Advanced apologies for any rambling or grammatical shortcoming in this post; today's news makes for some raw emotions.
In my last blog post, I lamented the difficulties in communicating with CCP. Today's bleak news cuts to the why that composes the heart of the matter; when we players seek out to converse with CCP (that means two way dialogue, not pats on the back or circlejerks that go nowhere), the goal is to try to avoid these no win scenarios. We've strived and struggled for years to try to reach out and talk to CCP about where their course of actions will lead from a player perspective, and it's situations like this that we desperately wanted to avoid.
For everyone's sake, player and developer alike, we need to stop for a minute and talk to each other more. Nobody benefits from a standoff that results in people losing their livelihoods. To that end of improved communication, the removal of community management staff from North America is exceptionally mind boggling, to say nothing about the dozens upon dozens of others who are now out of work.
Please, managers of CCP, from the bottom of my heart, I beg you to pay heed to the good points that the community has had to offer over the years and continues to provide! If you only leave us with the power to vote with our wallets, everyone suffers - and nobody wins. There are very few of us who want anything less than to see EVE Online succeed. Success and mutual enjoyment are the heart and soul of the matter, and we really need to talk.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Friday, October 14, 2011
How can I talk to you, CCP?
One problem that continues to make itself known when trying to talk to CCP, as a collective organization, is that of reception.
If you talk about CCP positively, the positive message will be embraced and proudly displayed. The circles of validation in use within the company, which many employees have embraced, result in a cycle of clinging to the positive messages and a pattern of reinforcement. These validations become a shield against criticism that is extremely difficult to breach.
If you talk to CCP in a neutral manner, the message is generally ignored for being too bland to write home about.
If you're negative about the message, well, your opinion tends to be dismissed. It's all but impossible to address points of concern with EVE Online or the company. Anything said that is negative seems to be treated as a personal point of contention with the workers, rather than the work itself; trenches are dug, and it becomes a situation of Us Versus Them.
I want to talk about the potential EVE Online has to be truly great. I want to speak gushingly about how cool the things players do in the game are. I want to be able to share a positive experience with other players and would-be players. With the state the game has been in since Dominion, I couldn't do it.
The last two years have distressing to behold; features that add little value to the end user experience were added in bulk. The balance of the game was left to languish while development resources were poured into pet projects. Bad things were happening, and the shields held until Incarna delivered a catastrophic blow to CCP's subscriber counts and the development of the Winter Expansion shifted into full on appeasement mode. Good things are finally coming, but these measures, which we have suffered long for, strike us as just that; a temporary bump in the road before the company goes back to the same bullshit that took us here in the first place.
How do I talk to you, CCP? What am I to do if the truth is not all roses? How can I talk to you about the game I, and many others, want EVE Online to be without being vilified or ignored by the men in charge of EVE's destiny? I can’t figure it out.
If you talk about CCP positively, the positive message will be embraced and proudly displayed. The circles of validation in use within the company, which many employees have embraced, result in a cycle of clinging to the positive messages and a pattern of reinforcement. These validations become a shield against criticism that is extremely difficult to breach.
If you talk to CCP in a neutral manner, the message is generally ignored for being too bland to write home about.
If you're negative about the message, well, your opinion tends to be dismissed. It's all but impossible to address points of concern with EVE Online or the company. Anything said that is negative seems to be treated as a personal point of contention with the workers, rather than the work itself; trenches are dug, and it becomes a situation of Us Versus Them.
I want to talk about the potential EVE Online has to be truly great. I want to speak gushingly about how cool the things players do in the game are. I want to be able to share a positive experience with other players and would-be players. With the state the game has been in since Dominion, I couldn't do it.
The last two years have distressing to behold; features that add little value to the end user experience were added in bulk. The balance of the game was left to languish while development resources were poured into pet projects. Bad things were happening, and the shields held until Incarna delivered a catastrophic blow to CCP's subscriber counts and the development of the Winter Expansion shifted into full on appeasement mode. Good things are finally coming, but these measures, which we have suffered long for, strike us as just that; a temporary bump in the road before the company goes back to the same bullshit that took us here in the first place.
