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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.
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!
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.
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...
Some people kick a ball around a field, I think they should get a life to.
It's just a ball damn it! Do something useful.
You speak as if day to day life itself is any less of a game.
I can't imagine why people should care about what your view of "life" is, if they're enjoying themselves. No, I have never played Eve or WoW. I probably would have got into Eve if there weren't any stupid RPG skill building elements in there though. I do think that it is unhealthy to not get out and do a bit of exercise every so often, but besides that, who cares if these guys get their kicks from playing computer games vs going out to bars or any of the other boring, meaningless crap that most people do?
which is totally what she said
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.
Your life is a game. A remarkably easy one.
I would hasten to probably add - a remarkably boring one.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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~
+100 Insightful
The only difference is that what we call "real life" is played on a much more powerful gaming rig.
I like to view computer games as "mini-games" that I play while I'm working my way through the main story, on my way to that final big boss fight known as death.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
Treating real life as a game is stupid. Why? Because quitting (or being forced to quit) = death.
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.
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)
You mean like Nethack?
Indeed, I've found most of it to be an endless grind for coin. Character advancement is very slow, if it happens at all.
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.
That's stupid. You die whether or not you "quit" or are "forced to quit". Everybody dies, but there is still a way to win.
If I have to explain to you how you win the game even though you die then I'm pretty sure you are incapable of understanding the explanation. So now I'll leave you to your narrow view of your own existence.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
So, you mean to tell me there is no spawn point? This changes everything!
We show geeks how to get their dream girl at EyesOfOdessa.com
firstly, for as long as men have been working they've been playing. there are tons of pointless things that have been done in excess throughout society. at the least gaming lends its self to a future. I mean, lots of people got into technology becuase of their gaming experience. tinkering with cars can have a similar effect as gaming - although most in that case end up mechanics rather than engineers.
yet, no one has ever truly elevated society via shooting the perfect basket. if anything i think they lower it on the whole - people spend more time watching the games than playing them. this usually involves beer and fatty foods. and the ratio of person being active to persons becoming obese on the count of that active person is *huge*. not to mention aspects like (retarded) rivalry that leads to fights, murders and even full blown riots.
you may want to think that since in the gaming and watching sports case they both are staring at a screen that they are somehow the same, but this is simply not true. there is no interaction with watching sports. there is no chance to get in and think your way through how the game works to tweek/hack something - or research how to perform said hack. people don't figure out how to build custom TV's from scratch to better their sports-watching experience. rather, the typical sports fan simply sits and watches mindlessly, occasionally making one noise or another from their gut.
and PS not everyone is "genetically programmed to run around and play."
that is why i stopped playing. not any of the reasons they think. RMT from the dev is stupid and immoral. it takes the challenge out of games like Eve. this coming from someone who can afford it even.
Sure there is, it lies about a foot above where a woman's legs come together.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
What this AC says is incredibly correct. Two of the ship types in the game (Super Carrier and Titan) are worth over $1000 real money. When you are fielding this kind of money which can be lost in as little as 15 minutes, perhaps you tend to care more about the game. People hated the noble store because it was stuff you had to pay real money for, which currently has no benefit. No one but you can see these items, they are clothes your character wears inside stations, which currently don't include interacting with other characters. The whole thing seemed to be a money grab from a company that had always appeared to care about their customer base.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?