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CCP Deconstructs EVE Online's Microtransaction Missteps
A few months ago we discussed an uproar in the EVE Online community over CCP Games' implementation of microtransactions within the game. Hilmar Pétursson, the company's CEO, recently posted a lengthy apology and an explanation of their thought process, which he admits was "wrong." Now, at GDC Online, CCP has gone into further detail about the lessons they've learned from the fiasco. Quoting:
"Of the eight original items, Cockerill said all but one was in the mid- to high-tier price range. Players naturally assumed the lower-tier range would be neglected going forward, which served to push some of them away. The second wave (and the forthcoming fourth wave) featured more lower-tier options, but it wasn't enough. Cockerill said virtual-goods sellers should release a range of goods at all of their price points to start with, or else they'll face the wrath of the user base. What's more, the team should have targeted the desires of its then-current user base, who cared much more about having virtual clothes for their ships instead of their avatars."
because of falcon.
In 2008, a little boy named Erin was relaxing on the beach in the middle of the day. Whilst doing so, he spotted a small lizard beanie baby about 6 meters away, stood up, and then called out to it. After the lizard asked him what he wanted, Erin said in a confident manner, "I betcha can't lick my buttcheeks!" The lizard replied, "I bet I can!" and stuck out its tongue a few inches. Confident of the lizard's impending failure, Erin laughed. However, he discovered that his confidence was misplaced right as he heard the sound of the lizard's invisible tongue slapping his buttcheek!
Angry, Erin yelled, "I betcha can't lick my buttcrack!" The lizard replied the same way, and then once again stuck out its tongue a few inches. And, once again... Erin heard the sound of an invisible tongue slapping against something, but this time it violated his buttcrack. Furious, he screamed, "I betcha can't lick my butthole!" The lizard replied the same way, stuck out its tongue a few inches, and the exact same thing happened.
For Erin, that was the last straw. He was so furious that he ran up to the lizard beanie baby and tried to stomp on it. However, it somehow managed to crawl up his left pant leg and appeared to be crawling towards his bootyass! In his desperation, he attempted to stop it by blocking it with his hand. He quickly realized that that would not be effective when the lizard merely crawled under his hand. The lump in his pant leg continued onward towards his bootyass. After trying and failing to take off his pants, Erin gave up all hope and began screaming for help. Once the lizard reached Erin's precious bootyasscheekcrackhole, it began crawling on top of it in a square pattern, stopping and continuing every few seconds. Whenever the lizard moved, the sound of a snake was heard many times in a short amount of time. This inflicted tremendous amounts of tickle on Erin's bootyass!
Now that you have read this (even a single word of it), the lizard will crawl on your bootyasscheekcrackhole in a square pattern, inflicting extreme amounts of tickle upon it! To prevent this from happening, post this curse as a comment three times.
No Developer integrity.
http://www.google.com.sg/search?gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=T20+eve+online#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&source=hp&q=T20+eve+scandal&pbx=1&oq=T20+eve+scandal&aq=f&aqi=g1g-b1&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=3015l4046l0l4295l7l5l0l0l0l0l250l894l0.4.1l5l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=7e1fc2f0ef23ad46&biw=1360&bih=655
They still don't get it.
It's not about the price or the clothes for characters instead of ships.
It's about the fact that we pay a subscription each month (an expensive one compared to other MMOs, I might add) and we feel that we deserve anything they develop for free. If they use their employees, time or money to develop something for the game, it should be free or more exactly: it should be granted by the monthly fee.
Most players do not just feel like they are paying to play a game, they feel like they are also investing money in Eve. They pay CCP in the hopes of seeing the game improve and accomplish it's full potential. When CCP makes us pay a subscription AND for new content, they don't just make us pay twice, they are also telling us "Thanks for your investment. Now pay us some more to get access to the result of that investment".
It's like renting a car and having to pay extra for a seatbelt. It's like a company taking money from investors and then telling them "your investment allows you to buy the products we make".
This is the third or fourth official apology from CCP and they still don't get it.
Oh and by the way - this new path CCP is taking (making players pay for new content) so far has made them lose more players than they have earned. Not only has this caused players to quit Eve, it has also ruined the company's and the game's reputation among potential future players. Personally the only reason I'm still playing is because I haven't given up all hope yet and I can say the same of most players I know.
Someone fire that incompetent CEO and replace him with somebody who understands the market Eve is in!
A game company manager finally figures out what the gamers arleady know...
Someone mark the date.. It's historic.
Now if only they'd try ASKING the players instead of bumbling around, failing, and then figuring it out half assed a year later.
Of course many players are also morons. So the signal to noise ratio is real bad.
In the CCCP, EVE Online Deconstructs You!
I'm a long time player who's watched this whole thing play out in disbelief. The vast majority of players couldn't care less about the current avatar or virtual goods scheme, or in fact the "ship spinning" that the apology letter talks about. The problem is that the company gets all it's income from one game (EVE) and is spending it developing Dust 514 (a PS3 exclusive that most EVE players will never play) and World Of Darkeness (a vampire and werewolf MMO that most EVE players will never play). As a result, EVE has gone without any new content for what feels like years. The "new" avatar system for EVE is basically a mass beta test for the Dust/WOD character system, and has no new gameplay at all.
The playerbase thought that the microtransactions launch was frankly insane (players of a hypercapitalistic game understand wanting to make money, but the way it was done made far less than they could have, AND pissed everyone off), and the leaks from inside the company suggest that most of the employees did as well. Many of them were players before the were devs, and they didn't like the way things were heading. As a result there were mass in game protests, which a leaked memo from the CEO acknowledged, but stated that they would be ignored, and that the company would listen to what people did rather than said, predictably precipitating mass unsubscriptions. CCP are dangerously overreaching themselves at the moment, with the speculation being that their finance arrangements are precarious, having overrun their timescales for producing their two new titles. Players and developers who have invested years into the game - far more than the sum total of official development - have written tools and created both fiction and real history in the game's universe, and don't want to see it vanish into the ether because of the incompetence of the company that runs it.
In short: the players want to play the game they signed up for, and want their subs to go towards new content for the game that they are paying for, not development of new titles they don't play.
Ain't people got better to do?
It's a game, for crying out loud?
Get a life, people !!!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The EVE MT experiment did not just fail because of that, it failed because of a multitude of reasons, most of which a sane person would have seen coming from miles away.
First of all, the NEX Store (the name of this abomination, yes I'm biased against it, deal with it) was released in a vacuum of a completely single player environment. The only place your purchase will be seen in all its glory is in the confines of your own game client in a shabby little hole called the Captain's Quarter (or dismissively, the Captain's Closet). Multiplayer Avatar interaction was indefinitely postponed for now (they finally admitted/realized that they had nothing fun in terms of gameplay value on the drawing board for it, go figure), so the only way your purchase is visible to other players is through the Tiny Avatar portrait (which is one of the reasons why the Monocle was the only item seeing significant sales, the other being trolls buying them to enrage the more easily excited opponents of microtransactions in EVE).
Second, the concept of a market-less (if you ignore the resale), infinite supply item is diametrically opposed to the core concept of EVE's player run economy and sandbox nature. Everything in EVE has a price defined by supply and demand. The price of the Vanity Items is based solely on the current ISK equivalent value of a month's worth of game time.
For a more sane approach on that and how it would be at least somewhat acceptable, I made a thread about that on a community forum in the wake of the ingame riots.
Third, even the low-price tier is still retardedly expensive. Even the cheapest items still cost 1000 AUR which amounts to 1/3 of a PLEX (the Gametime Code token which converts to 3000 AUR, clocking in at around 17 USD from a cheap supplier) and a full set of clothes (boots, pants, shirt/jacket, etc) would set you back over 20 bucks worth of PLEX/Gametime.
The reason given in TFA, while certainly not wrong as it really was bloody stupid to launch with almost exclusively high-tier items, compounds with all this and resulted in a huge backlash against CCP over it (and other poor decisions and a backlog of frustration over the last two years of neglect towards the core gameplay) but was definitely not the only or even the main reason for it.
I should probably also point out that the prices of the items in general are also hugely immersion breaking. The ISK equivalent price of a monocle (the highest priced item) is roughly that of a dreadnought. Which is a capital ship. The second largest and expensive tier of ships (after supercapitals).
And even the cheapest boots cost as much as a battleship.
Admittedly, you apparently buy a lifetime subscription to your clothes as they don't get destroyed upon player death like implants (another decidedly un-EVE feature of the Vanity Items) but that still seems somewhat extreme...
Eve is 8 years old getting older. It is niche and at end of life on life support.