How do I talk to you, CCP? What am I to do if the truth is not all roses? How can I talk to you about the game I, and many others, want EVE Online to be without being vilified or ignored by the men in charge of EVE's destiny? I can’t figure it out.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Ideas
After playing EVE Online for five+ years, it’s hard not to come up with a few ideas for making the game bigger and better. If you've kept tabs on the EVE Online forums and Failheap Challenge, you've probably seen many of these ideas before.
There is no shortage of ideas on how to enrich the experience EVE Online has to offer. Granted, they are merely concepts with thought invested in the requirements of implementing them within EVE. While not all of these concepts may be feasible, possible, or any fun in practice, there’s still a limitless fountain of opportunity to innovate, iterate, and improve on spaceships.
What ideas do you have for improving EVE Online?
- Modular starbases for performing industrial activities in an ordered workflow process style. Easy to set up, hard to destroy, and readily disrupted by small gang activities while just as quickly being rebuilt. A potential hub for planetary interaction based manufacturing, with NPCs providing traffic between planetary infrastructure and 0.0 processing and manufacturing facilities.
- Titan jump drives dragging everything along with them in a 2500 meter wake.
- Enormous fields of ancient wreckage located deep inside of Sleeper Space; a dumping ground for spare parts and ruins for intrepid pilots to explore.
- Artificial Intelligence systems, guiding and controlling each faction it represents with compartmentalized information. They harvest resources, conduction operations, build ships and provide a living, breathing PVE experience within a system of nigh limitless complexity.
- Robot Combat spectator sports in the throes of deep space; something to do in your free time and loads of spare ISK. This is the birth of an entire industry.
- Infiltrating pirate bases and secure installations with remote controlled, disposable bodies, done in the hope of looting those installations of valuable goods, blueprints, and data sets.
- A modification to reprocessing mechanics which makes use of refining slots and time, changing the game of reprocessing to be similar to manufacturing; a task that takes time and rewards the creation of player built infrastructure.
- A removal of permanence by introducing destructibility to Outposts; a reduction of player built stations to smoldering hangar bays and shredded girders via liberal application of gun. All is not lost on destruction; it’s simply left in storage as you made it. However, the station’s services are all offline and anyone and everyone can dock at the hulk if they want to.
There is no shortage of ideas on how to enrich the experience EVE Online has to offer. Granted, they are merely concepts with thought invested in the requirements of implementing them within EVE. While not all of these concepts may be feasible, possible, or any fun in practice, there’s still a limitless fountain of opportunity to innovate, iterate, and improve on spaceships.
What ideas do you have for improving EVE Online?
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Barriers to Entry
Some things in EVE Online are not easy to get into.
Capitals and Super Capitals constitute the highest end of content that EVE Online has to offer. With over a year of dedicated skill training required to pilot them and costs ranging between the hundreds of millions or tens of billions, this is the acme of flying in space; there is nothing bigger or more powerful. Once you fly super capitals, you've achieved the ultimate level that a pilot can expect to achieve in his or her career.
It makes sense that capital ships take the most time to get into. EVE Online is a subscription based MMORPG; the longer the game holds onto your interest, the more money CCP makes. The time taken towards getting into a ship like a Dreadnought or Carrier or Super Carrier can be delayed or further extended with detours like Heavy Assault Ships, Recons, Command Ships, and other, similarly high end toys. With lots of interesting ships to fly, it's hard to run out of things to want to try out in EVE Online.
But what happens when you get to the top?
What happens when those other ship classes or other races of ships don't gain and hold your interest?
Super Capitals have come to be known to a few of my friends as account coffins. They are juicy targets that leave you a prime target for ganks and hot drops. Eventually, most players who acquire super capital ships simply stop logging in after awhile, because their pilots have become tools of alliance warfare. The Super Capital's role in combat is largely limited, albeit not exclusively, to combat against large ships; they are tools for alliance warfare. Unfortunately, they are also unequaled as alliance warfare tools, which has created further pressure to start flying these beasts of burden. The Dominion sovereignty design and the desire to acquire the highest end content in game is highly counterproductive to the enjoyment of EVE Online as well as CCP's bottom line.
