EVE players

[Morrill]

Hello mates. So I am back to playing games again and back to the only game I play, EVE. I hear or view that many of you have quit so this is the official hey can i have your stuff post.


EVE System > Channel MOTD: I imagine I'll be kicked from Vanis fairly soon cos frankly I cba to log in long enough to move to G-0. Probably won't be back narf, Eve doesn't have enough going for it anymore.

So any of you out there that can bring yourself to log in. i would greatly appreciate it.

To be honest though I would rather have you back in the game.

PS Friz. I thought of you the other day whilst watching a bit of the royal wedding. Hope you are doing well.

Jack Slaide

[friznit]

Hey Morril. I really should change that motd since I moved and never did get kicked in the end, though I've barely been playing for months now, just keeping things ticking over. I still intend to come back sometime though, so not going to part with all my stuff just yet

[Shada]

I made a trial account to try the new character creation thing. That was fun. Actual gameplay didn't bring me back, though.

[Anhamgrimmar]

Oh christ, it happened...


Got fed up of wondering why i didn't play space excel (spexel?) anymore, and decided to use one of those 5 day free reactivation jobbies.


Well, the first couple of days went ok, so i spent some of my hard earned isk on plex. or three. sooooo..

Jaegerknack is back for 2 months
Gelibte Kettensage is back for 1 month (and apparently a CEO!)

anyone else still playing? whats everyone upto?

[friznit]

It appears I got the bug again, inevitably only a week after my last annual sub finally lapsed. So Friznit is back in business for the the short term at least, which means I'll need to dust off a couple of other accounts to support him. One of those has the incumbent 5punkorp CEO on it, so if we want to fire it up it can be done.

We had a full on old school skirmish fleet last night that lastest 8 hours. No capitals, no mega blobs, just good old slugging it out with cruisers and bs. Lots of fun and hopefully more to come. With the politics of the 0.0 game fragmenting rapidly I'm hopeful that things will get more interesting than they have been this last year.

[buzzmong]

I'm bumbling around in highsec missioning and exploring at the moment, possibly might move into some low sec funzone though depending if I get a pally or not and can then jumpclone out to russle up some iskies quickly.

However, based on CCP's current push towards Microtransactions with Incarna and today's epic fuck up regarding putting a repainted Scorpion in the game for the new RL money currency and nothing else (this is a problem because it effectively injects minerals into the game for £) and then the lies and backpeddling by the CCP staff member who announced it to the forums, I suspect that I won't be in EvE for much longer.

EvE seems to be quickly approaching a SW:Galaxies NGE moment.

The current anger in the forums is justified, while most people are quite happy about Incarna and walking in stations (hitting on June 21st), or at least don't care about it as long as it doesn't affect them, the fact remains that player run polls on the forums are showing that nearly 70% of the people voting don't want Microtransactions of any kind in a game they pay a sub for. Out of the other 30% in favour/don't care, a majority (~15% of the overall poll) would be ok with it if it was for vanity items only. In all the threads and comments on it, no-one at CCP has actually said *why* MT's are being introduced, people would be happier if CCP at least came out with the balls to say "We're doing it for the extra money" rather than the silence on the whole issue considering a couple of years ago a number of high up staffers promised that MT's would never ever ever be in EvE.

People are further annoyed with the pushing of Incarna and the item shop when there are massive balance issues in the game, with Hybrids are next to useless (Rails have always been poor, but blasters have been rubbish since the web+scram changes, and the boosts to Pulse tracking and Projectiles have destroyed their niche unless you're using a Serpentis ship like the Vindi or Vigilant with their damage bonus + web bonus), Factional Warfare being ignored even though CCP promised to fix and update it, Wormholes needing the promised content, and the massive problems with the overpowered state of Supercarriers (MOM's like the Nyx if you not played for a while) destroying the whole notion of BS fleets and having no counter, not to mention the overpowered nature of the Tengu, it's unscannableness, and problem with the tier 2 BC's utterly eclipsing not only the tier 1 counterparts, but the entire cruiser line up. There's other small ones as well.

In short, Eve Players are not a happy bunch.

Edit: 18:58. EvE has fallen over *again*. It's not been very stable recently. The last patch, which was a biggie as they've redone all the code behind the UI including the rendering engine, caused massive crash problems alongside lulz like all T3's flying backwards.

