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Thread Statistics | Show CCP posts - 19 post(s) |
Ravcharas
GREY COUNCIL
Nulli Secunda
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Posted - 2011.06.24 01:22:00 -
[1]
Calling it a diary is pretty rich considering you're supposedly leaving copies of it lying around for visitors to read.
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Ravcharas
GREY COUNCIL
Nulli Secunda
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Posted - 2011.06.24 01:26:00 -
[2]
 Originally by: Brooks Puuntai
-Bring back old hanger view. Make hanger view default, and keep the Incarna feature COMPLETELY optional until it is fully ready and optimized.
While I agree that Incarna should be optional for now and forever I must say that I wouldn't mind it if CCP had decided to give the hangar view some attention. Some high fidelity textures and snazzier lightning. And auto-rotate. The old hangar view was looking rather dated.
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Ravcharas
GREY COUNCIL
Nulli Secunda
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Posted - 2011.06.24 12:03:00 -
[3]
Ok, so I've mostly skimmed this thread, I'm late to the party so this might never get read and what I'm about to write might be repetition anyway. But it's a threadnaught so I'll join in.
CQ first; you should have let the players who enjoy it promote it to the players who doesn't enjoy it at the rate you expanded it. Making this a mandatory exercise was foolish considering the scope of the feature. If sitting in a sofa and staring at a huge screen with ever repeating infomercials is the future then I don't even...
Ok, MT:
First I'll admit that I'm wary of microtransactions as a concept. When a product or service uses it it's usually explained as "lowering the threshold for entry" and while that may be true, as I customer I always feel like it cheapens the entire thing. It makes my transaction and interaction with the company a purely mechanical affair. The company isn't asking me to go along with their vision or whatever, I just pay for what I want and ignore the things I don't want. Which can be fine, if I'm at McDonalds. I don't want or need to have an emotional or intellectual relationship with every company that enjoys my custom. But I do with some. Eve is a product that has from the outset taken a long view. Skilling takes a long time, game mechanics work on a scale of hours and days. It's a game that asks for alot of your time and effort and usually rewards you for it in equal measure. For better or for worse I believe that such a setup will encourage people to approach their relationship with the game as something that isn't a purely economic transaction. Instead of lowering the threshold for entry you guys raised it. But in return, you also raised the threshold for exit. At times like these it must feel a bit like having a pack of rabid wolves for company, but it is what it is.
Second, I'm extremely goddamn wary of MT in return for functionality. So wary in fact that this is a dealbreaker for me. I don't really care all that much what business model a game uses behind the scenes. I decide where I spend my leisure time on the grounds of what gameplay I enjoy, not how you guys finance your venture. Not my problem. But MT in exchange for functionality is a huge red flag because it tells me that the design and implementation of in-game features and functionality will be pre-gimped and pre-nerfed unless I pony up the dough. It's low-balling and it's a persuasion method that is frankly unethical, insulting and disgusting.
MT for vanity items is not that big of a deal to me. I personally think it cheapens the experience whenever there's an alternate dollar pricetag on ingame stuff. It makes me cringe a little. So I had no plans of buying any AUR anyway, no matter what the pricepoint was at.
Now you guys might say that there will never be any MT for functionality. You can swear it will never be implemented, despite one of your lead game designers expressing a desire for going in that exact direction. You can claim it was him playing devil's advocate and that CCP's MT will be fine if we only have a faith. But here's the thing.
One year ago CCP Shadow said there was going to be no MT at all in Eve. Now MT is not only planned, it's designed and implemented and deployed! You guys either knew you were gonna do it and lied to our faces about it, or you just set some kind of internal record for development. Your turnaround for fixing shipmodels is longer than this for crying out loud!
You have promised so much iteration on stuff I cannot take your word for anything. You shifted resources over to your other ventures and I get that. You don't want all your eggs in one basket. But for me as a customer here's what it looks like; Dust will be free for the Dust players because the Eve players already paid for it. Paid for it with capital that could have been more overtly and honestly spent improving the Eve universe right here and now. For us.
So I don't really trust what you say anymore.
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Ravcharas
GREY COUNCIL
Nulli Secunda
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Posted - 2011.06.25 10:05:00 -
[4]
Originally by: Kharontos
Can someone explain the gravity of the Hilmar e-mail to me? To me it doesn't even come close to admitting non-vanity items for cash.
To me the gold ammo issue is only one part of it. The arrogance on display there is not very flattering, but that's also just one part of it.
The biggest issue for me is that even if Hilmar clothed himself in sackcloth and ashes right this minute and promised to never introduce any of that poison ever, I would probably not believe him. They have completely run out of trust capital on which to lean.
If a company wants to make a change they always have to say to their customers and stakeholders "we're gonna make this change and you're gonna have to trust us to implement it properly."
I'm worried about the Noble store because it represents a slippery slope towards microtransactions for functionality. This wouldn't be an issue if I trusted CCP to tell me they know about the slope, they don't want to go down the slope. But I don't trust them, and now Hilmar is standing at the top of that slope with a toboggan!
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Ravcharas
GREY COUNCIL
Nulli Secunda
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Posted - 2011.06.25 10:33:00 -
[5]
On the upside CCP is leaking like a sieve right now. So there's still people in the company who cares enough to try to change the direction they're heading. It's kind of sad though that they cannot do it internally. It really says a lot.
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Ravcharas
GREY COUNCIL
Nulli Secunda
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Posted - 2011.06.25 22:23:00 -
[6]
Time to rename the newsletter. How about "A wee bit frightened" or "Mostly tongue-tied?"
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Ravcharas
GREY COUNCIL
Nulli Secunda
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Posted - 2011.06.26 11:59:00 -
[7]
Originally by: Argus Sorn
Honestly I do think that there is a bit too much anger being generated over what is ultimately an internal memo in an essentially private corporation.
Hi Argus. (Please come back to Nulli. Guderian has delusions of grandeur and is styling himself to be crowned king of all that he can see and I don't know how to talk him down.)
I'd like to reflect a little bit on your points.
First off I think it's not just anger over the internal memo. This is a perfect storm of faeces. Some people are angry at what was stated in the newsletter, some are angry about to overpriced MT items, some are worried about it being a step in a direction they don't want to see, some are angry at the communication policy, some are concerned about neglect of spaceship content, some are simply angry. Dispelling it by looking at the detail, while a perfectly valid tactic, usually won't work because these kinds of upsets rarely if ever happens in a vacuum.
Now I agree that CCP have no obligation to make their internal discussions public. There are however many things that private companies are under no formal obligation to do but which they do anyway. This is particularly important for companies that aspire to have a relationship with their customers that go beyond a financial transaction. Now one may feel that my dollar should buy me X amount of product and that's that. But for better or for worse customers expect more. I believe it is for the better, and I'm in communications myself - I know it's not fun to be caught up in that ****.
It has also been pointed out, I believe by CSM representatives, that the print version of Fearless is laying about the offices for any visitor to read. If this is true I wouldn't go so far as to call it internal.
As for the supposed company wide Hilmar-mail I don't agree with you that customer upset should be aimed at the hypothetical whistle blower. The reason is that I think it's a symptom of an internal disease that these things leak out in the first place. A leak tells me that employee X is so frustrated with the direction of the company and the way in which this direction is being implemented that they have no other option left but risk their jobs to try to change it. Employees that feel that their opinion has been duly noted and respectfully considered don't leak stuff. Not even if their opinion is completely opposed to what is being done.
The issue here, I feel, is that CCP have consistently miscommunicated with their customers. It seems to me as if they are trying to rebrand themselves as some kind of premium experience providers, when most of their customers are worried about unbalanced game content and would like to see a supercarrier fix or missile turrets rather than avatar customization as a means of self-expression. If they want us to understand how their design process works, if they ask two people to argue points they don't necessarily agree wih as thought experiments, then all they would have needed to do is show us how it's done. A devblog saying "this is how we make the game" and that would have been that.
I might concede that too much openness can paralyze a company, maybe not in the way you would agree though, but CCP is nowhere near that limit. And saying that CCP is better at this than their competition may be technically true, but that speaks more to the state of affairs in the game development business. And in any case, I don't give much of a **** about those other companies. I do not frequent their establishments, as it were.
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Ravcharas
GREY COUNCIL
Nulli Secunda
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Posted - 2011.06.26 12:22:00 -
[8]
Originally by: Argus Sorn
Honestly I do think that there is a bit too much anger being generated over what is ultimately an internal memo in an essentially private corporation.
Oh, one more thing on this subject, while I'm posting all balanced and reasonable.
I think ****storms are dangerous. They are poison. Somehow along the way, Eve players have learned that the only way to truly get CCP to listen is to go completely ape. And this is really the problem with CCP's communication strategy.
Every patch there are bugs cropping up that have been previously known and reported by customers who help CCP test their stuff out on SiSi. What I assume is reasonably worded and non-mad bugreports are being ignored. Maybe they are known and not just prioritized, maybe not. But the message this sends to the SiSi-geeks is "Don't even bother. If you want to see something done, rage on the forums after patchday."
A while back a couple of properly fearless developers agreed to answer player questions. They got alot. So many in fact that it seems someone somewhere either told them to quietly step down and back away or to get back to doing "actual work." The last round of answers literally trickled in ten days ago and they are not even one-tenth through I think. They got something like 900 questions. Here was a huge red flag, and it seems to have gone totally ignored. "Boy, these people have a lot of questions about our product. All presented in a reasonably worded and non-mad fashion." Opportunity, missed and bungled.
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