Something I've noticed over the years of playing EVE is that the more things you acquire, the greater my compulsion has been to hold on to the vast stores of wealth that I have earned in the game. My adversity to loss had increased. Even though I could afford to replace dozens of battleships, I feared losing even one. The compulsion to hoard was doing a number on my ability to enjoy PVP in game which is, arguably, EVE's one true strength in conjunction with the game economy. The biggest ship I had was merely a Nidhoggur.
To keep enjoying EVE Online, there needs to be value in flying a ship along every step of the way. When it's a race to the top to crush everyone on the bottom, there are no winners; the gears of the sandbox only stop turning.
Capitals and Super Capitals constitute the highest end of content that EVE Online has to offer. With over a year of dedicated skill training required to pilot them and costs ranging between the hundreds of millions or tens of billions, this is the acme of flying in space; there is nothing bigger or more powerful. Once you fly super capitals, you've achieved the ultimate level that a pilot can expect to achieve in his or her career.
It makes sense that capital ships take the most time to get into. EVE Online is a subscription based MMORPG; the longer the game holds onto your interest, the more money CCP makes. The time taken towards getting into a ship like a Dreadnought or Carrier or Super Carrier can be delayed or further extended with detours like Heavy Assault Ships, Recons, Command Ships, and other, similarly high end toys. With lots of interesting ships to fly, it's hard to run out of things to want to try out in EVE Online.
But what happens when you get to the top?
What happens when those other ship classes or other races of ships don't gain and hold your interest?
Super Capitals have come to be known to a few of my friends as account coffins. They are juicy targets that leave you a prime target for ganks and hot drops. Eventually, most players who acquire super capital ships simply stop logging in after awhile, because their pilots have become tools of alliance warfare. The Super Capital's role in combat is largely limited, albeit not exclusively, to combat against large ships; they are tools for alliance warfare. Unfortunately, they are also unequaled as alliance warfare tools, which has created further pressure to start flying these beasts of burden. The Dominion sovereignty design and the desire to acquire the highest end content in game is highly counterproductive to the enjoyment of EVE Online as well as CCP's bottom line.
Something I've noticed over the years of playing EVE is that the more things you acquire, the greater my compulsion has been to hold on to the vast stores of wealth that I have earned in the game. My adversity to loss had increased. Even though I could afford to replace dozens of battleships, I feared losing even one. The compulsion to hoard was doing a number on my ability to enjoy PVP in game which is, arguably, EVE's one true strength in conjunction with the game economy. The biggest ship I had was merely a Nidhoggur.
To keep enjoying EVE Online, there needs to be value in flying a ship along every step of the way. When it's a race to the top to crush everyone on the bottom, there are no winners; the gears of the sandbox only stop turning.
Friday, October 7, 2011
Some Thoughts With Regards to Incarna
For whatever reason, CCP's culture does not take criticism well. It responds positively to positive messaging, which can be seen when Hilmar responds to tweets.
The aftermath of the roll out of Incarna has been anything but smooth sailing. CCP is working hard to bridge the gulf that has formed between them and the community after much wrath and gnashing of teeth and no small number of lost subscriptions. CCP has fallen on the sword before, and some humility goes a long way, but it is far from a fix or a product.
The apology for Incarna basically summarizes to "We're sorry that we did a bad job deploying it; it made you not love it as much as we do." Incarna is an interesting idea, the motivation behind it isn't fundamentally bad. However, the approach, in pretty much all regards, needs to be re-evaluated. There was no consideration made towards creating game play or getting stories out of the feature, nor was any forethought placed into the creation of the NEX store. There is no motivation of a better experience behind the NEX; it was made in the pursuit of profit. But hey, it's business, so we can't be angry about CCP wanting to make money. What we can be upset over is the pricing model, which remains terrible; the NEX store could be much better, more profitable, and not leave prospective customers feeling shafted.
