Therem Harth
Cutting Edge Incorporated
RAZOR Alliance
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Posted - 2008.10.14 20:52:00 -
[1]
Personally, I am most offended by this move in two ways:
1) It completely beats me why the announcement was chosen to be a "bold" lie. It was a bug, we need to remove an unfair advantage, fix game balance, blah-blah-blah. You know, people here have read your player guide... Jesus, lots of us here been with your for years, why was it necessary to invent lame excuses? We also read news and know that Iceland is in an acute financial crisis, and we know CCP is an Icelandic company, it doesn't take an expert to add two and two. And it has taken a hurricane of forum complaints, and a lock on it, to get this devblog which has attempted, AGAIN, to bury the only meaningful sentence, - "We figure out how to maximize our returns.", - in a flurry of new excuses about suddenly bogged down database system. Perhaps fleet lag is also caused by ghost training, which has been found to magically circumvent all the new stackless advances in the art?
2) if we for a second forget about the lying, it would have also take perhaps a small, not really intensive brainstorm for CCP creatives (heck, you employ a full time economist, aren't you?) to find out a better way to implement this measure. How about simply limiting the time you can ghost train? 31 day of non-payment and your training stops. That way, you can't train Doomsday Operation 5 without paying, but you can go on vacation and not worry about a 5-day lapse in training on your BS 5 skill, simply because your time code expired while you were away, or whatnot. But no, there was zero creativity spent on solving this issue. Whoa, there's lots of freeloaders hugging our database storage, let's go kick them all out.
Personal conclusion:
I have never used ghost training unless by accident and for a few days only. But for the reasons above, I have cancelled subscription on all three of my active accounts, and I personally know dozens of people who will do that for much bigger amount of accounts, meaning CCP is not going to get ANY revenue from those people again. And at least half of those people actively campaign for more cancellations. You will have more space on database storage, though.
There is a proverb in Russian, which goes like this: if you spit on a crowd, they will wipe their faces; but if a crowd spits on you - you will drown. Ironically, one would expect that with company names like yours, you should know this by heart.
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