dave

I think there was also a time lag of concord showing up as well, from instantly in 1.0 to something like 25 seconds in 0.5.

But then at one time it was possible to tank concord as well. They had to abandon that idea for obvious reasons.

Conkordorkenned! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CLkXMlWUpk)

Which is partly why flying with BAT/Goons makes the game bearable because encouraging the noob rifter and people doing what they can to extract fun in Eve is first and foremost. The idea of being "Leet-PvP" in a game as generally bad as Eve is repulsive, but people will pad their ego regardless.

Eve is effectively a tribute to all the familiar issues with open World PvP. The need for timers, blobs, imbalances, punishment of noobies and the long periods of tedium. CCP have ameliorated some of these concerns but not really tried that hard to solve them.

And amazingly it got even better after that.  :uhrr:

I am trying to analyze their plan, how would they handle "tie-ins" when majority of battles are uneven fights? FPS suck with stacked teams, but that what most EVE ground fighting would be.

Maybe ship-to-ship boarding? This way initiating FPS mission can be a weapon, and you could balance around defending and attacking teams being the ship's crews that are about equal in size. If boarding team succeed, then ship is captured, but then what happens if ship is destroyed before mission finishes?

As to FPS on console - no staying power whatsoever. How is this going to affect EVE when console-side have all but 5 players total? It _has to be_ on PC.

I can just say that this will never even make it to any drawing board.

Much like Dust shouldn't  have.

Track structural damage in EVE, and send that data to Dust to deform the map currently in progress, then if anything cool happens in Dust (like sabotage, compartment depressurization) send it back to EVE to render it for those who have ridiculous gaming rigs?

Of course, you'd get Goon Bombers shooting holes in titans just to see the little Goon Marines come shooting out the breach, but isn't that the point?

To be fair, the idea is the next logical step for generating revenue out of an MMO while expanding your userbase. It just shouldn't have been CCP to put that idea on a drawing board.

Would have been an easy way for CCP to increase $/subscriber if they made it for PC.

We've been told that there will be orbital bombardment. Ships shooting DUST players. That probably implies that there's some mechanism for the ground pounders to shoot back or else DUST will really suck (like playing as Iraqis in Desert Storm).

So we may see a long duration map (like early Alterac Valley) with anti-spaceship towers that are capturable by the Dust players.

I'd also like to see a mechanism like your ground to space laser heating up over time so it doesn't one-shot small ships (although they have to scarper fast) but builds up and up so not even a big cap ship can just ignore them.

Ideally fleet v ground force should feel like a real fight in certain circumstances, not ducks in a barrel. If they manage that then if could be quite exciting - you could have a ground v space with a friendly space fleet inbound. That would be fun.

Actually, the whole idea of having an FPS in this game isn't automatically bad, it's just when it's coupled with a complete lack of planning for exactly what it's going to be there FOR, combined with the gloriously awesome idea of having that limited to console players, that it becomes what I'd automatically call a bad idea.

Then again, I would've loved it if fighting in EVE was more like in tie fighter or frontier: elite ii, so it was more a matter of pilot skill than lock f1 f2 f3 f4, but them's the breaks.

This has been implied in a cgi video. No one has actually said anything afaik.

If the tie ins are at all meaningful then PS3 gamers are going to hate being pushed around by PC ubernerds in a game they don't care about and EVE players are going to rage when they lose their shit at random.  Though I expect DUST will be kept on life support by the poopsockiest Tranquillity vets buying into DUST to dominate in EvE.

If the planet bombardment actually makes its way into EVE, then chances are I'm training up a moros. Precisely for that reason. :grin:

As soon the DUST player counts start to taper out, they're going to release the PC port.

I do hope so, the tears of console players attempting to play competitive FPS with a fucking controller would make the whole fiasco worthwhile.

Just imagine the tears of those who are so committed to their eve sov experience they actually went out and bought a ps3 specifically for dust. Only to find that the PC version was released a few months later.

Actually, I'm not so sure the PC version will be all that forthcoming. If it had been released on the 360, then I'd have no problems seeing it, but the PS3's core architecture is rather different, and I'm not sure how much work it takes to convert a game from the PS3 to the PC... Unless they're planning for both contingencies by developing for both platforms in parallel.

Some proper code layering (hah!) would enable easy porting. In theory, with proper modular design, there'd be a small rendering core that would need changing, same for the physics. And AFAIK, it was initially planned for Xbox and they even showed first demos on it. The only reason they're heading for PS3 now is that Microsoft requires you to use the Xbox Live network for multiplayer.

PS3 has a recent success story of cross platform play (Portal 2) while the last (only?) Xbox 360 game that allowed cross platform was the godawful Shadowrun remake; given this, I can't see why anyone is surprised that a game designed to interact with a non-XBL game isn't showing up on Xbox.

FYP

This.  lolccp

Does FYP stand for Five Year Plan? That sounds about right...

Fun experiment: open up the eve map and look at average pilots in space in the last 30 minutes, number of pilots currently docked and active, and jumps in the last hour.

I, uh, have seen a healthier and more vibrant 0.0.

Sure, goons may but do you think goons are the norm in that respect at this point in the game?

Don't know if this one has been linked yet. Here it is anyway:

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/21/interview-eve-onlines-kristoffer-touborg/3/

NOTHING about the Goons is a norm, and I don't mean that in a 'lolderp' kind of way either.

As CCP's financial situation has been discussed here (or in other EVE related threads) I thought you might find it interesting that CCP says it has refinanced the 12 million dollar bond that was to mature tomorrow. In today's Viðskiptablaðið (Icelandic financial newspaper) there's a piece where CCP is quoted as saying they have  secured foreign financing that is due in "a few years". This should give the company until the middle of 2012 to turn things around financially, unless there is another capital injection forthcoming.

"I’m a massive fan of Darkfall."  :ye_gods:

It certainly explains why they thought the amount of effort they were investing into Eve was reasonable.

How DUST 514 and EVE Online Bridge the Gap Between PC and PlayStation 3 (http://kotaku.com/5854244/how-dust-514-and-eve-online-bridge-the-gap-between-pc-and-playstation-3)

So what if no one has initiated battles?

Hurry up and wait? Just like in a real military outfit?

Realism, people! Realism! EVE is real! :why_so_serious:

I'd guess they'll have fights sponsored by and between the three npc factions.

Pretty much suggests there won't be any real time interaction between Eve and Dust since they're on different servers. So I'd expect a spaceship parked in "planet siege" mode to be a resource called upon or destroyed by dust players. And I'd expect it will generate disconnected battles, or dust people can claim resources themselves, because there's no way anyone other than Eve players will wait so long for any action to start.

Dust 514: The PS3's most important game

http://www.develop-online.net/features/1461/Dust-514-The-PS3s-most-important-game (http://www.develop-online.net/features/1461/Dust-514-The-PS3s-most-important-game)

They should be able to stream data between separate servers.  No need for them to be on the same box.  Granted, we're still talking quasi turn-based stuff here.
It's no different than separate levels in the same MP game intra-streaming data virtually.

:drill: