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I guess you all followed the very emotional discussion and protest the eve community is showing towards CCP. ATM I try to not dig too much into the discussion cause should spend more attention to my new young family member rather then the current emo driven discussion. But I would like to point out my point of view that I already described in the Fanfest roundtable.
$99 Developer License
Yes please, BUT with a couple restrictions and changes: The commercial license should be dedicated to those who’re really interested in making money from the players directly. If developers like to create an application (for example on the mobile market) or provide a service (Webapplication) where the players have to pay for with their own money, then the $99 developer license is the right way to go.
If developer decides to provide an application, service, website, whatsoever for free (real money) to the players then there should no developer fee at all. Voluntary donations (as long as they’re not needed to enable a premium access level) or advertisement is revenue (in the definition of the bizdevs) but nothing where players are directly forced to pay to use that service. Therefore the license should not be applicable. (P.S. even links to GTC shops are giving your revenue/ad money)
I also have no problems with services that are offered for ingame concurrency, cause that’s money which CCP already owns (through playtime used or exchanged plexes on the market). I don’t see a difference when somebody is putting out an informational website with ads on or a player providing a page for his ingame 3rd party service or the pirate and war contracts.
CCP Devs said on the Fanfest roundtable that they don’t want to enforce the license rules that hard and sue developers, whatsoever. I’m not sure who they wanna do this when nearly everybody must to pay a license.
Simple license definition: Does the player has to pay real cash for an app or service then “yes” otherwise “no”.
Micro transactions (MTX):
I don’t really plan to buy ingame goods with real money atm, but if CCP would have change a few little things in the beginning, lots of things and rage could have been prevented.
MTX aren’t really new to the online gaming world and not to the mobile market as well. But IMHO CCP ignored the word “micro” in “micro transactions”. MTX can be very successful if introduced, used and advertised right. Apple’s App Store is successful cause majority the apps are really lowprice and affordable. Nobody really thinks about spending 1 or 2 $ for a great app that gives him a lot of fun and satisfaction, and the apps that are generating the majority of revenue are the apps that costs only $1 but are fun to use/play.
Same applies to online games and MTX. Nobody cares, If you could buy a pair of sunglasses for just $1 and the luxury monocle for $5. In fact: CCP could have sold a lot more of those vanity items in a shorter time rather then just 52. Sometimes is more sales for a lower price better then lesser sales for high prices.
When you start a MTX store you should have lots of small things for a really low price (between $0.5 and $3) that attracts players rather then putting them into a rage. You can always introduce more expensive and luxury items later, but only when the store is running nice and smooth.
Of course those virtual goods should not affect gameplay or give players an advantage over a different player. I don’t care about faction standing, clothes, accessories or custom ship paintings but everything that effects ships, modules, industry or sovereignty is a very big no go. Maybe we can talk about vanity items that give young players an training advantage up to 5 or 10mil SP but that’s all.
With these exorbitant prices, the lack of communication, the incomplete and meaningless dev blogs and the most important fact that you completely ignored and forget about your (much loved?) memberbase/CSM leaded to the biggest protest I’ve seen in this game.
Conclusion:
CCP should make statement what they think and what they’re planning. Talk to the CSM and find a way that’s reasonable for you as company and your award winning community. Talk to the 3rd party develeoper what they really need and willing to spend. You can’t force somebody to work for the community for free if they have to pay.
I would bet that: DOTLAN EveMaps generated more satisfaction, helped new and older players and kept them happy (and therefore spending $ for the gametime) that I could ever pay me back or earn via advertisement. If you want to disgruntle those people who helped forming EVE and the community to what it is now, you’re on the best way to do so.
The community is what Eve is making so successful, so don’t do you (business) plans without us. You need us, as long as we want to play the game. Talk to us, talk with us. In the meantime: Have fun blocking Jita 🙂
Related links:
- Dev Blogs:
- Eve Online Forums:
- EveNews24 Coverage:
- CCP releases new DevBlog, offers apology and announces the summon of the CSM for the next Weekend.
- “Leaked” CCP Hilmar Global email shows the reasoning behind CCP Zulu devblog.
- CCP releases DevLog concerning leaked internal Bulletin.
- CCP offers an Apology – Disgruntled Eve Online players lock down Jita / Amarr Trade Hubs
- Greed Is Good: Purportedly leaked internal bulletin shows CCP’s “refreshing” new direction.
- The Cosmopewlitan – CCP: Celebrating the Creative player and Monetizing from their Apps.
Totally agree with you on both 99$ and MT.
Currently unsubbed.
Good post mate. If only CCP had a clue in the PR side of the universe, none of this crap would happen, but ahh the dream of “if only…” 🙂
I’m unsubbed due to questions about Incarna. I firmly am in the camp of “3rd person is fine in regard to ships, but don’t do Evercrack/WOW 3rd person ONLY for a Virtual world when it comes to me staring at me. Give me the choice to look out at the world through my eyes and not some orbiting camera around a “toon”.
Now I’m STAYING unsubbed until this mess is resolved, and word is given that CQ will remain optional.
When i heard of :99 Bux: i instantly thought of you Bro.
DOTLAN has become such a valuable service for all Eve-Players CCP shoudl have given you Lifetime Sub for Eve a long time ago tbh.
I can’t imagine Eve without DOTLAN and i hope CCPs fuckups never drive you away :-/
During the lifetime of the game called EVE there have been several incidents which could of been seen as game ending. The T2 BPO dev handout to certain entities a long time back was never really dealt with other than CCP admitting something was not right.
