Tag: ccp

Blogbanter #31

With 2012 almost upon us, I think it’s appropriate to look where Eve has gone this year and where it will be going. Well since the upheavel this summer, CCP has drastically altered it’s course. This resulted in a winter expansion that actually focused on improving the Space Game !

Blogbanter #31 focused on reviewing Eve after the winterexpansion. I thought it would be appropriate to link to it, since I am not subbed at the moment and won’t give you an opinion without actually havening played the new expansion.

This special ‘End of Year’ Blog Banter edition aims to be a crowd-sourced game review. Using your gaming knowledge and experience, join the community in writing a fair and qualified review of EVE Online: Crucible. This can be presented in any manner of your choosing, but will ideally including some kind of scoring system.

Freebooted : Blogbanter #31 and the end result.

 

CCP In Desperate Need Of Cash

Nothing like a catchy, provocative blog post title ! Maybe I should apply for a job at EveNews 24 ! Whatever the case, I am of course referring to the new 13 plex for $199,- offer ! Seems like a weird deal. It really makes you wonder how desperate in need CCP actually is.

cash_pileNot much in game news as of late on this blog. My sub ran out (like so many active Eve bloggers it seems ?) late July. I still read failheap challenge, take a peek at evebloggers.com whether there is anything that catches my interest, and now and then the Eve-O forums. Since I hadn’t been playing much the past few months anyway, I don’t miss it much. I must thank the Hidden Agenda corp for making the last year and a half or so in Eve a fun experience. The events like frig tournaments were fun and there was a nice balance between activities and freedom.

My last blogpost refered to the press conference CCP and the CSM did after the events in july. I was reading Life in Losec’s post which refered to a post by Seleen that touches this very subject. I alread thought the statements made in that press conference were a load of crap, but to see a CSM member agree with that is interesting.

If I take a look at eve-offline it seems this time people actually did vote with their feet and a lot of subs are indeed starting to run out. I do find the graphs there somewhat hard to read, but if you look at the  ‘past three months’ one you can see a decline in active players. Of course it being summer and all has to do with that as well. And since we’re not getting the economic quartly any more that had sub numbers, we’ll probably be in the dark for a while on the real numbers.

CCP Press Conference

A very good write up on the event can be found on Gamereactor. Written by @petterm.

Just a few silly quotes:

The CSM-members themselves arrived in Iceland “worried, angry and paranoid” but soon they realized that it was actually a “shadow of a controversy” since there was actually no real controversy in the first place.

Ah there was no controversy ! Right …

According to the CSM, CCP should have explained the pricing of the items in the Noble Exchange from the start and what kind of strategy they had for it. If they had, Alex said, the whole thing would have disappeared in a “puff of logic.”

Oh rly ?

Meh, I have enough of the whole affair to be honest :). Let’s move on…

Dat Statement

And finally the CSM and CCP statement about the Reykjavik Peace Summit has been released ! I am not quite sure whether there are winners or losers in this one, but if there were you could say the players won. The very popular eve feature of ‘ship spinning’ will be coming back and furthermore, only vanity items in the NEX store for the foreseeable future. I also liked the statement by the CSM that they very much disliked the leaked email by the CCP ceo, which was very out of touch with reality.

handshaking

 

We are convinced that CCP has no plans to introduce any game-affecting virtual goods, only pure vanity items such as clothing and ship skins. We have been repeatedly assured that there are no plans for ‘gold ammo’, ships which have different statistics from existing common hulls, or any other feared ‘game destroying’ virtual goods or services. We have expressed our deep concern about potential grey areas that the introduction of virtual goods permits, and CCP has made a commitment to discuss any proposals that might fall into these grey areas in detail with CSM at the earliest possible stage.

This is pretty much what most people would hope for, and it’s the best CCP could do at the moment. CCP must have looked at the numbers and seen all those unsubscriptions ! Also all the bad press this has giving made them change course. If there was a course to change (well the returning shipspinning is new).

