Back at the end of February CCP t0rfifrans announced Team Avatar and that one of our priorities was prototyping, specifically to:

"...create playable gameplay prototypes of gameplay features and try them out within the team, and within the company... The purpose of all this prototyping is to make sure we provide a strong vision for avatar gameplay, have a good demonstrable idea of why it is engaging and better understand the technology we will need to create in order to make it a reality."

The prototype itself has been finished and has been presented internally to the company stakeholders, the CSM and finally to the company as a whole. The feedback from that was overwhelmingly positive. So on to the information!
...

It has been fantastic to see the Avatar team show everyone that there is meaningful gameplay using more than just your ship as your agent in the EVE Universe. The prototyping work they have done in Unity has allowed them to rapidly explore different themes and make a game which is challenging, fun and in the true spirit of EVE.
...
So, all that being said, we have a great concept to expand the EVE Universe but now is not the right time for us to take that step. ItGÇÖs a step I very much want to take but I want to take it when it wonGÇÖt mean removing developers and focus from flying in space. So, for the time being, watch this space with regards to exploration gameplay for EVE avatars. The Avatar team will now be turning its attention to features it can put out for EVE in our winter expansion and beyond.

Hey guys, thanks for the positive reaction. Like stated above, our vision is to make the EVE Universe the ultimate science fiction simulator. Saying that EVE is just about spaceships, is a bit like saying that phones should only be about making voice phone calls one on one with other people. Indeed they did start out like that, but as technology evolved, they become something much bigger. We hope you guys stay with us long enough for that dream to materialize.

Oh and to someone that asked if it can be safe. Sorry, nope. The EVA gameplay is not safe, it's as safe as going into a wormhole. That's also what makes it interesting.

I don't understand all this pessimism surrounding the idea of having different lenses and modes of access to accommodate different gaming tastes. I mean what's behind that? Do you think it's not going to work, in which case why not? And why has EVE succeeded where any other take on the New Eden sandbox is so "obviously" doomed?

Or are you just jealous about having to share the sandbox with more kids?

After what happened when Incarna was released if there are people at CCP who think EvE should be about anything other than spaceships and the industry that supports them those people should be fired.

Actually CCP cares more about the massive drop in subscriptions that occurred right after Incarna than they do about people who want to turn Eve into a second-rate Second Life clone.

What is your fursona?

hey can you stop that battered spouse syndrome crap? and just hit the door already? why are you still paying for a sub or grinding plexes, get a clue, eve's been dying for 10 years,

I still want to hear about your first fursuit.

Just based on your username I bet it has feathers.

Sure I like walruses. That doesn't mean I put on a walrus suit and hump somebody wearing a squirrel suit.

People who like animals are great. Furries are disgusting and CCP shouldn't be encouraging them to play Eve.

Walking in Stations and other roleplayer nonsense = catering to furries. Don't let it happen to your game.

I expect company that makes an internet spaceship game to focus on internet spaceships and not avatar based Barbie crap that only appeals to roleplayers. CCP wasted two years on that crap and the game almost died because of it. Anybody asking for CCP to intentionally kill their game should be banned.

Can we stop perpetuating this bullshit?

I speak for the thousands of people who canceled their accounts after Incarna went live. Also, if there was really a great demand for WiS beyond the handful of furries who keep propping up this thread CCP wouldn't have disbanded Team Avatar.

The prototype itself has been finished and has been presented internally to the company stakeholders, the CSM and finally to the company as a whole. The feedback from that was overwhelmingly positive.

I like how you guys can't even conceive that not everybody wants Eve to turn into Second Life in space and it messes with your head so much that you take steps like reporting other posters for disagreeing with you.

CCP is never going to release the number of people who still have CQ turned on because the entire WiS fiasco was a huge black stain on the game and on CCP's reputation. I still don't understand why this thread is open considering Team Avatar has been disbanded and the roleplayers and furries have their own ghetto forum where they can go and talk about dance parties.

I speak for the thousands of people who canceled their accounts after Incarna went live. Also, if there was really a great demand for WiS beyond the handful of furries who keep propping up this thread CCP wouldn't have disbanded Team Avatar.

CCP is never going to release the number of people who still have CQ turned on because the entire WiS fiasco was a huge black stain on the game and on CCP's reputation. I still don't understand why this thread is open considering Team Avatar has been disbanded and the roleplayers and furries have their own ghetto forum where they can go and talk about dance parties.

Sure, but you are aiming at the wrong stuff. CCP isn't working on WIS, they shelved it and dissolved Team Avatar to focus on the things that make CCP money today. Nothing realistic you guys are putting forth will bring in new subscriptions or retain existing ones. CCP is not going to spend a dime developing a release that contains just a single room so a scant few players can meet there and be seen posing for each other. It matters not how much money you claim to throw at SC or any other game, this is unlikely to change for a long time.

Denial is not a river in Africa.

Yeah, I'm the one here clamoring for iteration on a feature that has been shelved.

Surely you can do better than "no, you!"

I'll be glad when more of you move on to the acceptance stage.

So, all that being said, we have a great concept to expand the EVE Universe but now is not the right time for us to take that step. ItGÇÖs a step I very much want to take but I want to take it when it wonGÇÖt mean removing developers and focus from flying in space. So, for the time being, watch this space with regards to exploration gameplay for EVE avatars. The Avatar team will now be turning its attention to features it can put out for EVE in our winter expansion and beyond.

So, what's your point?

They are still not working on it.
They don't know when they will be working on it.


All you got is a "Coming SoonGäó" ?

Yup, I missed the release date. What is it?

So, you have presented nothing to support your position but "hinted" and "probably".

As it stands today:

They are not working on it.

They don't know when they will be working on it (if ever). Protip: very much wanting to bring something out does not mean that something will ever be released or even further developed.

Even though CCP has stated there won't be any development in this space for a long time, people are still here clamoring they release "something" now or soon or EVE is doomed.


What else do you think I am "missing" that my own eyes are not revealing.

The prototype itself has been finished and has been presented internally to the company stakeholders, the CSM and finally to the company as a whole. The feedback from that was overwhelmingly positive. So on to the information!

The demo that Team Avatar created was a mock-up (in Unity I think) and it was just a proof of concept of something that could become an addition to Eve when the support for avatar based game play is provided.

Putting a small team of devs on upgrading the current avatar engine in Eve would both be futile and totally stupid since it would duplicate the work that their colleges in Georgia are already doing.

The prototype itself has been finished and has been presented internally to the company stakeholders, the CSM and finally to the company as a whole. The feedback from that was overwhelmingly positive. So on to the information!

So, where's the demo video we can see, and where is the commitment from CCP that this feature/game play will in fact be developed and implemented? That second part is very important.

Personally I prefer to stick with things I can see with my eyes, than to defer to your emotional enthusiasm to read-in that because CCP has successfully produced a simple proof of concept, it somehow means we are going to get anything like that, or at all.

After what happened when Incarna was released if there are people at CCP who think EvE should be about anything other than spaceships and the industry that supports them those people should be fired.

The short version is that CCP ignored Eve for two years to work on WiS. When it launched it was a massive failure and the playerbase rioted and the game lost more subs than at any other time in its history. CCP apologized for the wasted development time and promised to refocus on real Eve gameplay: spaceships and the industry that supports them. Ever since that time the game has grown steadily every quarter.

It's amazing how you WiS "enthusiasts" are unable to make your points without baseless personal attacks. It's almost like you think the ToS doesn't apply to you.

They have already scrapped it and the game is healthier for it.

That's part of the problem considering most of the ideas are horrible. Roleplayers are just awful people and once they get entrenched in a game it's very difficult to get them out and while they are there they just ruin the community.

Who necro'ed this garbage?

Does anyone remember this?

http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/10/05/ccp-games-ceo-issues-letter-of-apology-to-eve-online-players/


CCP, stick to fixing the stuff you have in game or do this all over again.... Learn from your mistakes.

Hey guys, thanks for the positive reaction. Like stated above, our vision is to make the EVE Universe the ultimate science fiction simulator. Saying that EVE is just about spaceships, is a bit like saying that phones should only be about making voice phone calls one on one with other people. Indeed they did start out like that, but as technology evolved, they become something much bigger. We hope you guys stay with us long enough for that dream to materialize.

Oh and to someone that asked if it can be safe. Sorry, nope. The EVA gameplay is not safe, it's as safe as going into a wormhole. That's also what makes it interesting.

