Yesterday we announced the end of the relationship with our current publisher for EVE Online in China. Today we announce the next step for Serenity, in collaboration with NetEase Games!
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Hey, someone predicted this in the other thread.
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Any news about Which release we will be playing in October? Ascension? Lifeblood? or straightly Into The Abyss?
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Yep, it was @Rosov_Aulmais who is doing great work at giving regular updates for the english speaking crowd about all things concerning the Chinese community on Serenity and TQ, here and I think on reddit.
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Well, that is one fear becoming reality.
Why? NetEase sounds quite good - well from the few articles I read so far.
NetEase has skeletons in a great many closets. Simply using an enterprise for partner selection based on numbers is a risk. And while NetEase for its gaming activities has not gone down the road which it has with every other activity (it’s got a remarkable track record for getting slapped on the wrist by the CCA / China Consumers Authority for counterfeiting and bad business practices through secondary brands) it is a company which has a bigger advantage because of its conservative use of an easy homegrown volume market than it has much forte in being agile or tuning in to market specific conditions.
Also, as I understand it, NetEase and Blizzard aren’t a match in heaven either anymore, due to increasing rumours of NetEase subsiduaries engaging in third party software investments. And while NetEase is expanding to international markets, it’s actually tried to resist that for a long time because of it being very, very, Chinese company. People have a tendency to underestimate William, but also to misinterpret his perspectives.
I guess it also adds a bit of context to those people who once upon a time went to Serenity as Much Crying Old Experts, of whom some got in touch with staff who were fine with working for Tian / Tencent / Netease all at the same time 
Look, I’m not saying it is bad. From a paper perspective it is good. But NetEase is the kind of enterprise where if you are the western partner you are going to need someone with his own fingers on the pulse of information and services. I’m sure CCP has already figured that out.
That said, what is more pressing now really is the perception challenge of the existing and the potential customerbase of Chinese EVE players. That is far more relevant now, and interesting. I’m sure they realise that NetEase has the market pull to replace them all if need be, or substitute them quickly. Continuity is important, but this is the second time, and the previous times did not exactly keep things healthy.
And now that there is more interaction than ever between Chinese and other (TQ) eve players, Serenity has a perception problem no matter who the publisher is. So that should be priority number one.
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Really? I thought their ventures looked quite forward thinking.
Well the Chinese market is huge in every way, so it doesn’t come as a surprise to concentrate on home-market, if it promises good development prospects. But what did you mean by “very, very Chinese”?
From what I read over the last year(s) about the situation on Serenity, I think the ability of the new partner to entirely replace the playerbase does sound good actually. If botters and RMTers can keep a company hostage and this leads to a situation like now, where the game is simply not moving forward anymore, it’s bad, it’s the end of the game. If all that is left are botters and enablers of botting, this kind of playerbase deserves no continuity.
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Right now, we estimate that NetEase will assume the publishing of EVE Online in the Chinese market starting in October 2018
Compared with the last transition this one is quite shorter. Last one was about 2-3 months. Though the one extra year behind that should not be overlooked.
With new events, updated content and the incredible care and attention to detail that NetEase shows its titles, we are incredibly confident that this partnership is the start of a new era for internet spaceships in China.
That looks like a sound promise, and I really hope it is something of good quality and tailored to the Chinese market. Interestingly, they had claimed “Making TQ and Serenity run as much the same content as possible is our way to collaborate.” 6 years ago when TianCity took over(EVEÖйú·þÎñÆ÷µÄмÍÔª-ÓÎÏ·ÐÂÎÅ-EVE Online¹Ù·½ÍøÕ¾ мÍÔªÒÑ¿ªÆô), but the challenge of the Ascension patch is so serious that it stopped Serenity from being updated for almost 2 years. I am looking forward to their solution to the problem.
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Except there is a full and functional handover of everything packaged. In other words, full continuity. Status quo.
The way it was before shutdown at TianCity, is the way it will be the day it goes live again at NetEase. This is why the index of RMT prices only briefly dropped in China for EVE, only to pick up (!) again right after. What worries me a little bit is that information was already out before it got out, if were to believe two of the old Much Crying Old Experts crazies who left at the time but still stuck around on Serenity told me yesterday. “Don’t worry, tomorrow they will announce NetEase, we got that from Serenity bot sellers”.
I just hope that CCP have done their homework the past two years, and that the agreement in place allows them to keep their own hands on the reigns. Alternatively, Serenity will have to change drastically in order to follow a different commercial and immersion model.
On the bright side, it should all put to the rest the paranoia of TQ players on assumptions on massive Chinese bot / RMT invasions. It doesn’t pay for those to branch out to TQ. It pays them to focus on the Chinese EVE.
