Friday, July 15, 2011

I Can Haz Monocle? $70? Eve Online Riots!

The fury from monocle gate and Pay-2-Win has finally died down some with CCP doing some major damage control. In fact it got so bad I was expecting them to release in game T3 DCU's as all the design work appears to have been done!

For those who missed it, the release of Incarna coupled with a leaked internal CCP newsletter and email plus something a dev said when being interviewed the week before caused riots in game. Literally people were rioting in their spaceships. Locking hi-sec systems down by sheer numbers, raging on the forums and shooting in-game monuments. There was much rage logging, people cancelling accounts and CCP weilding the perma-ban hammer when people went too far in the forums. 

Damn Google! I wanted GEEKS rioting, not GREEKS!

The main issues were...

The prices in the NEX store - Really CCP. A shirt for your in-game Avatar that costs more real life money than... well a shirt for yourself! And then we have the $70 monocle....
Incarna graphics - Some people couldn't load the Client, some peoples graphics card just melted.
Bugs - Black screen of nothingness when undocking or jumping. Restart the Client, you're pointed and in 10% structure. Pop. GM - "Our logs show nothing." Me - "What a coincidence, that is same as 5 times a day on my screen when I undock or jump. Nothing"
Loss of the hanger - No ship spinning and not easy to see what ship you are in if hitting undock in a rush.
Pay-to-win - Now this wasn't in the release. A mix of the newsletter, the dev interview and the emails gave the Eve community the sence CCP was going down the pay-to-win micro transactions route. It was rumoured that the Ishkone Watch Scorpion could be bought with Aurum with no input from players. *puff* and a battleship appears from thin air. This got people the most worried.

Many people said "So what?". You can buy PLEX with rl money already, sell them for ISK and buy a wtfpwnage-ship-of-awesomesauce already. Isn't this the same.

No, and here is my view why.....

At least with PLEX, which is still real money trading technically, when you buy a shiny faction ship the following has to happen:-

 
Player 1 buys PLEX from CCP, sells PLEX for ISK, buys shiny faction ship. The End? Yes, but lets go back to the start.
 
Before Player 1 can buy that fancy faction ship off the contracts section, a lot has happened....
 
Player 2 gets LP's for running missions.
Player 2 buys a t1 hull from Player 3
Player 2 trades LP's and t1 hull in for faction ship
Player 2 puts up sale contract which is bought by PLEX selling Player 1.
 
But before that.....
 
Player 3 buys minerals from player 4.
Player 3 uses minerals to build t1 ship hull.
Player 3 hauls t1 hulls to trade hub in a freighter.
Player 3 sells t1 hull on market which is bought by Player 2.
 
But before that.....
 
Player 4 mines minerals to sell on market, bought eventually by Player 3, after buying new Hulk.
 
Player 4 had to buy new hulk as dirty piwat player 5 popped his last one :)
 
And where did that Hulk come from? Well... Player 6...... :)
 
And that's just the hull, now repeat that for modules, rigs, ammo and drones. Maybe some of them are T1 and were looted by Player 7. May be they are T2 and the BPC to make them came from a BPO owned by Player 8. Maybe that BPC came from an invention run from Player 9 who bought the datacores from Player 10. Where did the rigs come from? Well the salvage was sold by PvP player 11 who salvages both player tears and their ships in null-sec. 
 
And not just for player 1's ship..... player 2 needed a fitted missioning ship, player 3 needed a freighter, player 4 need the hulk, player 5 and 11 need PvP ships.......
 
Yes, Player 1 used real life money to buy and fit a ship of wtfpwnawesomesauce. But how many different people contributed to that one single fitted ship?
 
That is what make's Eve special, CCP even pointed this out in the butterfly effect promo video. Now they are going down the line of giving you a ship, mods, ammo and who knows what for just cash?


It's looking likely that CCP won't be going down this route now and will require a t1 Scorpion hull to be trade in along with Aurum. Anyway, lets all hope so.....

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