I have a feeling the new hires from EA are advocating furiously that CCP pursue the kiddie market, because there is a substantial amount of (their parents) money to be had. Thus some of the changes we are seeing. Kiddies are also less wise, and more apt to "get in line" and not protest or hold CCP hostage by withholding subscriptions. Hilmar wasn't so much sorry about what happened with Incarna, he was sorry he and his upper management underestimated their customers and that the customers prevailed.

:furries:

:emoters:

i want to suicide gank emoters in hisec everyday.

I want to use a thorax' nose to rip a space station's interior decks so that I can invade enemy stations from within, shooting crap left and right, board the same damn thorax and finish the job with hot blaster action on the survivors.

it's better than dancing in funny hats.

of course you can dance without hats in a sort of a safety dance or something...

I want to use a thorax' nose to rip a space station's interior decks so that I can invade enemy stations from within, shooting crap left and right, board the same damn thorax and finish the job with hot blaster action on the survivors.

A bit off-topic... to keep a sense of perspective, a frigate is suppose to be about the size of a 747 airplane. Now that frigate is how small next to a station since stations are apparently holding thousands of ships and how many people (along with all the other living arrangements). Based on how the game is set-up, there is the shield around the whole station, along with using dreads to bring down stations. Thus bullets in melee weapons being as small as they are would not puncture the outer hull of a station and suddenly asphyxiate the whole into imploding. Years ago, the old story line had a Gallente mother ship crashing into a Caldari station and while the station burned (actually still burning years later), it did not explode. And based upon the planetary interaction good "Sterile Conduits", as part of its description - "Each length of flexible, self-repairing tube..."

So blasting away with melee weapons would rile the citizens, it would not even dent the overall station.

Back on topic.

So where is the (high / medium / low) risk of loss using a proxy?

This Merry-Go-Round topic still active?

First it's on, then it's off, then on again, then off. It's a never ending cycle that just keeps going ...... and going ...... and going ...... Sorta like the Energizer Bunny.

And wasn't Team Avatar disbanded and it's members placed into other CCP Teams?

Now don't get me wrong, the idea of having Avatar game play content is all fine and dandy. The problem is having that content appeal to everyone which isn't gonna happen any time soon. Mainly because everyone has a different interpretation of what that content should entail.



DMC

Also: As long as there is oxygen, there can be fire, so stations CAN burn from the inside... if not for very long.

I feel like I should say something to help keep the thread going, and support the idea.

But there is nothing left to say. CCP are just going to continue to ignore what people want just like they did pre-incarna. I almost feel that something more radical should happen. Maybe we should publically hang around outside of the new player safe zones and suicide gank their new players in their shiny new cormorants. I imagine doing that for any length of time would hurt sub numbers pretty bad.

I won't be waiting 1-2 years. If the next expansion is crap my alts and I are out.

ye, I've never seen a 2000 player battle directly, just on youtube. Now if only it actually looked like the cgi battles they have on several of their trailer videos, but noooo its a bunch of blue and red squares at max zoomout that is quite the opposite of exciting.

Yeah. I'll either stay or leave based on what they announce for the winter expansion.

Years of "soon"(TM) has taken its toll.

Welp, they've got two or more years before Star Citizen is out. Overall I wouldn't expect them to deliver on their "Hallelujah plan" for the game at launch either, the things people expect out of them are way too much to get done in two years for the scope of game that they're talking about. If they pull it off I'll be pleasantly surprised, but the emphasis there is on surprised >.>

Like I said, I'll be happy if they can pull it off, I just don't think it's going to happen. MMOs are notoriously problematic during development and the more people you're dealing with the more problems you're going to have. Hence why I say it's probably not going to release on time or it'll release on time but missing some promised features to be added... "soon"

I present as evidence of this:

• World of Warcraft - Huge budget, especially for the time and spent far more than 2 years in development. Still released with a good number of bugs and issues and was fairly light on end-game content at the start, especially compared to these days.
• SWTOR - Huge budget, massively hyped, fell flat on its face on release. Not a ton of content, very linear gameplay, overall very disappointing.
• Dungeons and Dragons Online - Two years in development, unknown budget, still released with a fair number of bugs and issues and very light on content. Didn't really come into its own as a successful game until a year after release when it went free-to-play.
• Planetside 2 - Just released, 18 month development cycle, unknown budget, and still coming into its own a year after release. Optimization update planned "soon".
• Guild Wars - Great game, 2 years in development, still really buggy on release, though less so than probably most others on the list. Also less ambitious since most content was instanced. Also the people who founded Arena Net originally worked on World of Warcraft.
• Diablo 3 - Can't forget this one. Worked well technically but the gameplay had major issues that still haven't been fully resolved.

