Herschel Yamamoto
Agent-Orange
Nabaal Syndicate
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Posted - 2011.06.24 01:52:00 -
[1]
I don't envy you your position behind the riot shield, but I'm glad to see some CCP response.
I haven't been playing much the last couple months, but I do still care about this game, and I do still want to see it go in a good direction. I think our biggest concern, as an angry mob, is the fact that CCP's idea of a good direction and ours seem to be diverging pretty hard lately. I've always thought of CCP as being sort of a big stupid dog. Yeah, he might crap on your carpet sometimes, but it's only because he loves you and was trying to give you a present. You haven't been acting much like lovable goofs lately, though, and I'm starting to think that the turds I'm seeing are there because you want them to be there.
I mean, really, what are we supposed to make of Incarna? This is the most insulting set of microtransactions I've ever seen this side of my cable company, and literally less than 24 hours later I get to hear about how one of your senior folks has a great vision for the game where the whole thing is turned into an accountant's playground of player screwjobs. Doesn't matter that the only way you managed to stop the last tsunami of rage was by promising that this would never happen and that you had no plans of ever even thinking about it, now we get to read about how you're plotting to ram it down our throats because it's what we really want deep down. And all this less than a week after you have the brilliant idea to take the people who pour their own time and effort into making your game better have to cough up money for the privilege of trying to offset their bandwidth costs with advertising.
Every single news story I've seen about Eve in the last week has been about a ham-handed attempt to extract more money out of players. Doesn't matter if it's a useful sum or not, doesn't matter if it'll destroy some of the tools that make the game playable or not, just cash the **** in. Yeah, we're pissed off. You're acting like either you think that we're all a bunch of sheep who will keep feeding you cash as quickly as you ask for it - and the subscription numbers haven't followed that trend since Trinity - or you think that the game/company is dying and you need to get the most cash you can as fast as you can, and the long run be damned. Neither of these is a good thing, to put it lightly. And until we actually get some sign that this is a monstrous aberration and not the wave of the future, you're going to keep getting a whole lot of perfectly justified rage, and(while I obviously don't have access to the numbers), I'd wager a whole lot of cancellations.
You charge a pretty good subscription fee, which makes the people who pay it entitled to some things. Most notably, a level playing field. I don't care if someone gets to put on a sparkly pink thong in the character creation screen, but when we're undocked and fighting, I want my ship to be the same as the other guy's, whether he bought it with missions, GTC sales, or aurum. I want it to happen in a way that keeps the game's economy stable, since the economy is probably the single biggest thing that makes me like Eve. And I want to feel like you actually have a vision for the game that isn't just drunken talk of "Awesome" or a single number on a bank statement. If you can make us believe that, then I'm sure we will, by and large, shut up. If you can't...
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