Then came more allegations of possible Dev help to certain entities, once again though am unsure if anything ever truly happened to those involved on the CCP side of things!
There have been several other things also & on each & every occasion the PLAYER-BASE seemed to give CCP the benefit of the doubt. Now we find ourselves 8 years down the life line of EVE & CCP have now decided it is a great time to start whacking players with as much costs etc as they possibly can. Why have they waited so long before starting to talk about charging 3rd party app developers for the added help & attraction they give to the game? Was it due to them making enough $$$ from the game & not really needing to raise revenue through those means?
Then we have this so called Micro-Transaction shop, where items are so overly priced that $60US will get you a great little round thing that will sit over one of your eyes & do nothing more for you. This is just how the players want it as far as the items affecting game-play, however if anything has been proven in the past through MMO’s it is that these shops usually get into selling game changing items & then it is a point of whom ever wants to go spend the most will be the hardest to kill & that is bullshit!
With EVE in the state it is currently in I think it would have been more appreciated if they had put as much effort into fixing what is already in the damn game before adding even more problems. Sure super carriers are great for those that have them, & for those that have multiples of 30 & 40+ of them it is even better as they can basically wipe a system of anything player added in a matter of minutes with very little outside of an even bigger blob of the things to counter them.
Then there is the current saturation of RMT’ing & it isn’t like CCP don’t know who is doing it as they do & many people know it. I can’t help but wonder where it all stops or how far up the ladder it goes as that would explain the lack of visible action against these parasites.
No I think IF EVE continues on the road it is currently on for much longer we may be seeing the end of what was once a game with a lot of possibilities. As it is there are players leaving the game in bigger numbers than EVER before & the actually numbers of people logging in have also dropped by several thousand by the numbers that show as being online at the login screen. (Was nearly always more than 30k online, now there is more often less than 28k online. Maybe it’s just due to summer in the northern Hemisphere?)
There are many ways CCP can fix the issue, it’s just a matter of whether they actually give enough of a fuck to bother & up until now it looks like they couldn’t give a damn.
I wonder if CCP are moving into the console market & away from the PC game side of things? Can Dust be run as a stand alone game if EVE was to fail & close? or would that cause it to become just another FPS?
Very well said … props
The developer licence is a good idea and I’m sure developers like yourself will engage CCP in a lively negotiation about fair pricing. I’m actually looking forward to more 3rd party integration and I think we’ll see some good apps coming out of this.
As for the trade items: LOL. Who cares. I turned off the captains quarters as soon as I could find the check-box for it and I never even opened up the screen with vanity items. Nevertheless, if someone like walking in stations and wearing fancy clothes… more power to them! I don’t see a conflict between the way the hard-core eve players play the game and the 2nd life recruits who want to pimp their character. Its a source of new players and a source of new income for CCP and if it works, I’m happy for them. I really don’t understand the emo about this. If you don’t want to pay for a vanity item then don’t buy one…. seems pretty simple to me. As long as they don’t start selling things for real money that enhance player capabilities then it’s all good.
I turned Captains Quaters off aswell, cause my laptop isn’t fast enough. Just sad that we can’t do shipspinng with CQ turned off :/
“As long as they don’t start selling things for real money that enhance player capabilities then it’s all good.”
Ok, the space dolls part of Incarna doesn’t bother you. It doesn’t bother me, either.
But… What if they start actually selling things for real money that enhance player capabilities beyond what other players can produce with ingame resources?
That’s the real point. So far it’s been harmless to introduce space dolls. But it’s the infrastructure for something that can be worrysome, to say the least.
I disagree about giving new players 5M or 10M SPs for real-world money. That’s too much of a slipperly slope, so best avoid it entirely.
Honestly, I had a *blast* moving into 0.0 with 3.5M SP. I could barely fly a Caracal (much less afford it), and it was fun trying to destroy NPC battleships (which were actually dangerous) while learning valuable lessons like “no, you can’t take on a red Vagabond.”
I guess you got me wrong. I mean: I wouldn’t have a problem If CCP would create Vanity items (implants like the one you get in the officer edition which speeds up trainign, etc for the first 30 days of a new pilot) that would increase your training time by 10% until you reach a cap of 5mil sp (example).
I don’t want that people can buy SP directly to distribute them. That’s not giving anybody an advantage in a fight if a person can train 10% faster until his extended newbie time has run out. … it won’t make him a better ever player
We did, in fact, have fun blocking Jita..! …tell you what too – I canceled, and when my sub runs out, am seriously thinking of sniffing around Eve just a wee bit longer by buying PLEX – with ISK. “Damn it feels good to be a miner/missioner…”
The point, of course, being that Eve has slid down the “Pay2Win” slippery slope way too far already. You all should have been protesting when PLEX was introduced; Eve *already* has “Pay2Win,” (instituted while I was on hiatus playing City of Heroes), complete with batshit-insane Russian minign moguls buying up ISK and constructing giant space phalluses….and it’s going to be much harder to claim the high ground now.
I fully agree. As a carebear miner I don´t really care about pimping out looks of my chars.
But if they really gonna introduce shop for game items it will be lame. Too many llamas will take advantage just because mommy paid for the nice stuff.
Ubiquitous Newt is right too. PLEX is a tool for conversion to real world currency as is the char market. Also I believe that marketing of game items could make the market fluctuate in an unhealthy way. As well I can´t imagine from what values would be the prices calculated.
It´s all the time the same… when money get´s involved everything goes to hell.