OK, so these paying customers start complaining that their mining barges keep getting blown up in High Sec. Their real world money keeps being lost because a gang of people in Cats keep rocking up and shooting them. They just want to mine in peace and play the game, dammit! Why won’t CCP do something about this?
People start to stop buying the ships because of it. What, based on CCPs track record, will happen next?
You and I have flown in the same fleets, Aiko. We both know that CCP constantly try to make ganking harder - I mean, they usually fail because they fundamentally don’t understand how high-sec ganking works but they try. In recent months they have even mooted the idea that maybe high sec should be combat optional…
When people are losing real money to ganks, what do you think CCP will do?
However, it’s not the end of the world. Their motivation here, I believe, is to actually help new players figure out how to undock. I think CCP could deal with this more appropriately, but I don’t think they have some evil nefarious plan.
I really don’t believe that CCP intends to ban ganking from Highsec. If they do, I’ll just move to lowsec, and I’ll watch as the Highsec economy implodes. I think CCP knows this, and they will never do it. CCP wants Highsec miners to die.
I used to agree with you Aiko back when CCP had people that would say no to Hilmar but now no-one can stop the carebear cries of the King of the Miners.
Who will save the miner’s from themselves? It used to be James but are you now willing to stand up and take up that mantle?
…
Yeah, I’ve been a little hyperbolic in this thread - partly for fun and partly for rhetoric. I would never put down to malice something I could explain with incompetence, after all.
If CCP didn’t have their track record, I think we’d be on the most part cool with this as a community. But they do and it ain’t good. Their motivation has always been to get new players in and keep them in but they’ve given up on ideas that were innovative and have taken the EA/Ubisoft/Activision route of saying “instead of us throwing money at the problem, why don’t we get the players to do so?” and then relying on the sunk cost fallacy.
It usually works for those other devs because they re-iterate on the same games over and over. CCP can’t really do that. And when that revenue stream dries up - which it will - they will find a way to cater the game to that market, not realising it was always transient. CCP’s history in the free-to-play era has always been to chase the dollar they once had rather than finding the dollar they’ve yet to see, after all.
Even with that, I wasn’t quite so concerned until I saw Swift’s comment. Although, honestly, I don’t know why it swung the balance for me because its just business as usual. CCP sees us all as bittervets and they’re mostly right. But whilst once upon a time they would still try to extract the real points of concern from the ■■■■■■■■ the player base was spewing, now they’ve given up and are just not listening.
TL;DR - Aiko’s right, I’m rambling, CCP gonna CCP… But this time I think they’ve CCPed their pants while water-skiing over a fish with big teeth.
… in their magical retriever that the rest of the galaxy had nothing to do with.
Getting a player in a ship and in space is a very good thing of course - but that doesn’t mean you can use it as an excuse for breaking the game itself. The whole selling point of this game is that WE build all the stuff, and if you want some of it, go out and interact with the game.
And now - after being literally told by CCP Swift there will be more of those kind of packs in the future, that this is gonna be their next big thing for Eve - we’re expecting it to be expanded to other, more relevant ships and activities than this poor shitfit retriever.
I think this is a lofty promise and I have a lot of skepticism it will be kept, but if the objection is to the ships coming out of thin air and CCP delivers on it, then there should be no problem on that front for you going forward.
CCP Swift also points out they have research that says players who buy these packs transition into long term players. I am not so sure that direct sales of mining vessels as opposed to combat ships would have the same result, but I also have no research into the subject to say otherwise.
I’m not saying I think this is what I think CCP should do, or that I’m OK with it. I do want to point out that the response we were given by CCP Swift is not completely blowing off the issue and dismissing all concerns. They’ve got plans for Fanfest, and since most people were not going to do much more than /sign this letter anyway, may as well wait and see what they have to announce.
Lastly, and this isn’t directed to you specifically but to the players in general, it is OK to be critical, skeptical, and even cynical, but don’t be mean to CCP staff.
People don’t have a lot of trust In CCP saying they have data and then not showing it because, historically, if it differed from the data player groups had, CCP would celebrate such data at FanFest to prove their case. They then stopped and just said “trust us” which was somewhat understandable from a commercial viewpoint as they at least spoke to the CSM about it behind NDAs. Now it appears they’ve stopped talking to the CSM too.