I am sure there will still be drama and forum whining, ‘but they didn’t promise no non-vanity items ever !’. But those people will just have to play the game as it is, and not what it could be in a few years time. From a business point of view they cannot commit to non-vanity forever, as I already stated in my previous blogpost.

Fact remains that I still don’t like where CCP is going. Devoting most of the development time to Incarna, Wod and dust. Releasing crappy ‘expansion’. The sad state their 3d engine is in (this doesn’t bode well for Wod btw) etc etc.. But at least for now we see some light at the end of the tunnel (queue dramatic music).

No plans for golden ammo

A devblog that addresses the recent events in Eve has been posted by CCP Zulu. This one is much better in tone and even says “For that I am sorry”.

There are no and never have been plans to sell "gold ammo" for Aurum

 

Note that he does not say ‘there never will be’. At this point CCP has committed to the new Aurum store. I don’t think it will ever disappear. Nor will they make a commitment that it will NEVER contain any non-vanity items. CCP Soundwave in his piece in the leaked bulletin mentioned storage for ship fittings. (Feels a bit similar to bags in LOTRO). Something like that can still happen. Or skill points or whatever.

The CSM has been called up to Iceland, but to be honest I see that as a PR stunt. I have no clue what they’re supposed to be discussing. Performance troubles in Incarna ? The Aurum shop is pretty much untouchable at this point. The CSM won’t make CCP change it’s mind.

CCP knows perfectly well that non-vanity items would make a large percentage of people leave, they might at some point in the future when Eve starts dwindling down take that risk and milk the last few dollars from their cash cow. And we won’t like it, but it’s a business after all.

Eve In Turmoil

A series of events have lead CCP and the Eve players base into an NGE like situation. How did we get here ? First of all several pretty lacklustre expensions in a row. Then we got the ‘18 month halt because we’re developing a console game’ disaster last year. Then this year we had the ‘Dust is ps3 only’ debacle, followed by a $99,- for a website license devblog.

And in the last few days we got the badly coded Incarna, which fried some people’s pc’s and made a lot of people wondering why CCP spent three years developing an empty room with a screen. Furthermore the few vanity items (all five or six) were ridiculously expensive !

So far a lot of people were upset, and some threadnaughts appeared on the forum. Some people might have canceled, or at least canceled alt accounts. People demanded the old ship spinning screen back and all that. The situation wasn’t very pleasant.

scream_2

 

Then on the night of the 22nd of june, an internal bulletin was leaked. Apparently some people like Mynxee and Teadaze had already seen a similar one, and confirmed that it might very well be legit. A little later that night it also appeared on the forums (well links to the news article).

What exactly was wrong with the bulletin ? I think it was especially the tone of voice ! It made us, the eve players look like cows that can be milked for cash. Especially CCP_Soundwave came across as a money hungry Lead Game Designer, coming up with all sorts of weird plans to make people buy stuff from the NEX shop. Ammo, ships, it could all be bought with cash.

Then we got to a point where people expected some sort of response from CCP, and until now we still haven’t gotten a proper response. Just a ‘bear with us, we’ll make a statement soon’ thing, from a PR person I had never heard of.

So there you go, Eve on the brink of disaster. Most of the older vets saw this coming from a mile away. Even on this blog in early 2010 I posted a ‘I am concerned’ post. CCP has taken a different direction the past few years, since they are trying to develop two new games, financed by Eve players. I think this has turned out to be a little too expensive and they’re a little strapped for cash, but that is pure speculation !

To be continued…

UPDATE A pretty insulting devblog that was supposed to address the issues people have with the current direction CCP is taking actually said absolutely nothing… I guess CCP doesn’t care any more for the existing playerbase and is on the hunt for the new one that does not exist.

November Bugfix Release

As we can read in yet another new devblog Incursion will be released in parts. The first part that will be released in November will contain mainly balance and bug fixes it seems :

  • 80 new story line courier missions
  • Rocket balancing
  • Tech 2 ammo balancing
  • Adding faction ships to the market
  • Fighter bomber missile visual effects changes
  • Anti-aliasing support
  • Window resizing, camera offset
  • Meta-item indicator icons
  • UI optimization to contract delivery filtering
  • Cargo can now be dragged to hangar by dropping on Neocom
  • Toggling probes in overview
  • POS gunners now receive notifications about control towers under attack
  • Sorting deliveries according to distance in jumps or regional locations
  • Unique icons for Microwarpdrives and Afterburners

Mind you, this isn’t written in stone, so some things might not be in it. To be honest, although it is a bit disappointing to not see real new stuff until January when the second part is supposed to be released, it’s better that the new stuff actually works ;). Wonder how the CCP PR machine will spin this though. The lack of a trailer so far makes me think they will start promoting the January release rather than the November one.

Blog Banter #19 – CCP and the CSM

Welcome to the nineteenth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed to crazykinux@gmail.com. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This months topic comes to us from @evepress, and he asks: The CSM: CCP’s Meta Game? – The CSM, an eve players voice to CCP. Right? In the grand scheme of things yes, the players bring up issues and the CSM presents them to CCP. But in its current iteration the CSM was supposed to be given small authority to assign CCP assets to projects that the CSM thought needed work on. As it has now come out this is not the case. So fellow bloggers, is the CSM worth it, has the CSM improved the game in any way, or is it just a well thought out scam by CCP to give us players a false sense of input in the game? What’s your take?

This BlogBanter comes at a delicate time, when the shit has hit the proverbial fan after the minutes of the latest CSM – CCP meeting had been released. If I have to answer this question at the moment, then I would say, No at the moment the CSM isn’t really worth it if no development time can be assigned to any issues. Of course it’s useful to keep the conversation going, but if it’s just talk and no action it’s pretty much useless. CCP does send out press releases about the CSM (at least I see the same type of articles on various press sites) so it’s still being used as a PR tool. Reading the latest ‘18months’ devblog and the responses by various CCP employees, I get the impression that at the moment CCP doesn’t really know what to do with the CSM and CCP_Zulu even seems annoyed by them.

athens1

Overall though I think the CSM has been useful, if not only for the skill queue and various other accomplishments. It’s a really nice idea to have some people represent the players who bring forward concerns by the players. It’s then up to CCP to decide what will be addressed and what will not. Of course we do understand they can not do everything that’s being proposed, but at least some issues would be nice. I assume that was the original idea behind it…

See other participants:

  1. Growing Pains | CrazyKinux’s Musing
  2. CSM: Hoax or Serious Business? « Lost in New Eden
  3. CSM-Power to the people or puppets of CCP « A whole lot of Yarrrr!!!
  4. Gaming the CSM | A Mule in EvE
  5. A Taste Of Democracy | StarFleet Comms
  6. CSM: Player Power or Paper Tiger? | I Am Keith Neilson
  7. Governance Thrash Redux? « The Ralpha Dogs
  8. CCP Doesn’t Care: Blog Banter 19 « OMG! You’re a Chick?!
  9. The Cataclysmic Variable: It’s Crunch Time!
  10. The 19th EVE Blog Banter is upon us… and about the CSM and CCP | Victoria Aut Mors
  11. CSM: Lame Duck from the beginning?
  12. Blog Banter #19 << Dense Veldspar
  13. Be careful what you say, Roc « Roc’s Ramblings
  14. Exchange Fraking Phone Numbers « Scrap Metal & Faction Ammo
  15. Blog Banter #19: Assumptions
  16. EVE Blog Banter #19 | EVE on Real Life
  17. A Reality Check | A “CareBears” Journey
  18. Quit your bitching | Fly Reckless – EVE Online
  19. War has come to EVE | Scram Web
  20. CCP and the CSM | Morphisat’s Blog
  21. More to come…