So with an eye towards making EVE Online more profitable for CCP through Incarna and more desirable to players alike, what would I do to make walking in stations a better experience?
The first step is to stop the real body shenanigans; it creates an immediate cap on what can be done with gameplay. Meat puppets are the way to go, since it allows all sorts of possibilities; what would you do with an indefinite number of expendable, fleshy bodies? The most, probably too obvious route is first person shooters, but there are other possibilities. Smuggling and bar operations become much more interesting when other player's puppets feel no reservations about giving or taking a beating.
The NEX store should be redesigned to offer extraordinarily cheap goods compared to the current offerings; 5 cent goods, but without persistence. The goods offered in the NEX store should be destroyed when you get podded, as well as when your fleshy puppet characters get killed off. Making these goods expendable and insanely cheap makes the impulse to go through those goods much stronger, compensating for the lower income with high volume.
To remove remaining reservations about the NEX store, Aurum, the currency of the NEX store itself, should be available for purchase in pure ISK. The trick to making this work is by offering Aurum at unfavorable exchange rates in comparison to PLEX; at present PLEX prices, one Aurum costs approximately 115,000 ISK. Pricing Aurum at 1 million ISK each will encourage the use of PLEX for this purpose.
The greatest and most immediate gain to be had in altering the real body model Incarna has lies in Meat puppets allowing CCP to leverage Incarna's greatest strength; the character creator. Giving players more bodies means more excuses to play with it.
The aftermath of the roll out of Incarna has been anything but smooth sailing. CCP is working hard to bridge the gulf that has formed between them and the community after much wrath and gnashing of teeth and no small number of lost subscriptions. CCP has fallen on the sword before, and some humility goes a long way, but it is far from a fix or a product.
The apology for Incarna basically summarizes to "We're sorry that we did a bad job deploying it; it made you not love it as much as we do." Incarna is an interesting idea, the motivation behind it isn't fundamentally bad. However, the approach, in pretty much all regards, needs to be re-evaluated. There was no consideration made towards creating game play or getting stories out of the feature, nor was any forethought placed into the creation of the NEX store. There is no motivation of a better experience behind the NEX; it was made in the pursuit of profit. But hey, it's business, so we can't be angry about CCP wanting to make money. What we can be upset over is the pricing model, which remains terrible; the NEX store could be much better, more profitable, and not leave prospective customers feeling shafted.
So with an eye towards making EVE Online more profitable for CCP through Incarna and more desirable to players alike, what would I do to make walking in stations a better experience?
The first step is to stop the real body shenanigans; it creates an immediate cap on what can be done with gameplay. Meat puppets are the way to go, since it allows all sorts of possibilities; what would you do with an indefinite number of expendable, fleshy bodies? The most, probably too obvious route is first person shooters, but there are other possibilities. Smuggling and bar operations become much more interesting when other player's puppets feel no reservations about giving or taking a beating.
The NEX store should be redesigned to offer extraordinarily cheap goods compared to the current offerings; 5 cent goods, but without persistence. The goods offered in the NEX store should be destroyed when you get podded, as well as when your fleshy puppet characters get killed off. Making these goods expendable and insanely cheap makes the impulse to go through those goods much stronger, compensating for the lower income with high volume.
To remove remaining reservations about the NEX store, Aurum, the currency of the NEX store itself, should be available for purchase in pure ISK. The trick to making this work is by offering Aurum at unfavorable exchange rates in comparison to PLEX; at present PLEX prices, one Aurum costs approximately 115,000 ISK. Pricing Aurum at 1 million ISK each will encourage the use of PLEX for this purpose.
The greatest and most immediate gain to be had in altering the real body model Incarna has lies in Meat puppets allowing CCP to leverage Incarna's greatest strength; the character creator. Giving players more bodies means more excuses to play with it.
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