A letter from me, to CCP

Communications Center General Discussion
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Dear CCP,
Hi. It’s me, Kerono. Look, it’s been a while, I know. I’ve said some things I regret, you’ve done some things you probably will regret in the future. But all that is behind us, for now. Can we just talk about the future for the moment? Please? Because I think that if we just try, we can save our future.

Specifically, let’s talk for a bit about microtransactions. I don’t have a problem with them, as long as its only cosmetic stuff. That said, you promised you wouldn’t make them P2W back when you introduced them. I mean, I can go back and dig out the announcement if you don’t believe me. The trouble is, you’ve kinda-sorta made them P2W. Now, before you get all agitated and tell me that you haven’t, let me explain what I mean. You know those skill extractors/injectors you introduced a while back? We’ll use those as an example. If you don’t remember, they’re basically a way for players to trade skill points; one player extracts 500k skill points, another uses the resulting injector to supplement their training. This allows people to have shortcuts for things like capitals, which you and I both remember were supposed to be something special, something that took years to get to. Granted, it would be absurdly expensive (for most players), but the fact that it can be done at all is more than a little disappointing.

I’m willing to forgive you for that, though, because we can still make this work if we try. But the problem I’m having here is that, see, the extractors are kinda, sorta on the NES. Available for PLEX. Which can be bought with real life money. Do you see the problem here? It’s a shortcut for skillpoints that is bought by someone else, for real cash; in short, it’s P2W, but worse because the person getting the shortcut doesn’t even have to pay the RL cash for it. Sure, the total number of SP in the universe doesn’t rise because of them, because you’re not buying injectors for cash and someone has to put their SP into it first, but surely you can see why I (among others, mind you) have a something of a problem with this, especially because you seem to kinda be skirting around the aforementioned issue on a technicality.

Now, you’ve broken promises before, hell, everyone does at some point. And I’m not mad, I promise. Walking in Stations was a bad idea anyway, I mean really, it didn’t have any bearing on spaceships at all, and likely never would. You were showing off, and I guess that’s fine. But this… This really hurts. It hurts me, because it makes our time together less special. But more importantly, it hurts our future. I mean, where does this stop? Soon you’ll be giving up guns and ships and giraffe pants for PLEX, and no one wants to see you end up like that. At the very least, it would kill the spirit and you’ll push all the people you love away and no one will look at you the same way again. At worst, it could seriously hurt you, even kill you. Nobody wants that. You have people who love you, and want to see you bright and happy. I really hope it’s not too late for that.

There are other things I want to talk about, but… Well, I can save them for later. One step at a time. I just wanted to try to get through to you, in the hope that you might turn around and get back on the straight and narrow. I know it’s not what you want to hear, but… This is what I, and many others, are seeing, and we love you too much to just let you do these things to yourself.

Please, write me back.

Yours truly,
Kerono
xoxoxoxo

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+1 …

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Havent seen it yet myself but +1 as well if true.

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having 100m SP means nothing if you don’t have the actual skill to back up what you are using.

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That’s a whole lot of words to say such a simple thing.

And to argue against it:

  • Isk doesn’t help you win. It can buy you a nice shiny ship but we all know just how easily those pop
  • Buying SP saves you time. But ultimately, buying 80m SP and injecting yourself to be on-par with an existing character (hell lets go big and inject 200m SP), you can and still will lose to a 20-30m SP pilot if they’ve got more skill than you do.

In the end, the so-called microtransactions do nothing but save you time. They aren’t pay to win.

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Don’t you understand the more money you spend the crappier your ship will perform, it balances eachother out.

Now move along nothing to see here

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How quaint.

However, they have 425 million reasons not to care about your opinion, sorry.

Cold, harsh, unrequited love.

Prepare for giraffe pants.

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  • Pretty sure they didn’t meet their stretch goal, thus the bonus money is probably a no-go
  • CCP doesn’t see a dime of that. CCP’s owners do.

That said, they do of course generate revenue. I’m not sure what it is exactly as they’re not a public company, but it’s probably pretty reasonable.

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Actually in our day and age isk value has overcome player skill.All the large or meaningful groups encourage you to go for more alts more caps more stuff more rorquals.Player knowledge and skill has no impact against a wall of supercaps

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Ah…those financial goals are known, then? I wasn’t aware of that.

Of Course. Although Hilmar did have a chunk of ccp stock and it seems unlikely he’s going to steer the ccp ship against the direction the buyers of his stock wish.

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CCP Games’s headquarters is in Reykjavík, Capital Region. CCP Games has been a Subsidiary of PearlAbyss Corp. since Sep 2018. CCP Games has received a total of $66.3M in funding. CCP Games’s main competitors are nDreams, Coatsink and PlayCanvas. As of November 2018, CCP Games has 21.2K fans on Facebook and 48.1K followers on Twitter

Estimated Annual Revenue

$10.5M

Estimated Employees

338

CEO Approval Rating

90/100

CCP Games’s revenue is the ranked 4th among it’s top 10 competitors. The top 10 competitors average 10M.

nDreams is seen as one of CCP Games’s top competitors. nDreams’s headquarters is in Hampshire, England, and was founded in 2006. Like CCP Games, nDreams also works within the Application Software industry. nDreams generates 47% of CCP Games’s revenue.

thats most of the info I found, nothing really important it seems. Though my bolded comment above is interesting

im not gonna post it all here, but this link has some interesting info, from back in september i don’t remember reading anywhere else.

