we love you <3
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plex is never going away, ever.
to your other comment ‘i can now buy skill points to advance whaaa’ you could of done that already, it was the character bizarre. You might have to hunt for the one you want, but you could of bought a pilot capable of doing whatever you were waiting to do right now. This eliminates that, and as the game market has changed form ‘i have tons of patience so waiting a few weeks or months to fly this is fine, because this is how you advance in all moos’ to ‘I WANT IT NOW DAMN IT!’ eve had no choice.
Much like everyone is doing DLC’s now, instead of finishing the GD game, companies that don;t do DLC’s lose out on money. it sucks but a business is in business to make money.
Oh gods!
Get me the Reddit stretcher!!
Anyone using terms like never and always in the context of a commercial enterprise is in for a surprise.
The gaming industry has become like Hollywood, it’s all about the money. Games didn’t use to be about that so much, but about the games. Apart from money, a real problem about the game business anymore, is that they all aim to be permanent milking cows. Much like real cows, actually, hmm…
In the beginning, EVE was about the game and it had interesting goals, later on it all became about how to hold on to the user base it has, while trying to get new people onboard. Game decisions are about revenue, not the game, but how it can implement an acceptable compromise. I mean, I am paying to play an interesting game, not for a viable business strategy.
There are reasons why these companies struggle with the money aspect, even with subscription plans and micro transactions. It’s not unlike the gaming companies in the olden days, even when the games were the primary goal.
Look at consoles like Xbox and PS4 for example, almost no local multiplayer because they want you online. I mean WTF, all some of us want to do is get together and play some games and LOL (literally). But no, blah online blah subscription blah login required blah. Good on Nintendo, who at least tries to keep their games local multiplayer.
Anyway, to the OP, I agree with you. The game isn’t all that different, in the sense of being EVE, but the game play is not like it used to be. After all this time, maybe it’s me that has changed. Maybe that’s it.
For anyone that think that I am trying to re-live some memory, think again. I am trying to continue to play a game I have vested lots and lots of good and fun times into. There is a difference.
“Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.”
Heh…but it is always about the money in a commercial endeavor. If a commercial endeavor is not profitable the resources being used in that endeavor will be used elsewhere. After all profits are a measure of how valuable that endeavor is.
What is the “point” of an economy in the end? To make money? No. An economy exists to satisfy people’s consumption needs and desires. Money just lets us do that much more efficiently. Money lets us bypass the problem of dual coincidence of wants. Money makes exchange vastly easier.
If CCP and EVE are not profitable the investors will take those resources that they control and deploy them elsewhere where they believe there will be profits, and they can redeploy if they think there are even greater profits to be had by doing so. After all the profits are how other people satisfy their consumption needs and desires. Heck alot of us here are relying on profits for when we are older to sustain our consumption needs and desires.
If they did not have a stream of profits…we wouldn’t have the game. And competition means that firms are always looking at trimming costs, ways to innovate, and find new profit opportunities when and where they can.
This process of deploying and redeploying resources from where they are unprofitable/less profitable to areas where they are more profitable is one reason why we have economic growth and why things tend to get “better” over time. Why our cars get better (all of the following were at one time luxury car options: power steering, power windows, AM/FM radio, cd player, air conditioning, bluetooth, etc.). Life expectancies going up, infant mortality rates going down, new products, etc. In 1800 about 90% of the planet lived in extreme poverty and markets were just starting to become a Thing™. Today about abut 15% of the planets populations live in extreme poverty or less than a billion. Why? Markets, the quest for profits and what that entails such as specialization, innovation, and so forth.
But we still get people who believe that socialism will work…if we just try hard enough. Never mind that everywhere it has been tried it is an abject failure that leads to human misery and typically a murderous state.
Yes, CCP wants to “milk the EVE cow”. Good. It is why we have the game in the first place. The question is will they “husband” that resource or not.
Damn it.
I read that comment and thought “man, that’s just wrong, it’s always been about the money”. I was about to hit reply when suddenly I thought “hmmm, I bet if Teckos saw that he’d reply”. As sure as the sun rises, I scrolled down and there you were 
There was never any golden age of altruism where people did things out of the kindness of their hearts and then suddenly became “greedy”. They were motivated by profit from the get go, they just hadn’t figured out all the ways to get it.
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We live in a time where this isn’t necessarily true anymore, Teckos. “Better” needs to be defined properly, as it is too broad to be applied nowadays.
As science and marketing grow closer and closer together, “better” more and more turns into “less quality with improved ways of getting people to buy ■■■■”. Just look at CCP’s ads for example.
They get “better” in terms of attracting people to spend money, but from a higher perspective they got much worse, because they attract stupids.
Or graphics cards in the 90s. Companies figured out that it is sufficient to throw numbers at people and they buy even crappy cards, as long as there is something that makes them look good, like the Geforce 4 MX 128, which was a Geforce 2 with more VRAM than other cards. Back then no one needed the 128MB (and the bus of the card didn’t allow high performance use eithet), but lots of people bought it anyway, because “mine’s bigger”.
The same applies to many games out there, who are crap, but attract simple minded with graphics and promises of feelings of “being heroes”, while being actually shitty games using science to get people addicted.
The same applies to music, where e’ll see less and less quality and more and more science, eventually reducing music to specific patterns (even more than it is today already) which trigger the brain into getting addicted to it.
“better” is relative. Numbers of Sales do not directly correlate with quality anymore and evolutionary progress does not automatically mean something is better. We live in times where marketing defines the product’s quality far more than anything else.
I do not believe that people pay increasing amounts for crappier and crappier products. It assumes that people are just generally stupid and can’t think for themselves. If this is indeed the case, then we don’t need paternalism we need parentalism. We need people to want to be parented because they cannot simply take care of themselves and make decisions.
What has gotten worse? Computers? Cell phones? Televisions? We have more choices for just about every product.
It is not a sustainable trend to rely on just marketing and gimmicks. Because that creates a profit opportunity. Instead of selling one’s customers increasingly shitty products those customers move to competitors who don’t. Look at many products in your kitchen. Microwave…what do you do when it breaks? You buy a new one. You don’t get it fixed, it is cheaper and easier to just buy a new one. Same thing with your toaster, your coffee maker, blender, etc. Why? Because firms have economized on the inputs and these items do things that in the past the couldn’t. Now, you can program your coffee maker so the coffee is ready when you get up. Is it always going to work this way? No, of course not. But over time we see improvements in just about everything. That does not mean each an every “new thing” has to be be better than the last, but the notion of a continuous downwards spiral sustained on continuous bamboozling of people…not buying it.
Seriously you really think the following is a sustainable plan:
- Make a good product.
- Then start reducing the quality.
- Jack up the prices.
- Use marketing to get people to keep buying this product that is getting more and more expensive, but where the quality is always going down?
In fact, you are offering a view here that inherently contradictory with many of your previous posts. If people are this dumb…if they are this susceptible to marketing and being lead around by the nose…then they absolutely need a totalitarian environment because they are not capable of taking care of themselves. And you should be fine with it…because that is what these people need. Expecting anything more from then is quite unreasonable.
My view is that man is rational, but fallible. That we want to focus people on their propensity to “truck, barter and exchange” vs. their propensity to “rape, pillage and plunder.” And to do that we need to look at our institutions (both formal and informal–e.g. laws and social norms) and that desirable outcomes cannot be forced from above, but have to be allowed to emerge from the bottom up and the interactions of individuals.
Congratulations, you figured out where we are heading. 
Too general. “Better” does not equal “more choices”. See my example of the Geforce MX 4.
That’s the past. The present looks differently, if you care to look. Now we’re heading towards getting people addicted to games via gambling. It’s science. It doesn’t matter that much anymore if the game is ■■■■. Sure, really shitty games will bust, but even the less shitter ones won’t.
Just look at the MMO market of recent past. Shittons of equal games coming out and people started playing, until they realized they were actually shitty. At that point companies consolidated servers, but the big money has already been made. If that wasn’t profitable, then it wouldn’t have been done so excessively. Now enough people stopped buying into this ■■■■, so new tactics have emerged. Like “early access”, “free to play” and the recent lootbox fiasco.
I’ve continuously pointed out how even CCP attracts stupids now, and we had several threads for this already. I also mentioned that games over the last two decades continuously got easier, so people feel like they’ve achieved something. Easier games don’t breed smarter people. They breed people with a false sense for accomplishments. I am also absolutely believing that we are heading more and more into a totalitarian future, and there are tons of people on the forums proving me right. They aren’t actually an insignificant minority, at least not in the western parts of the world, with the USA being the number one place where you can find the most of them.
I don’t know how you manage to ignore the present and the outlook into the future, but you manage that really well for some reason. You manage to ignore politics in the western part of the world, and how for a three or four decades now each generation has more idiots, instead of less. More consumers, less creators. More princesses, less people like us.
Too much theory, Teckos. You need to look more into what’s going on, and what’s going on is that increasingly the product matters less and the way it is being sold matters more. It’s been like this in politics for years, and politics turned it into something that is accepted as the norm.
Just listen to modern music. It’s primitive, but it’s made in ways that cause earworms in people. It’s made in ways that gets people to buy it anyway, despite the low quality. A few people in the world create the most stars, because they know how it works. That’s scientific progress.
Think about this: Marketing has always been about getting people to buy products. Hundreds of billions are sunk in research about how to avoid critical thinking and instead triggering instincts. The video games market is a prime example for this and CCP “recently” joined the club, with support from people who worked for EA.
What do you think where this goes, considering an ever increasing amount of scientific progress now even backed by AI? It leads, as example, to music that will be reduced to beeps, blips, and primitive chorusses (even worse than today), but people will love it anyway, because it’s designed in a way that makes them want it.
