= “Whales are people spending money on items which satisfy their egos, which means they must have desires that demand to be fulfilled”. 
Thanks, glad we agree,.
Actually you can roleplay for free and can have pretty avatar and clothes for free. But they are not role specific. As a rolaplayer, My 120 nuPLEX outfit was bought for ISK really. I like it because it fits my engineer with combat background theme, logistic type, both things I am roleplaying. This outfit is what I imagine could be used daily by this kind of people in EVE. For special occasions I have something more revealing and fancy. And some accessories are not even in game. Roleplaying is like satysfying your urge to be slightly different, but you can do it solely with imagination, tho something you can see is more appealing to the senses.
There is no need to buy stuff, if you can imagine it. You cant sell a thing to me if I can just imagine it. But if you can imagine and make it, there is a slight chance I will spend some ISK on it. There are pirate outfits, engineer outfits, combat outfits, scientist themes, skirts and catsuits, all of them fit different roleplay themes for different roleplayers. 
What is bad is that we cant have even a piece of background for avatar, with life like capabilities, to extend the sensual immersion.
2 Likes
Everywhere they talk about money, ISK is just a virtual currency, you can buy PLEX for ISK from someone who spends real life money tho.
Hardly few hours of gaming to buy yourself a fancy outfit counts as whale action.
1 Like
I don’t know if I’m considered a whale by having 3 active omega accounts… Probably. Most people get away with 1 or 2 or for paying for none and staying Alpha-s.
1 Like
Whole whale term is rather murky and subjective. At the end they just state that:
That’s a quality that applies to his life as well, and it shows that if you look past the excessive spending, “whales” is just a fancy word for “gamers” who are as passionate as we are. They’re not hermits, and they defy one neat attempt at categorization. Not every whale is the same. Some of them relish the glory of competition — being the top player or owning the most — just as much as they value the fellowship that comes out of it.
The spending pattern varies and is rather subjective also. Depends who earns what and where he lives, things like that. Disposable income can be spent on many worse things.
1 Like
On ‘Escapism’:
If you really want to boil it down, ALL works of narrative fiction are ‘escapism’ heck, even many works of non fiction too!
Movies, shows, books, stories, VIDEO GAMES–they all offer a person the same thing: a chance to experience and exist in a world (real or no) that they would not have the opportunity to do so other wise.
You choose to perceive this as ‘escaping’ However, I choose to view this as pioneering brave new worlds, ones that may not be limited to my income, socio-economic condition, geographic location, place in history or only what is merely tangible immediately before me. Call me delusional, call me mentally ill, call me an escapist:
For if I truly do escape–what I escape are the arbitrary restrictions of some flimsy, frivolously defined notion of what can validate an experience as meaningful to an individual. If imagination is ‘escaping’ then by that definition, the opposite of ‘escaping’ would be to consign your entirety to only what lays at the very tip of your nose. Curse my name as a ‘romantic’ but, I think you know which foolishness I personally would champion 
6 Likes
To be fair, a whole lot of gamers are exactly like that, games are an escape from the uncomfortable parts of real life. Those of us who don’t need games for that tend to discount it, but really it’s a 'to each his/her own" type thing.
That being said, I think people like that have always wanted EVe to give them more, and I think that’s a bit foolish. I’ve heard people say “I can’t identify with being a spaceship”. Well, you ARE NOT a spaceship, you are a capsuleer inside as spaceship and that space ship is merely a tool for you to use to accomplish goals/
WiS is useless for us because we don’t need a new tool called an Avatar, our spaceships and various UI interfaces are more than enough. In fact, the fact that EVE doesn’t make us walk around to do stuff is a selling point of EVE, not a detractor.
Which is the simple point of conflict between the WiS types and the ‘keep it spaceships’ type. The WiS people want more than EVE has ever offered, they want to get lost in New Eden, to be able to walk an avatar to a virtual bar they can’t feel, sit down in a seat that isn’t real and drink a drink they can’t taste. They want their spaceships to ‘mean something’ and have interiors and they want to be able to go on ‘away missions’ like this was Star Trek or something.
But the rest of us know that there is no way for a company like CCP to deliver that without taking away from something else, and the last time it took away from the actual core game (spaceships). Imagine is the World of Tanks DEVs took 18 months off improving the game all so they could add infantry…to a game about tanks.
It’s funny to see you concentrate on solely on the term, instead of everything around it.
Trivia: In german, they call them Fisch. Like the literal fish. It’s funny, because W’whales aren’t fish, despite what the simpler minds think. The simpler minds, those with the easily exploitable spending habits.
If anyone actual person in the industry now uses it as general term, or as a term reserved only for the biggest spenders, is not really of concern to me at all.
The facts matter, not the term. Companies try to manipulate you, and exploit you. CCP is no more different. Why do you think people complain about seeing it shoved down their throats everywhere?
I am starting to believe that people really aren’t aware of what all the tiny changes actually mean as a whole.
Allow me to expand a little and then grab my hat for today. I feel like i hogged enough attention already and apologize for that.
