Ah ah ah.....be careful what you ask for. Functionally identical......a $2 t-shirt is functionally identical to a $100 t-shirt. Sure, they both serve the purpose to cover the body but one has nicer fabrics and is generally more durable. Just like the Isukone Scorpion purportedly by CCP was functionally identical to the regular Scorpion. But, we couldn't get any more details on that other than it was "functionally identical". Some of us actually suspected it would be a p2w item beyond its paint scheme. And I do believe we are entering a period where the words we choose are going to become very very important when dealing with CCP in the next few months.

In the example of the Isukone Scorp.....functionally identical doesn't exactly convey identical characteristics. All BS's are functionally identical. That is to say functionally, they all kill things. How they do it and their efficacy is the real question.

I know I'm going off here about a t-shirt and it doesn't really make any difference in that situation. But I do smell a new effort by CCP to revamp the NeX, which isn't a bad thing except we seem to be taking the same route we did last year. The player financial survey is what is setting me off here. It proceeded the disasters of last year. So, just a word of warning folks.

Be vigilant and make sure to keep your hand on the brakes.

^ this

CCP's marketing was not deceptive unless they specifically stated that you would not be able to purchase the special t-shirt in any other way. YOU were the one who made this assumption, and by the looks of it, you don't have very much company.

a reasonable expectation requires a reasonable person

a reasonable person does not spend $300 on virtual shirts

ergo it is impossible for there to be a reasonable expectation re: a $300 virtual shirt you purchased

There is no argument here, just a lot of people laughing at you for failing at reading comprehension.

Quality is greater than quantity. EVE is an interactive science fiction simulator and a sandbox style game. It is self-evident why microtransactions are bad for such an environment. What I see with Aurum is CCP being short-sighted in its belief that microtransactions will make it more money and thus be good for EVE, at the expense of the long-term integrity of the simulation and sandbox.

I hold that anyone who advocates or uses Aurum is careless in at least one of two ways. Either they haven't followed the ramifications of such a system on a sandbox/simulation through to its almost immediately obvious conclusion, or else they just plain don't care beyond getting their kicks right now.

Microtransactions move EVE from the awesome scifi-simulator/sandbox realm, and into the realm of cheap arcade games (just pump in another quarter ...) or Zynga games. It's a move from away from meaningful and towards vapid. By supporting it, you've picked up the snake and opened the door to all sorts of nastiness, including situations like your current one. Congratulations.

It's not like it's particularly strange that promotional items later become available to all and sundry (in fact, CCP has done exactly that on a number of occasions, and since it's the nature of promotional items, it didn't really come as a surprise to anyone).

It already is pay-to-win (read: pay for an advantage) and has been since the inclusion of PLEX. I groaned about that, too. Aurum takes it a step further by generating in-game items (vanity or otherwise is largely irrelevant to the principal alone) from thin air, predominantly coming from those with the cash to spend. The ramifications of this are inherently only slightly more dire than the fact that EVE itself is still based on a faucet/sink system*. However, when placed on top of the already fundamentally flawed notion that a faucet/sink system has any place in a simulator it is a clear indication that EVE is moving even further away from a deep simulator and towards a casual, pump-in-your-quarter, get your kicks and **** the rest style game..

It has the effect of bypassing the normal player-run market and make items (that some apparently consider valuable) appear out of nowhere, without any industry or time-investment behind them. In and of itself, this could be made tolerable if it weren't for the fact that said items possess the unique and economy-hostile property of being indestructible under normal use. It also robs the game of promised gameplay that would have generated said items in a more GÇ£inline with standard game practicesGÇ¥ kind of way.

Compare this to PLEX, which are essentially economy neutral. They enter and exit the economy, leaving behind only a tiny ISK sink in the form of taxes and fees spent. While it does shuffle some money around, not net value is actually added, because the PLEX exits the economy when redeemed (after all, all it is is a call option for 30 days of gametime or 3,500 AUR).

They were free promotional items just the same.

What do you mean by GÇ£like PLEXGÇ¥ here? The market for PLEX is not purely dictated by demand, and PLEX also has a rather special value.

GǪand that's just it: the original plan was to make them part of the player creation system. The game was rather brutally robbed of this content and instead it was turned in a massively bungled attempt at making a quick buck which cost them massively....

And that says quite a lot about how bad an addition the NeX is: it needs a justification. It has nothing to do with the actual game, and only screws up the economy in new and interesting ways (and not in the positive sense). The fact that they already have a mechanism that fully supported what they wanted to do (the LP store) and that they instead chose to (fail to) implement a far inferior copy of the same concept just makes the whole thing even more laughable.

GǪand that makes them no different than any other NeX item, except that they cost 0 AUR to create. As for inducing sales, that just goes back to the novelty keychain parallel: there is nothing to suggest that the item will not be available at a later date or that it's actually worth much to begin with (novelty item are usually cheap tat, after all).

Combine this with CCP's decision on previous occasion to re-release GÇ£specialGÇ¥ items, and I just don't see why the expectation would be anything other than having this item GÇ£firstGÇ¥ (for some indeterminate length of time), and that it would eventually be available in larger numbers. It's not that I brush over a distinction GÇö it's that I consider the (admittedly limited) historical pattern and don't assume that a distinction will be made. Sure, you could gamble on it not being re-released, but then that's what it is: a gamble, and you need to accept that you can lose those. vOv

GǪwhich no-one has been able to show was actually advertised in the original offer. So when TA keeps banging on about Gǣreasonable assumptionsGǥ, there is actually nothing that seems particularly reasonable about them, leaving only a bog-standard GǣassumptionGǥ as the basis for his whining.

The OP is the one making the assertion that his assumption that CCP would never re-release a promotional item was reasonable. That the person making the assertion has the burden to provide evidence to defend their assessment is a longstanding tradition of debate.

You can't say "The Bigfoot is alive, Prove I'm wrong" and be taken seriously. You have to say "The Bigfoot is alive, here he is in a cage." That goes for any assertion, no matter how tame and ordinary because it's long been understood that disproving an assertion is impractical if not impossible.

He has yet to provide any evidence that his assumption was reasonable. Instead he has simply repeated his claims ad nauseaum and refused to respond (in any meaningful way) to any criticism pointing out that he's concerned about a free item or about the fact that CCP routinely re-releases promotional items or about his lack of evidence suggesting that his assumption is reasonable.

Sure it is. Reasonably assumptions are assumptions that are reasonable given the facts available to the person making the assumption at the time he made it. The OP has not shown any reason he had to believe that the Shirt would only be available through that offer at the time he accepted the offer..

Irrelevant. The Text of the Offer is the issue in question. If it specifies that the item is one time only, he's got a case. If it's the offer that's one time only, he doesn't and he read something into it that wasn't there. OP's job is to find the text of the offer and post it and point out where it says the item is only going to be available through the offer.

According to the previous post from CCP Navigator: