Has this not been the objective of CCP the entire time they produced the game? They created a sandbox in which thousands of people from different backgrounds meet, interact, and decide their own fate. The situation you are describing here is essentially a look at current international relations across the globe. There are super-states and there are those that wish to either be a part of that, or completely wish them gone. Of course only the largest armies can face off against one another. So…think of the real world. If you aren’t a part of a super-state you try to ally with them, or ally with the other guy who is going to fund you with what is needed for the asymmetrical warfare required to make any sort of impact on said super-state. In my opinion: Amazing job creating a player driven galaxy which is eventually led by the strongest/most devious/most enigmatic people who take charge of their situation.
TL:DR - CCP made a game which reflects humanity and it’s proclivities.
Back in January I wrote down my feelings about the state of EVE and that apparent stagnation if CCP development here: Why should I renew my subscription?
Since then obviously the trigs came out and we got a somewhat statisfting summer expansion, although there wasn’t a lot in it that personally excited me it was good to see there is still progress.
However I must say they really have to get their ■■■■ together when it comes to botting. It feels like they don’t have the manpower to address that problem properly.
EVE is a sandbox and interfering and favouring or abolishing one group over others would be very contrary yo what EVE is and hurt the game more than you can imagine. And no there are no signs that CCP is helping them at all.
There is a difference between making money and greed. I mean their business model had worked for over a decade without micro transactions and extractors and they still had a surplus of money to crash multiple projects into the wall.
If the store next-door would suddenly double all the prices you could use the same argument and say “they are a business, they need to make money”. Just in this case it is easy to see that you will lose a lot or all of the customers and earn less in the end.
It works similar with a game, overdue monetization and pay2win like mechanics and people will simply leave. It’s not like there is a huge backlash all the time that should raise a red flag every time they do something like this. For now it seems they stopped. But those things seem to come in waves when winter is coming… So we will see.
Well, in my book, banning the individuals financing the Casino war against Goons as Goons were being defeated counts as “favouring one group over others”.
On the other hand, your brick and mortar store barely has anything now that already existed in 2003 and still is the same price as then. CCP is as much subject to inflation as every business, but they can’t just rise subscription.
No, nothing at all, CCP just “discovered” RMT going on in a timely fashion to stop the war after it turned bad for the Goons.
You know, if there is a lesson we learned with Incarna, is this: what matters it’s never what CCP says, but what they do.
And CCP banned the guys killing the Goons how and when CCP wanted, which turned to be right as the Goons were facing defeat and not, say, one month later.
Goons where already beaten when they banned the casinos. Also they banned them for completely unrelated reasons, they where breaking the EULA by conducting RMT. They should have banned casinos back when the whole blink disaster was boiling anyway.
The war still was going on and CCP decided how and when to ban the RMTers, thus shuting down the Moneybadger Coalition how and when CCP decided to.
The ban could had been performed one month later, or two months, or a year, as that was CCP’s decission. And their decission was to perform it while war still was raging on and the decission would play a key role in game.
The decision to shut down the gambling with EVE ingame assets was probably driven by the flak that Valve was getting at the time for (non Valve owned) sites that allowed gambling for Valve ingame items.
If any favoritism was present it was to the Moneybadgers using those trillions they shouldn’t have in the first place. Are you actually retarded to not understand this simple logic?