[friznit]

An alternative view (and I've been a bitter vet for the last six months): I found that if I stop reading the forums my enjoyment of the game increases immeasurably. There's so much self perpetuating bullshit being spouted by barrack room lawyers who hardly even play that people lose sight of what CCP are actually doing with the game. I've recently jumped back in to 0.0 and I'm having a blast - the alliance has been in non stop Heavy Cruiser and battleship fleets for months, only occasionally pulling out supercaps to reinforce a station or I-HUB.

I agree there are some issues - not least the stupid amount of Real Money Trading carried out be certain Russian based federations - but CCP's efforts over the last few years have, on balance, been very positive. It's worth remembering that the Sov and super cap changes were both largely player driven (the latter by Selene while he worked for CCP) and in response to complaints about the previous versions. One very common theme with the Eve community is they will bitch like queens whatever the fuck happens, but as with all these things they are invariably a flash in the pan and just as quickly forgotten.

Incidentally, last night's downtime was caused by lulzec, who were busy DDOS'ing their way through a number of different gaming servers around the world. Apparently this was amusing for some people, but clearly I'm too old to understand.

In summary, while the magic may have gone out of Eve, that's largely because I've been playing the game for almost 6 years rather than anything to do with the game itself. Meanwhile, it still delivers a better sandbox Massively Multiplayer Online game (in the truest sense) than anything else out there.

[eRabbit]

Microtransactions? Seriously? .... Piss off. There's a subscription fee!

[friznit]

Microtransactions? Seriously? .... Piss off. There's a subscription fee!

Thing is, it's not microtransactions as people would understand them from other MMOs. It's an extension of the Timecodes for ISK they have going already - you can currently purchase 30 day pilot licenses (PLEX) for real monies, which become an object in game that can be traded, moved, blown up or stolen like anything else, or ofc turned in for 30 days of game time. This was originally to combat RMT by creating an alternative, legitimate market for turning RL Cash into ISK and worked remarkably well (the $ price of ISK dropped by more than half), but it's also a convenient way to effectively play for free if you can earn enough isk (which narf doesn't take that much effort). They're now talking about allowing vanity items to be bought with PLEX, and it's this that has got so many people up in arms as they see it as a slippery slope towards implicit microtransactions.

[buzzmong]

Actually Friz, what they're doing is allowing you to convert PLEX to a new 3rd currency called Aurum (AUR, also the latin word for gold). It's essentially an ISK variant, goes in your wallet and such.

It's no different in application to any other system at all. The only difference being is that you have to buy PLEX first and then convert, you can't (yet) buy AUR directly. It is your bog standard MT item shop like you see in many F2P MMO games.

[Baliame]

Incidentally, last night's downtime was caused by lulzec, who were busy DDOS'ing their way through a number of different gaming servers around the world. Apparently this was amusing for some people, but clearly I'm too old to understand.

I probably am too old myself then.

[friznit]

I asked about this on another forum. In short:

Buy PLEX with RL monies or ISK
Turn PLEX into Aurum
Spend Aurum on hats
Get bored of hats
Buy PLEX with Aurum

Doesn't sound too bad really, as long as they keep to hats and paint jobs.

[buzzmong]

You can't buy PLEX with AUR according to the dev posts.

I do find it somewhat amusing what CCP are planning with the hats and stuff. If you get podkilled, they go bye-bye. That's going to hurt.

narf, I'm also not happy about their plans to shift content from the character editor to the AUR shop. While they're not removing stuff from the Char Creator screen, they plan that you choose a "default" outfit at creation, then if you want to change via the in-station editor (or the mirror in CQ), you get to pay AUR for the priviledge of buying clothes that are currently free.

I don't really care about the clothes though, just more of the prinicple of the thing.

[FatherJack]

Sounds like they need to come clean about why they're doing it above all else. Either they want the cash as subs have dropped or they need it to fund future development of things you wouldn't get otherwise.

Generally, though - it seems a kind of consensus that all cash-bought content should be purely cosmetic stuff that others can deride you for wasting your money on - and I'm not sure how this has come about. Personally I'd much rather prance around a space station in an outfit I'd designed myself than fly a spaceship about, unless maybe it was a pink spaceship, but perversely others would see such items as valueless. My friend makes herself happy spending real money on horseshoes and ribbons in Simfarmtown and imaginary furniture for her virtual flat in PS3Home, so clearly she attaches actual value to these items. I don't think she would be very impressed if someone came along and blew it all up.

Things I'd pay for in Eve might be a police escort for my ore freighter, or a time-limited loan ship to do a special mission in, because why the fuck not? It wouldn't exactly break the game and would actually be worth the money in terms of time saved or not having to have a second account.