Also, I know it’s incredibly unlikely you are, but your post reads a bit like a sock puppet. I only say that because there was a history of it a number of years ago so people may call you out on it.
Now consider a scenario: you’re in an athanor in a wormhole. You want a new ship. How do you get a new ship into your wormhole and your hangar?
With the packs, you get a ship crate in your redeem queue, you redeem it to wherever you are and voila, you now have a ship in your wormhole.
At this point it doesn’t really matter if this ship was made from thin air by CCP or that one ship of that type is removed by CCP from the market somewhere else.
You’re still avoiding a lot of important interactions with the game’s universe.
No offense taken. I think people are justified in being skeptical. Too much skepticism, though, can turn into poor judgement and I think people should be cautious of this.
Indeed, these ships in packs do not only bypass the aspect of players mining, refining, industry or the player market, but also bypass the need of transportation.
For a MMO of which the gameplay heavily relies on having players in space doing all those things, magically created and delivered ships is a disaster.
There is no difference in activity between undocking and mining in a Venture and undocking and mining in a Barge. If people don’t enjoy mining in a Venture they also won’t enjoy mining in a Retriever, it has nothing to do with not knowing what options you have.
If CCP were actually smart they’d offer something that is not available to alpha newbies, like cloaking. Cloaking is one of those “oooh I want that” options that are behind the sub pay wall so creating a pack that for a week allows you to fly a covert to do exploration then that would sell well. And if they’d be really smart they’d combine that with some new event that is all about exploration that is preferably in HS space and is interesting to do other than just flat out isk: perhaps create some storyline out of it.
And instead of giving out the ship they give the expert skill plan, add PROPER community fits for it and enough plex to buy like 2-3 of those fitted coverts.
However, I think people could do a better job of enumerating what their objections actually are. Without someone to apply some semi skillful analysis and defense of CCP’s response people will not describe their objections in enough detail to make defects that are actionable known.
It is unlikely, especially since ships are already for sale and in light of CCP’s response, people will get CCP to stop selling them now. If they want to influence the outcome or future of development, then the time has come to narrow the focus to key concerns that it may still be possible to avoid. Redemption of items in wormholes may be on that list, but only if someone takes the time to mention it specifically as a potential problem so that it can be looked at.
@Qia_Kare
People will sell ships to ccp for isk, ccp will sell ships to players for dollars.
Issues with this plan:
-redeeming ships anywhere
-global economy where you can buy ships anywhere
-market fluctuations in the two parallel marketplaces
-the rmt market place likely won’t have a changing dollar amount based on supply and demand
-direct impact on the plex economy
-the idea that you can just buy ships with dollars to gain an edge
(Hypothetical) what happens if no one sells on in game markets anymore and we all sell to ccp, does that mean we now need to just use dollars to buy ships?
Edit more issues:
-the idea that this now sets a flat isk sell value for ships regardless of material prices because ccp will always buy for X.
To be honest, if I wanted to read “we hear you but we’ll do it anyway”, I’d just look up for Swift’s reply up there. You don’t have to repeat it.
It’s not a “potential problem”. This is a major issue with those ship packs.
It’s also not specifically limited to wormholes, because changing the wormhole in my example to Tama, 1DQ1-A or a random system in Outer Passage doesn’t make it better at all. The redemption queue doesn’t care where you are, as long as you’re docked in a station or have a station set as a home station.
I invest time and money (through omega subscriptions) into this game because of it supposed design where the real world developer provides the universe and a little bit of the infrastructure through NPC stations and such and the players do the rest in a universe that can lead to a multi-year engagement with other players in a shared game space. I recognize the company has to make enough profit to justify paying for real world servers and staff. But this is not the way to do it. In my opinion this breaks the fundamental design of the game and has an impact on the economy. I suspect this is one test case to see if people will spend money on ships. Was this why you made industry so complicated and hard all of a sudden? Is the grand design to move from a player dependent and generated economy to the Eve Universe having a “god” in the background that poofs things into existence in exchange for alms and offerings? I’m sorry, but I don’t want to play that kind of game. And I won’t play that kind of game. I’m not buying ships with real world money. Period. If it comes down to that… i’ll find something else to do with my time.