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Okay, but the same could be said about, say, WoT. Sure, you can grind your ass off for a shiny tank, but gee… It sure would be easier to just buy it, wouldn’t it? That way you might be able to roflstomp all those people who walked all over you. Granted, if you have a shiny tank that you don’t know how to use effectively, you’ll lose a lot. But you can still use the tank and can improve your skill from it, giving you a much larger edge than you otherwise would. The same applies here. Yeah, buying SP saves you time, and yes you’ll be able to get into a shiny ship that you might not know how to effectively use. You’ll still have the skill, though.

Consider pilots A and B. They started at the exact same moment, and since they’re unimaginative they train the exact same skills and use the exact same tactics, ships, fits, etc. Every time they fight, it’s 50-50 odds of which one will win. But, pilot B gets a crazy idea for once; just buy SP! That way, he can get the shinier ship faster. Now, the terms are unbalanced. Even at the same personal skill level, B now has better skills and better equipment than A, and so will beat him more often, if not every time. B has paid to win.

Now, of course, things are absolutely never that clean cut. But the fact remains that the player who buys SP now has an edge that he wouldn’t otherwise have. Ultimately, it cheats everybody. The player who doesn’t/can’t buy SP feels like he won’t stand a chance against people who simply forked over some cash, and the player who buys the SP will not feel the sense of accomplishment that comes with training the old fashioned way and working his way up.

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Nobody who matters will digest your letter.

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You are sadly mistaken because surely they will…

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That’s a real common argument, but a real stupid one. Well… maybe if all you do is duel. In that case, not so stupid.

But 99% of EVE PVP is not dueling. It’s blobbing. All that guy that has been playing for a week and is flying a capital has to do is fit it as he’s told, do what the FC tells him to do, and know how to GTFO when told.

He bought his way in. Saved years of training. And is at the same level as most “vets”. So please stop with the lame “time invested is more important than SP” argument. It isn’t now - and has never been - related to actual combat in this game.

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Right… but is it the isk or the mechanics that make that what it is? Once you start multiboxing, you literally don’t bother to pay CCP anything because you can do it all for free.

And yet… that’s not P2W. You’re circumventing the timegating, sure, but you aren’t winning because of it.

Now… if said shiny tank shot special ammunition that you could only buy from the developers, which did more damage (I’m unfamiliar with WOT mechanics so bear with me), THAT would be P2W. Or if you could only buy that tank for cash, and it had stronger stats, again P2W.

But in Eve, you’re buying the same ships, modules, and ammunition as everyone else.

I contend that spending money for isk is no different than me multiboxing for income. I get more than I could possibly need, and if I wanted to I could fly blingy ships. But I’m smarter than that.

Yet. That he wouldn’t have yet. Sure, if I buy an injector and train a skill that gives me a 5% ROF bonus, I’ve got a 5% ROF bonus that I didn’t have. OTOH, I could just train it up myself. Maybe it’s a long train, maybe it’s a short train. At the end of the day, the skill is available to me regardless of how I choose to get it.

And again, because I multibox and have disposable income coming out of my ears, I can buy injectors without giving CCP a dime. I don’t even have to pay for my subscription.

P2W skills would be skills that you can only get by giving the devs money. Perfect example, Alpha vs Omega. If Alpha was “the normal way to play” and you could spend money to go to an Omega skillset, THAT would be P2W. But because Omega is the baseline, it’s not actually P2W in that example.

I agree completely. And the bigger the blob gets, the smaller the influence a single player has. If I spend a trillion isk on an AT hull with mutated officer mods, literally the most powerful possible hull in the game, and that ship will disappear in a puff of smoke. Just as easily as a regular hull with a regular fit.

You’re obviously not very good at reading. I specifically said “Buying SP only saves you time”. That’s exactly what you’re saying.

If the FC is lending experience and guidance, I say GOOD! But it still has nothing to do with P2W. He isn’t going to win because he spent money. He might win because he has a good FC and people who follow orders. He might lose because the other side has a better FC.

Absolutely nothing you’ve said indicates that plex or injectors are P2W. Only that they save you time, and reduce the barrier to entry. You’re not gaining any advantage over another player that they themselves could not gain for free.

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You’re right. But then I never indicated you’re a girl IRL either.

Don’t start with the straw man ■■■■.

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This.

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This is just silly. You could buy SP before extractors/injectors. Completely trained Titan toons, PI zombies, Market minions anything you wanted from the char bazaar, with plex, that was bought with rl money. It wasn’t labeled pay to win back then and it shouldn’t be now. Its actually even better since some SP is lost upon injection at higher numbers and gives some people the chance to get a little somethin back from those bob forsaken years of learning skills to learn skills while mining to pay for more learning skills to pay for combat skills.

Nice letter structure and grammar though. Better than i could ever accomplish.

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You know, the post was really fluffy and cute. I liked it. Although, not sure why you are picking on skill injectors instead of picking on PLEX as the main issue. PLEX has been around for as long as I’ve been playing. You could say that the game has always been pay to win. But why now? And what difference do skill injectors really make anyway? So a pilot get SP sooner rather than later. And if they paid tons of money for it fine. So what? It just doesn’t make any difference to me that other pilots get SP faster than me. So is it just jealousy?

Regards,
BOING BOING