Star Citizen is a more ambitious project than most of these and has a smaller budget for the next 2 years than Eve Online does. Overall I'll be somewhat surprised if something doesn't give between here and there, either the feature list, or the release schedule.

Actually, CIG (the company making Star Citizen) has got in the line of 80 employees after their last expansion. But Chris Roberts is a producer, and he just has been hiring 3rd party Montreal based studios with the expertise he needs to make the less-creative work. There are two studios making the videos, another one doing the 3d Animation, and so and so.

That's just cunning, as a 3rd party studio is likely to have everything a new company doesn't: equipment, personnel and expertise... and they work on a schedule and a budget.

LOL

Also Dust 514 is based on the Carbon engine, so this proves Carbon actually works and your statement is blatantly false. It has some bugs and the gameplay is not perfect yes, but makes Dust514 itself an awesome test for carbon.

Posting on forums doesn't pay the bills. This thread is a year old...CCP is well aware of what handful of role players and furries want and when they compare that to the number of people who stopped paying them last time they tried WiS it is not hard to see why they haven't tried again.

You're close, but I don't think guilt is exactly what we're seeing presented here. He clearly has strong, intense emotions whenever avatar gameplay is mentioned, yet those feeling confuse and frighten him because his self-image is so closely associated with spaceship flying. Cognitive dissonance is created when a person who fancies themselves a spaceship pilot first and foremost, whose very identity is constructed around PvP, finds the very mention of walking in stations to be arousing. This cognitive dissonance presents itself as forum rage. The ruse is childishly transparent and obvious to even the most casual observer, but to the PvPer harboring a secret need to walk in stations, it is necessary to their very notion of their own identity.

All we need is a nice mechanic. For instance: I would love to be able to go to my locator agent office, track your stubborn Rhes ass, so I could sneak up on you in dark alley (some rusty station environment) and beat the pulp out of your character with my knee high boots(purchased from Nex store coincidentally). Then I could open a nearby waste disposal hatchet to trash your useless Biomass.

I gave you my small version of how avatar interaction could look like. But you sound like a broken vinyl record.
Show me on this doll where 2nd life furries touched you.

Maybe you guys can petition CCP to rename this thread:

"Star Citizen and the future of our prototype"

CCP's problem is not only whether its devs and programmers can be competetent and proactive enough to deliver development of the game's graphic and physics engine and connection to the other EVE Universe titles. The main issue and obvious disadvantage to RSI is the direction given to development and the platform and marketing choices made.
...
Right, just what CCP's CEO and producers should have done. Want to work on more stuff than your team can handle, hire more people or outsource the work to other studios. Don't put the main project on hold by firing them or moving them around between secondary projects.

Cons - Post-2011 layoff, hours required became unmanageable for several departments who were cut in half or worse.
Icelandic management has a tendency to halt progress on all other projects to fix their mistakes with EVE by taking over whole development teams for months at a time.
Tendency to 're-invent the wheel' with everything, even when there are proven, useful tools in the marketplace already.
Very little follow-through on in-house tools. Little to no maintenance done, until someone needs it again, and then it becomes a 6 month to 6 year undertaking.
Not a ton of support if you are struggling with the hours and workload. Work harder, not smarter.
Frequent burnout of employees creates a lot of turnover.

Cons - The number one problem was a lack of producers (in function, they have plenty of people with producer on the business card). In most studios you have an upper level of "idea people" the "grunts" (programmers, designers, artists) and in the middle, you have the producers, who try to ensure schedules are stuck to, and that the upper level understands what delays will come from changing their minds. They also facilitate communication between the grunts, so that projects with inter-dependencies get done. CCP is completely lacking this middle level of people. They have granted long standing employees with this position as a reward, regardless of lack of skill in managing people.