When people speak of dumbification, then that’s usually exactly what’s happening. Some folk also call it “adapting it for a wider audience”, or “making it more accessible”. Fact: Simplification of any system leads to a dumbing down of those inside the system, because complexity has been removed, which makes it easier to understand for a wider audience.
BUY PLEX, UPGRADE TO OMEGA!
Why do you think the omega sign is in golden? Coincidence?
Why did they redefine the formerly default sp/hr as DOUBLE THE SPEED? Is it, because they bait Alpha players with an idea of a higher social status, compared to being an alpha, who only trains at half the speed of an omega. Is that just a random, silly idea of CCP?
Now there’s a PLEX vault and dare i say, if people hadn’t complained it would be on the top of the list, just like it was on Singularity. That’s how I do things, and as i’m not a genius or invented it, it’s how CCP operates as well.
I test the waters and see how people react. If there’s no outcry, i just go on. If there is, i invent a compromise which usually shuts up enough people and i still get what i want anyway. If that doesn’t work, then i give in, because it stops being worth it to try. I am not kidding, exaggerating or anything. Just pure, straight honesty and business.
You get free skins in events, to give you a free fix. You use it, like it, then seek out another one for your favourite ship. It’s not a loot drop, so you just pay the few bucks instead of wasting time grinding.
Please understand that these "You"s aren’t directly pointing at you specifically. Some fall for one type of bait, some for the other, and some for several, all of them or none of them.
There’s all kinds of problems emerging for games with this, including cultural ones. Fact of the matter is that CCP slowly shifted towards a demographic receptive to the above - and way more - manipulation tactics.
So, in that sense, and in respect to the actual topic of the thread:
you can expect something, as long as you gather up enough people to prove that it is worthwhile for CCP to invest in something. This something, though, you apparently have to provide - at least as idea - yourself, because they’re killing off the CQ, without any hint that anyone even thought about some sort of replacement.
Reality is that you’re just a number and that it’s all about the money. You apparently don’t bring in enough of it. What i find the most horrible of CCP, though, is how they proceeded exactly as they wanted. Just without WiS.
1 Like
Your post in no way or form changes anything, but it’s a well written justification. Luckily, the funny idea of free will utilized like this doesn’t stand as argument, because it doesn’t work like that. Especially not in a reality where companies spend real money (billions) on research on how to make people want to buy their products, and advertisements everywhere.
But hey, you believe what you believe you believe … that we agree on.
1 Like
You know, the selling point is now flying a spaceship. And that is not really better than walking in other games. Look at usual playing session in EVE, what we see is warping for minutes before we can have some action. We use engines, not legs, but the game is not really more dimensional than other games on market. What made it somewhat different is the ability to actually leave your spaceship. It added new dimension, human scaled. Only it was pocket dimension, good only for stretching legs and stuff as watching screen and admiring good looking avatars. 
CCP allowed it to be untill they abandoned even that.
People are giving money for stuff they like. It all boils down just to that.
4 Likes
Free will is the only thing we get for free in this world and even then, we have so few place to redeem it.
EVE maybe a person’s (virtual) vacation but, that ticket has a price
But hey! If you want to develop a game with thirteen years worth of content, lease,operate and maintain the hardware to run it as well as provide support for your users
and you want to do this all out of the generosity of your heart, be my guest! I’d give it a try.
and then moan about everything I hate about it on the forums you so graciously supplied 
Okay.
1 Like
Well, the original vision for Ambulation was loosely related to another game, one that is even older, freakier and smaller than EVE, and yet still enjoys good health for its age…
Entropia Universe.
CCP wasn’t leaping into the void.
2 Likes
“This is the end, beautiful friend
This is the end, my only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I’ll never look into your eyes, again” - The Doors
4 Likes
This is what I’m talking about. WiS types are people who focus on the ‘avatar’ (in this case a spaceship. For people like me, the tool being used is irrelevant, Im not ‘fying’ a spaceship, i’m ‘using’ a spaceship to do what I want.
When I play chess, I don’t imagine I’m the Rook, and if I needed to imagine I was something, I wouldn’t play chess. likewise ships are just peices on the board to most of us, not some in game representation of self.
The point I’m trying to make is that if someone needs that kind of representation/immersion, why would they play EVE? EVE doesn’t give that and never has.
And the fact that EVE has survived this long without it means EVE doesn’t need it. I remember when Star Trek Online was announced, people were saying “CCP better hurry up with Incarna, STO is going to have it starting day one”. Yet here we (including the people who ‘warned’ about STO) are 9 years later still playing EVE and I rarely hear anything about STO.
Maybe because STO is not for you? People are still playing it, its for rather casual audience, and star trek fans.
4 Likes
Great news, for me EVE is about spaceships, 3D ships, guns, planets, etc… not 3D avatars. I’d be much happier being able to customize my ships external view with custom or CCP-made skins, being able to customize the ship colors however I want rather than getting that 3D character stuff.
1 Like
Please let this be the end of WiS.
Let it die.
Bury it.
2 Likes
WiS idea will live forever. \o/
3 Likes
Was a interesting thread until a couple of people hijacked it with psychobabble rubbish, hopefully a mod will delete most of this rubbish and get back to topic