As I understand it wasn’t the challenge of that patch, but the agreement to let things be between CCP and TianCity, with the grace period before end of partnership.
But yes, promises are always made. Have to make people enthousiastic. Have to make people believe. Have to seduce people. This is how it always goes. It is up to people themselves to use their own minds to decide whether to believe marketing, or not. Informed choices are always better than choices driven by impulses of emotion or evolutionary psychology.
That said, I do think it is fair to say that CCP has figured out how disastrous it can be not not maintain content evolution of a game, by looking at how Serenity developed after Ascension. Or rather, how it de-evolved from a young emergent dynamic into a stale and hijacked game. I do not doubt that there will be a similar content cycle as on TQ. But how long that will last, and it will be managed, that is another discussion.
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https://twitter.com/HilmarVeigar/status/1024474335682224128
Just FYI Hilmar had arrived in Shanghai and will probably attend the Netease release conference in Aug 3.
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I know not much information will be released on that, but some major bot makers had stated they won’t give up after the transition. Whether they will actually survive remains in question.
Assets and Chars, yes, but does this mean that former behaviour will be accepted as well?
Is there any precedence how NetEase approaches the topic of botting and RMT?
Difficult to say, because each game is different, though Netease, being a larger company, has more resources to protect their revenue.
Accepted by … ? Who specifically? CCP? Hell no. Unless the commercial model changes, and the aim shifts to taking over what others essentially run away with. As is CCP’s prerogative. Players? Most I know hate it. Abhor it. But accept it, as is what it is. Almost like a Chinese variant of the Japanese Shikata ga nai syndrome.
I seriously doubt NetEase has an interest in doing what TianCity did. But, conditions are different there in comparison to here, in many subtle ways. At minimum there will be a challenge. Sure, NetEase has its own little sideshows, like with the Blizzard partnership at times stumbling over, shall we say, investor relations in software exploitation, but that is also a matter of defining business priorities as business evolved.
Should Serenity be healthy? Yes. But what is the definition of this? A lot depends on how commercial targets are set and how the product is defined.
Fun question though, on the side, will CCP let the Serenity players who came to TQ stay this time? Or will they, like the last time the publisher changed, remove/block/ban them.
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have a transition that is as smooth as possible.
inb4
Does anyone know what the Serenity server infrastructure and players numbers are like compared to Tranquility? CCP has invested an enormous amount of cash in renewing the Tranquility racks in the last few years and I wonder if off the shelf cloud computing will offer a good enough service to Serenity players. Otherwise Netease is going to have to put in a similar setup to CCP.
To any Serenity/Chinese players : Do you want to keep up to date with Tranquility patches in the future of Serenity or do you like the fixed point in time with no changes?
I hope it goes well for Serenity players. You may not play in the same universe as us, but you are still brother and sister Eve players.
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There’s never been much info on that. But yeah, it would be fun and interesting if CCP were to provide some background / data, for both TQ and Serenity players. Few good marketing angles and incentives for competition between clusters as well.
Maybe. Could also be in the hands of CCP. Players don’t know the details of the arrangement. CCP might provide more info on it, but they might not. Similar questions, albeit more important from a player perspective, exist. Such as who has control over services, over customer support policies, over internal affairs, etc.
One of the biggest issues was always the lack of updates, lagging behind, being a second class universe.
But, and this is important, perhaps more important than anything else, over time that issue got replaced with the state of that universe from a different angle. It is stale, corrupt, fossilised, carved up in baronies where incentives for conflict are excluded, the economics are beyond ■■■■■■ up, subversive behaviour of botting/RMT is the only thing that allows for progression / force projection and so forth.
I still kinda wish it were just straight up possible (and depending on entry points it actually is, but I think this kind of reach is beyond CCP) to have a single cluster for every part of this little planet to share another universe.
It would be just so much more interesting, and let’s be honest, TQ needs new blood in many different ways. Not just different/newly identified player types, but cultures, languages, identities.
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Zachri are you, ( or have you ever been 
) a Chinese or Serentiy Eve player?
You seem to know quite a bit about the situation, and I’m curious to get the views of those who are going to be affected. Your views are just as vaild either way, I’m just curious.
Once upon a time long ago, on a forum of bitter vets far away, someone got the idea of going to China. As always with EVE players, if something seems possible, the only reason you need is “because”, and thus a way was found.
Many went, fashionably tagging along. A good many stayed for a while. Some set up their own shops, and even today there’s a good group left and active. Some of those actually facilitated quite a bit with the migration of Serenity players to Tranquility.
Over the years you build up networks, contacts, you get to meet people, both in game and in real life.