Because of this, they have wholesale embraces SCRUM as a way around the ineptitude of management. Fine for projects small enough for a SCRUM team to finish on their own, provided all are made up of driven individuals, but larger projects languish for months because of a lack of direction or enforcement across teams.

This is ignoring the recent "purge" in which many very competent and talented individuals were let go, and their peers who toed the company cheerleader line more closely were kept. The purge was also suspiciously drawn across icelander/foreigner lines, with many more icelanders staying, despite Iceland not having the industry to actually support a true surplus of talented individuals who would merit keeping over their experienced foreigner peers.

Cons - Internal processes can be muddled, and are sometime missing so people have to find a way to figure them out when they shouldn't have to.
Internal communication can be bad at times, sometime it feels like management is out of touch with the staff, but usually it's a case of misunderstanding. Also, there is often a lack of knowledge between teams, it has happened more than once that several teams are working on almost the exact same thing. That's getting better with better planning recently. Too much automated email spam.

Cons GÇô Weak and inexperienced senior management. Too much nepotism.

Advice to Senior Management GÇô Pay your people what they're worth, make them feel valued, and they will stay loyal.

GÇ£Visions of grandeur killed a great companyGÇ¥

I worked at CCP full-time

Pros GÇô Anyone who doesn't rank above director is great to work with. Food prepared and served on premises is excellent. US health benefits are good.

Cons GÇô Senior directors, VPs and members of the executive board are delusional, disconnected ego maniacs too busy patting each other on the back to see that they are sinking their ship.

Advice to Senior Management GÇô Listen to the peons who are trying so hard to clean up the messes you make.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend GÇô I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

I'd be more than happy to pay for a fully fledged Incarna experience as an addon to the existing EVE universe. That way all the whiners who don't want it don't have to buy it, and it's not "wasted resources" as CCP gets compensation for it.

SC is far away from alpha and the door to the head has opened, can even sit on the toilet if one is so inclined, yet our door is still hermetically sealed. Nuff said.

:rant:

I hope CCP still develops WiS in the background but after the initial Incarna fiasco I would be surprised if we hear a single peep about it before it is done.

I must say the character parts of the official trailers seems to improve each time they are released.

But.. but my calculator can't run avatar gameplay... only spreadsheets... :tantrum: lololol oh wait wrong post

Vincent Athena, I think you missed the point. You actually do things with your spaceship even if you control everything through the UI. It matters where the ship is and what it has fitted in relation to what you are doing despite not having a hard requirement to see the ship. You can indeed have avatar gameplay without avatars (e.g. text adventures) but the fact you are a person still matters to what you are doing. I'm talking about using the physicality of the avatar you are controlling.

Please add a option to remove the WiS crap from the EvE Online client, uses too much HD space.

Um, O.K. whatever you are getting on about, it was lost on me. Go back a few pages where the whole "space toilet" was proclaimed as such a big deal by Ishtanchuk, who then later stated that it was somehow an indicator of how awesome SC is going to be because it was done pre-alpha.

That maybe, but even if CCP "reaches Rome" with the summer expansion 2014, so to speak, I, most likely will no longer be here to "bear witness to their triumphant return"...

No, Incarna didn't almost destroy anything. Overreacting, hysteric herdmental basement dwellers with entitlement issues gone full ****** is what almost destroyed the game, luckily all they achieved was a broken pixel statue.

Hey this plex is running out today ,well i have seen enough of it already.

Had a nice month on these forums here .

With the usual 2 or 3 goons complaining about WIS and surprisingly a lot of new WIS lover posters

And another attempt from Bayasian to defend the lies of CCP

As expected WIS will never come to this game,sad but true .

I see you guys later ,maybe here or in another game with the real sci-fi gameplay and looks

bye bye

You're right. I get PLEX to post in this thread.

I guess you didn't play during the Summer of Rage. You know when CCP flew the entire CSM in for an emergency summit to find a way to stem the tide of people fleeing the game. What was achieved, beyond a "broken pixel statue" was a commitment from CCP to focus on actual Eve content...a commitment they have stuck with and the reason why the game is successful now.

I think this is a fantastic idea for anybody who can't play an internet spaceship game without dress-up Barbie attached.

If people feel this way about Eve I have to question why they are paying a subscription fee for it.