World of Darkness... is CCP's future.
Eve Incarna Carbon is a PROTOTYPE for World of Darkness... CCP even state this themselves in press interviews.
They are just milking Eve for World of Darkness funding.
Don't kid yourselves, get a new playground, a new game. Move on.
Quit pumping new real money into Eve, stop funding CCP.
Send a very loud message to the MMO industry, make CCP with Eve go the same way as Star Wars Galaxies.
Into Failure.
World of Darkness is in jeopardy now, this is obvious.
STAY THE COURSE!
Still saying that the reason people got into EVE - spaceships and stuff - is all wrong, and what you all really want to play is The Sims In Space.
Note those words, little else in his mea culpa is particularly significant. It's not "Arcana was a bad concept" it's "Arcana just didn't go far enough." Get your monocle polish ready.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The problem comes for a subscription service when the premium content isn't just cosmetic but puts people who pay extra at an advantage. For example perhaps someone could buy boosters that speed up production, or learning, or reduce overheads. And anyone who chooses not to pay ends up a second class citizen.
Obviously if Eve were F2P it wouldn't be an issue, after all the entire F2P model is in selling stuff on an a la carte basis. But it's subscription based and the players are so hard core that I doubt F2P would even work without substantial changes, possibly a separate universe to accommodate them. As such, CCP should stop trying to screw their player base over. Sell the cosmetic shit but drawn a line on the ground and do not step over it.
How the hell is $65 a "micro-transaction"? I haven't played Eve for a year or so (quit just before Incarna) but this is just.... wrong. If you want to get micro-transactions right, take a look at Valve and the Team Fortress 2 hat system. Items are a few quid. I paid £11.99 for my Familiair Fez (now they're much cheaper!). But $65? I could buy a couple of games on Steam for that, or a new release. It's ridiculous.
The Plex system allowed players to change real life currency into game currency. Players with lots of $ to spend have a significant advantage since they can buy better ships, equipment and so on. I failed to see why the new micro-transaction system was necessary in the first place.
My best guess is, Sony made them do it in order to allow sideways plug into the upcoming FPS game.
Secondly, you are right that the infinite supply of "things" goes totally against the market strategy of EVE. Player make objects that they sell for in-game profit. If anything, EVE should have sold "Blueprints" to the vanity items with limited runs - the mechanics for this already existed at launch.
One thing that is more dangerous to EVE than to other MMORPG - most serious players have at least 2 accounts and pay for it. If CCP annoys one serious player, 2 accounts are unsubscribed. Having multiple accounts in WoW for example is still the exception.
EVE needs to watch out that the game is not avalanching and the "Barbies in Space" approach clearly has not helped bring in more players.
So, I guess Himlar saw what we can do then :)
How about being able to hide - truly hide. Not instantly appear on local, or in an overview.
Collision damage. Mining laser dual use (should be able to cut a ship in half with a strip miner!), planets should be able to host giant missile batteries, the ability to orbit planets and moons..... jeez the list is endless.
Hell the ability to warp to the point of your choosing, forget warpables.
Stuff like that.
Instead we get captains quarters.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
...all over again. Except the CU affected game play and this is just highway robbery on the new digital highway. Hmm, let me explain. No, it would take too long, let me sum up -- based on the posts here from current EVE players about the background of what is happening, this whole event has the _feel_ of the SWG community after the CU and is moving towards the feel of the NGE implosion.
Sucks for long-term players, regardless of your game of choice. I had three accounts on Star Wars Galaxies at the height of my playing. A LOT of the people I gamed with did. We all, to the last person, left by the time of NGE. Maybe CCP will get its shit together and stop trying to use EVE to beta-test for their other games. Or at least stop trying to get you to pay for their R&D through EVE, other than a subscription.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
Spot on. Add to that the fact that these older players are also the ones that add the real content to EVE - all the drama that gets mentioned on gaming web sites and blogs - makes this even worse. Without those, EVE becomes annoying for the "grunts" ... and they well leave the game, too.
A lot of the player anger was driven by the fact that this arrived as part of an 'expansion' that managed to take away popular features and forced players to use the Walking In Stations interface even though said interface was incredibly resource intensive and melted GPU's. Also, they screwed up several months previously when at the last minute they dropped support for older CPU's because the library that simulated clothes and hair needed SSE3 extensions. The deployment of the new avatar technology has just been a mess and actual 'flying in space' features have been left unmaintained at the expense.