[friznit]

...Things I'd pay for in Eve might be a police escort for my ore freighter, or a time-limited loan ship to do a special mission in, because why the fuck not? It wouldn't exactly break the game and would actually be worth the money in terms of time saved or not having to have a second account.

Therein lies the whole fucked uppedness of it. Eve is more MM than any MMO out there. If you want that shit, you should be paying ISK to hire other players to escort you, or hire ships that other plays have built. Not some pseudo micro transaction crap that the devs spawn on demand if you throw Euros at them. Hats I can abide, they're utterly irrelevant to the gameplay. Actual in game stuff is out of the question.

[FatherJack]

Therein lies the whole fucked uppedness of it. Eve is more MM than any MMO out there. If you want that shit, you should be paying ISK to hire other players to escort you, or hire ships that other plays have built. Not some pseudo micro transaction crap that the devs spawn on demand if you throw Euros at them. Hats I can abide, they're utterly irrelevant to the gameplay. Actual in game stuff is out of the question.

At first I thought I picked bad examples, as you describe those are both jobs other players could be doing to earn ISK, but now you mention it I struggle to think of any gameplay element which would save a player time - in essence the only game commodity I personally place real money value on which would not disadvantage another player or hurt their income. And this isn't F2P players being hurt, it's paying subscribers.

It's a strange model. As I tried to describe, players who pay real money want some actual reward they value, and in the F2P model they usually buy piecemeal what subscribers already get, but here the transactions can only be for things you can't get otherwise as any shortcuts instantly disadvantage your existing, loyal customer base. I can't see where they're going with it, does the average Eve player really give a shit about hats, other than that they were perhaps told they would be getting free customisable hats and that now they have to pay extra?

[buzzmong]

Eve's being used as technology testing place by CCP. What started with the Carbon code, now continues with Incarna (Walking in stations), and now the new MT store

Thing is, all the stuff before Incarna and the MT store actually improved Eve. The MT store however is a trial for CCP's next title, Dust 514, which is launching as an F2P game supported by MT's.

And no, people don't seem to care for hats, especially when it'll make no difference what so ever until they release the communal areas for WiS (the release on the 21st is limited to the Minmatar captains quarters only).

But like I said, apparently the MT items get destroyed if you get podkilled. The tears will be divine.

[Joose]

But like I said, apparently the MT items get destroyed if you get podkilled. The tears will be divine.

I predict glorious stories involving roving bands of MT-user Hunters. Cant wait.

[buzzmong]

Holy shit. There's some serious fuckups going on with CCP recently.

As per the thread, they've gone back on a promise to never have MT which upset loads of people, then they've been royally told off by the forumites for their next plan to add a ship via MT which would have massive ramifications on the market and destroy the sandbox as it's minerals for RL money and lied about what the CSM said, but they've gone and taken the biscuit with the latest thing they're planning on implementing:

Charging $99 licences for 3rd party websites/applications if they recieve any form of money, be that RL from ads or subs to the 3rd party sides, or even ISK within EvE (inc unsolicited donations). Things like EvE files and everything else, probably even public Kill-boards would be subject.

The EVE-O forums have come up with this little gem to describe the entire idea:

You are charging people who work for free to make your game better you asshats

.

Rather apt. CCP appear to have backtracked for now, with the dev's on the forums blaming their Biz Dept for the idea and claiming it's only a draft.

Honestly though, even EA or Activision aren't daft enough to try and charge 3rd parties for doing stuff for free that improves the game experience (think Beef's/BC's stat tracking websites).

[friznit]

No, no, no. Stop reacting to the forum babble like a Daily Mail reader and actually look at what they're proposing. This is yet again a massive misunderstanding from a bunch of forum idiots who are posting in reply to another idiot and working themselves into a frenzy before they've actually read and understood what CCP are aiming to do. CCP are proposing to charge people a license fee who are making commercial products that use Eve IP (e.g. API pulls). This is absolutely fine and normal, and nowhere does it mention anything to do with voluntary donations, or ISK for in game services (e.g. Chribba, forum sigs, Evefiles, EFT etc).

The propositioin - monetizing the free 3rd party tools - is something that 3rd party developers WANTED because they were doing so much work for free, but were unable to before because commercially they cannot resell Eve IP without a license. Now they can. If they choose to carry on working for free, or for isk which has no real value as it belongs to CCP as well, then they won't need a license.