Subscribers have gone up every quarter since the summer of rage (since CCP put WiS nonsense on the back burner) and that is the only data that is needed.

The fact that you canceled your subscription and it didn't make CCP change course means not enough people agree with you.

Either way there still aren't enough to make CCP change the course of the game again. If subscriptions weren't going up every quarter you'd have an argument but they are so you don't.

what do you think made them change direction?

I like you conveniently leave out the amazing amount of effort put into rebalancing that has happened since Incarna. It's been nice seeing the focus put back into spaceships.

Speaking of hypocrisy, a lot more players than just some goons quit (not threatened to quit), enough that it caused CCP to reassess it's financial outlook and staffing levels.

Team Avatar doesn't exist anymore and WiS wasn't even mentioned in the expansion announcement. It's time for those of you who can't live without more WiS nonsense to actually do something about it. If there as many of you as you seem to think somebody at CCP will notice all of your subscription cancellations.

rethoric speech full of rant

Then what are you complaining about?

You have posted multiple times in this thread about how unhappy you are with the game while I have posted the opposite.

I'm still confused about why you bother subscribing to a game you dislike so much.

So you're just trolling at this point?

Um, yeah...

I think we just uncovered either Vanilla Ice's forum alt, or Dog the Bounty Hunter's.

Another perfect example of what I was referring to before about having a clue before speaking.


Now I'm thinking maybe J-Roc..

fail at understanding hypocrisy or who were the mentioned hypocrites/insults/rethoric speech/rant/wah wah/denial/whining/change subject/Incarna is bayd wah wah/insults/wah/remain silent when confronted with the truth and asked for explanation

So, let's get this straight. You are happy with the amount of (spaceship) content we are currently getting in our expansions at the moment, but you hate the fact that some people might want CCP to spend some of their wasted (Dust, WoD, Valkyrie) resources on WiS content?

You do realise, that we can both be happy right? Or are you that spiteful that you would want other people to be unhappy when their happiness would cost you nothing?

I already stated how I don't feel up to allow that artbook make me dream of different, better EVE experiences. My issue it's not with the beautiful images... it's about the fugly game and the absolute lack of hope.

Oh look! Concept art! We're doomed!

Right, because it's not like more than 50% of concept art making it to the final product is often called a "Victory". .

You guys think they are capable to deliver any avatar content?

I'd be more, if at all, impressed by renders and animation demonstrations.

As for development - EVE is old. Very old. A hint of work being done is the recent implementation of DX11 capability into the engine. Trust me - working on a code that old, likely poorly documented, is hard. It's harder than writing it from scratch. You can't write it from scratch either, because there is something out there that bases on 3 lines of code here you consider redundant. You optimize it, you break it and it all falls to pieces.

I think it's more of a CCP is sitting with sunglasses on, ready to watch a nuclear test go off. Because when SC slams face-first into the ground it will be a classic explosion of hyped-up disappointment.

One thing CCP has learned is not to promise those Soon(tm) features. They just keep it quiet until they're ready to face the public. There is a lot of wisdom in what they're doing - how fast would an EVE player get bored with features like that hangar? Two-three weeks in they'd see it as a hindrance when it comes to undocking.

Roberts, as much as I like his old work , strolled into the MMO scene with a lot of promises and a lot of money on the line. Take a look at Freelancer, from his previous releases - he promised amazing, dynamic world that changed on its own. What came out in the end? The world was static, never changed, plotline required you to do boring and repetitive missions in order to advance. It was a good game, but not what people wanted.

Were any elements of the actual gameplay, content and all presented for Star Citizen or just a shiney-yet-useless hangar?

http://www.mashie.org/eve/new_dress02.png the boots are on TQ.

http://www.mashie.org/eve/new_dress01.png probably will be the 20 years anniversary clothing...

Oh, and roast popcorn to eat while behelding drama, hilarious plans (LV titan power cutting, mentioned), forum dumps, DoSing, drunken insults at Fanfest and the resulting backlash... list goes on. EVE is so metagamey, the metagame is EVE.

I Said You Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' ...

CCP is wasting resources on floppy side projects without any reason to do so.

Yeaaa that kind of says "hey we canned the project."

Still, with talks about NEX store and new cosmetic items being released we may see this mess sorted in a nice way - though WiS is still way off.