Just like FarmVille, Mafia Wars, WoW. XP grinding, Achievements, lootboxes. You can either believe that people have free will, or you can accept that the the whole world is built around a dystopian fake happyness, good times and grwat products and that you’re a part of it. You can ignore that scientific progress and research exists and keep believing that people buy things because thwy make a choice. I can guarantee you that 99.9% of people don’t.
When scientific research aims at circumventing your ability to think “do i really want this?”, then the aim is also to make you think “i want this”, until the optimal end result is achieged, where you don’t even think anymore and just buy it out of an impulse.
This conversation would be better in person. We could just stroll around through a shopping mile and i’d keep pointing out examples. vOv
Anyhow… that’s seriously off topic. Great for a new thread, though it’d achieve nothing.
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I beliece people act depending on the information they accept as true and the social implication that the action has in their social network.
You are only partly right here. It isn’t people that are the problem, it is people making collective decisions. The tendency is to assume that such a process is as rational as individual’s making decisions. It is not. It is inherently non-rational. The best we go it voting and it is actually pretty bad. People often extol voting as if it is a wonderful thing which is like bragging about being the tallest pygmy or the best tasting ■■■■ sandwich.
However, when they are left alone or allowed to approach problems without such a process the results are often startling and they work. Not always but far more often than many people would believe. I’ve used this example previously, but Paul Samuelson, clearly a brilliant person, came up with the theory of pure public goods. His mathematical models were pristine and elegant. And one of his conclusions was that the private provision of light houses was impossible. Along comes somebody equally brilliant, IMO, and most likely far more subtle, Ronald Coase who merely wondered, “Is that true?” and then went and looked. And what did he find, that about half of the light houses were privately provided. That sailors and others involved with shipping got together and “solved the public goods” problem but in a way that Samuelson, a bona fide genius, did not and maybe could not have foreseen. Elinor Ostrom continued such work. And yes Samuelson won the Nobel in economics, so too did both Coase and Ostrom. And Ostrom was not all just theory, but actual case studies.
Leave people alone to try and figure out how to deal with alot of these problems and they figure it out. The problem is that it can take time and it may not be like how some people like it, but there is quite a bit of evidence of people solving tricky problems. And when you look at some of our biggest problems they are often self-inflicted by boneheaded policy by wonks who think they know it all and can make better decisions that millions of other people. The degree of hubris there is simply stunning.
The market mechanism is a trial-and-error mechanism. That last part is where some people think they can do better. They’ll get rid of the error by top down planning/dictates to the rest of us and everything will be awesome. But how can a handful of people make better decisions about an economy with hundreds of millions of people taking actions and making decisions. Or even billions once we factor in international trade. We need both the trials and the errors so we can find the successes. If you try to remove one, which is what happens with making this process political you cannot get the successes, at least not at the same degree of frequency. This is why every country that is socialist ends up being a complete ■■■■ hole. North Korea: ■■■■ hole. Venezuela: ■■■■ hole. The PRC under Mao: ■■■■ hole. The USSR: ■■■■ hole. And they are often murderous ■■■■ holes. Where the regime in power is out there shooting people, often blatantly.
Why is there not one mega band then? One music station on the radio? Or one recording company? If this were true why is there so many different variations in music? Talk about too much theory…are you sure you are not totally ignoring evidence right in front of you?
I’ll close with this…
Confirmation bias much?
I hate that trope.
I prefer the lesser known “Shampoo are big in Japan”
that’s just nonsense, let’s take a ship as simple as a battleship and all skills needed to fly and use it to it’s full potential. you will catch up with a vet once and then never have to train them skills again, how are you unable to catch up again ?
plex is cool and i fully support it, some like to grind while others will hit the credit card hard, nothing wrong with both styles of play, each to their own, but to say you can’t catch up is silly, it’s the wait you don’t want and hey, i get that too.
plex became a currency a long while back and CCP backed it up by giving all players a plex vault, yup your plex moves with you now just like your isk, many people infact will only trade goods and services for plex.
plex will never be removed, that’s as silly as saying when will isk be removed. long live plex.
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I think you misunderstand why PLEX was implemented the way it was (obviously profit was probably a big factor). PLEX exists as a CCP-approved method to ‘buy ISK’, it provides an alternative to the black market RMT that plagues MMOs actions such as botting, credit card theft, and account hacking that are used to generate in-game currency to sell. Without PLEX there would be more demand for black market RMT, and that demand would need to be filled or prices would rise and it’d become even more tempting. It also facilitates allows veteran players to play for ‘free’, from ISK they’ve accumulated, facilitating the transfer of wealth from veterans, that might’ve just sat on their ISK, to newbies.
I’ll take “Never” for $1000, Alex.
Why on Earth would they remove PLEX?
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This is true. 
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Im wondering what I said people took offence at lol.
A cuban sandwich isnt a euphamism, its a really nice sandwich.
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So I’ve heard. But some people will take offense at anything. Be glad you didn’t write that on Twitter. 
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I nearly choked on my cofeve there
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