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.
You had me at, "For whatever reason, CCP's culture does not take criticism well." :)
ReplyDeleteYou know, I agree with nearly everything you say on twitter as a general rule, but meat puppets are the exception to the rule.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me it will just create a risk free, meaningless PvP environment. I don't mind the idea of stations having the ability to hurt/kill each other, but it should be in normal clones, with replacement costs, implant loss etc.
@belamar
ReplyDeleteIt depends entirely on what CCP would choose to use Meat Puppets for. If it's used for direct PVP combat, it would be uninteresting. Personally, I'm a fan of using them for Giant Robot Arena Combat. Robots can be expensive, thus requiring assets earned from flying in space to replace; an entire new industry could be centered around those kinds of game mechanics. Remember, any PVP that takes place in a station will never be a substitute for the meaningful empire building that makes EVE what it is.
Interesting angle there. In contextual relevance perhaps:
ReplyDeletehttp://failheap-challenge.com/showthread.php?3973-Establishments-confirmed-NOT-in-the-Winter-EVE-expansion&p=234195&viewfull=1#post234195
and
http://failheap-challenge.com/showthread.php?3973-Establishments-confirmed-NOT-in-the-Winter-EVE-expansion&p=234235&viewfull=1#post234235
I believe that there's no place for MT in this form in Eve. Sure, offering cheap stuff at the NeX store would be a small step in the right direction, but it's not enough(for me at least).
ReplyDeleteLet me present my idea for implementing vanity items in Eve.
CCP should provide the community with example models, some basic documentation, some technical specs(like texture resolution, max vertices etc.), some guidelines for submissions and let the players design the vanity items. They wouldn't even have to write any tools - the players would design those in a matter of weeks.
Each submission would cost some amount of ISK or a _small_ fraction of a PLEX. If the submission would pass the vetting process then the submitting party would receive a BPC allowing them to manufacture those items.
The cost of submitting a custom asset would depend on the number of runs they want to get from their BPC, but the price wouldn't increase linearly - the unit cost would decrease the higher run BPC they would want to get.
The vanity items could then be manufactured in-game using PI materials, and of course they would be destructible like everything else in Eve.
*Those items would be manufactured by players by in-game means
*The supply would be limited
*The quality would vary
*CCP already has a team of people reviewing player submitted content(eveisreal)
*There'd be a place for both cheap, mass produced combat apparel for pvpers, and high quality, exclusive clothing for roleplayers, carebears and people who don't know how to spend their ISK.
*There'd be incredible variety of items and CCP would still have some control over the content.
*CCP would spend much less money and effort to introduce such system, so they could concentrate on working on the game itself.
Downsides? I can't think of any.
What I also thought about is that a set of the cheapest clothing should cost less than a shuttle(there's no point in setting the upper limit) - say 5k ISK(relatively low submission prices will also mean that some people would be willing to collect and lose this stuff).
I thought about writing this up in a better way and submitting it to the CSM, but that a gamedesign proposal, so that probably wouldn't work.