Well I don't exactly see a massive drop in amount of people logged in. Hell, it's been going up since Incarna so even despite the upcoming second coming of dogfighter genre CCP is doing something right.

Riiight and that's in no way tied to the usual climb of PLEX prices around this time of the year if I recall or new services that were introduced.

Like multi-character training. For PLEX.

With the volumes of PLEX usually going through Jita, it's hardly surprising. The offer didn't last long and I think I recall it being restricted to US-only. A lot of that PLEX ended up in hands of speculators and market wizards so they'll take care of the price not dropping.

And no, the amount of PLEX is actually a terrible idea when it comes to looking at sub numbers. Also, last time CCP focused solely on getting money and more subs we got a really nice "Greed is Good" memo didn't we? Or was that because they decided to stick to developing what's effectively EVE's core gameplay.

A vision full of empty promises that, in the end, failed to deliver?

Roberts has only made promises so far, we're yet to see how his product holds up in gameplay value. For now seems he sold Incarna for over 20 million (and original Incarna generated the Summer of Rage). After summer, CCP realized that those little chores are something you gotta do to keep players playing and fixed a lot of things in Crucible.

And I am aware of what Roberts did in the past, but past is past. I don't doubt he can make a good game. I've mentioned Freelancer earlier - it was a good game, I enjoyed it greatly.

But it wasn't what he promised before it released, was it. Roberts promised a "simulated, living scifi universe". In reality, outside of missions Freelancer was rather boring and repetitive.

I'm positive that Star Citizen is fully capable of being a competent game when released. I'm nearly certain though that it won't meet the overhyped expectations of a crowd treating it as a messiah among game.

Sooo SC is a cold, harsh sandbox game with single-shard universe? It's... actually not, it's got a lot of instancing going on. Can you drop a hundred capitals on someone's frig fight in SC? Can you play it unfair and get away with it, even be hailed the king of kings for doing so?

Publishers, for all the evil they tend to be (your release date is cut! ship it before christmas! no more money! make a bad ending!) also have one good thing to say: "Enough of your feature creep and promises, bucko - now start deliverin'". Roberts only has fans breathing down his neck it seems, and that's hardly as motivating to get things done right as a bunch of suits with their vast army of soulless lawyers.

Well having played space games prior to EVE, I can say there isn't anything quite like it on the market.

Star Citizens won't kill EVE either, the only thing that can kill EVE is CCP.

So essentially, we should stop being concerned that SC will flop because Chris Roberts is Chris Roberts and he has a lot of money.

Still, alright, back on the track before we get hammered down. It would be interesting to see what CCP says about it all but it's probably all controlled by men in suits responsible for company PR.

the future is never what you think of it... and EVE is just a game.

Heh, just look at what Hilmar said to Wired:

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-12/24/eve-valkyrie

(...)

Have you played any other Oculus Rift games?

I've played a bit, but not as much as the guys who are working on this. They're keeping up with everything that's going on. My job is a lot now, not just connected to development like it used to be. I miss it because it's super fun to make games but I also need to focus on doing my actual job which is to make sure that the company is organised around our strategy and making sure we're making the right high level decisions.

(...)

CCP marketing expense 2008: (8,524,124)
CCP marketing expense 2009: (9,410,916)
CCP marketing expense 2010: (9,769,965)
CCP marketing expense 2010: (9,769,965)
CCP marketing expense 2011: (9,912,335)
CCP marketing expense 2012: (12,567,302)

Respectfully speaking it looks to me that the company is run by a bunch of inexperienced kids.

I disagree. If CCP were just a rabble of inexperienced kids, they would have just turned their noses up at the community outrage and pushed on with what they had been doing. You think that is failure, but CCP is still here

Wut? John Smedley, is that you?

Not wanting to be a **** but that looks like an informal fallacy rather than a formal one.

It's unbelievable how people think. No poblem, I am happy to wait for other games to come out and then CCP will change their mind in regard to WiS. When the cash shrinks cause people drop EVE for some other subscription title, things will change. I can see the future. I doubt that Valkyrie will be cash generating, as only a bunch of people can afford to pay for the FaceBook goggles, so that is going to be another failure in vision and overall strategy.

All this trailer has shown me is that the art and trailer team are clearly more competent than the rest of the staff.

walking in stations is dead and buried