It should also be pointed out you didn't need to spend real money for microtransactions, you could buy PLEX from other players (who wanted to convert real money into game money) and then, this being Eve, you could troll other players by flying around with MT items that cost more than a capital ship.
They're ALWAYS in an uproar about some shit or another. That's like saying "Linux community upset about changes to kernal" or "Sony being criticized for heavy-handed move" or "Apple fans anxiously awaiting next Apple announcement."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
CCP showed their players the door. Literally.
When you turn off the amazingly resource hungry, badly designed, captains closet, the game literally shows you the door. And those nice Icelandic folk still don't understand that "showing someone the door" is an american idiom for kicking them out. There were so many stupid idiotic mistakes in this release that clearly showed the pure incompetence of CCP. If, as seems likely, they were as incompatent with their money, and with the Iceland/EU and EU monetary issues they're likely to go bankrupt soon.
Its even worse than that.
Its tied to the playstation3. It will be coming out at the end of the PS3 lifecycle.
Who is going to buy a game that is supposed to be a persistent shooter on a platform that is at end of life? If CCP sticks with PS3 play on their expansions then they loose the new/better factor of the PS4, go to PS4 and people are pissed they can't play the game they just bought last year. Play on both and its crappy for everyone...
Then the tie in to EVE is very risky. To many dust players vs. eve players and not enough for them to do, not enough dust players and hard to accomplish stuff in eve. Wars slow done in eve dusties get bored. Dusties start leaving eve players have harder time fighting wars.
Anyone think CCP is smart enough to solve these problems on their first release?
It's different this time. If it was FOSS there would be a fork right now.
I'm letting my subs go until there is a drastic change in management and T3 ships across the board. And yes, ship skins would be kind of nice; at least other players could SEE those. But, despite high subscription fees, none of this is happening, because all the effort is going to two new games which are both doomed to fail. Since they are ignoring their player base, this apparently the only way to voice my opinion.
Yeah, but this time it looks like the online player numbers are slowly but certainly declining. ...Two of the missing accounts from there are mine; I quit in June for reasons other than MT introduction.
Look at this link: http://eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility
(the 6-months data seems to not show up for some reason)
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
At launch? No, those mechanics did not exist at launch. Unless... do you mean the launch of the vanity items? Because then you'd be correct. However, when EVE launched, blueprints were not yet correctly implemented. Arguably, it took 3 years to get that part right.
Someone else pointed this out, but I think it bears repeating. The vanity items and cloths are NOT designed for EVE. They are assets from WoD or maybe even DUST. CCP decided to do a quick and dirty little trick by introducing them to eve, along with the CQ, which is another asset from WoD.
2 accounts? AHAHAHAH. Most of the players I know, granted, mostly hardcore, have 3-5 accounts. It is not in any way uncommon for someone to have more than 5. I had 3 "mains" and 6 throwaways over the years. Anyone that is part of a major nullsec alliance generally has at least 2 accounts, and more often, 3. The reason for this is pretty simple economics. In EVE, 2 ships can make a LOT more money than 1 can, and furthermore, you want a main with combat skills, and an Alt with industrial skills, and maybe another Alt with covert skills and maybe another Alt with the ability to fly a freighter... etc etc etc. Furthermore, if you have any idea what you are doing, 3 accounts can make enough ISK in 1 month to pay for all 3 accounts. Depending on how you go about this, you might only need to log in once a month or so, for each account.
So yeah, CCP is in deep shit when it comes to pissing off their player base. They claim subscriber numbers in the 300k range (last I checked), but as a player in since beta, I know for a fact that number is closer to 1/3 of what they claim. They might have 300k accounts, but only 100k players. You start pissing off large groups of those players and EVE will die in a matter of weeks. Interestingly, EVE has a tipping point that most MMO's don't have. That is, signification portions of the game universe are the direct result of player interactions. The ships, weapons, ammo, space stations, and all the "infrastructure" in Nullsec is entirely provided by players. If enough players leave to depopulate major sections of the map, the game world begins to crumble, FAST.
But it's a very old game that has not had much in the way of updates. EVE has been holding onto players pretty well for a game of that age. Any decline can not be attributed to just one factor, and of all the factors the biggest is probably players getting tired of it and wanting to do something new.