Doesn't CCP usually give the CSM a couple different plans and the CSM pretty much has to choose which one is the least shit?
Originally Posted by Zagdul
Also doubtful. From what I understand their pay rate is horrible and a lot of developers turn CCP down due to not wanting to relocate to Iceland.
Hmmm, given that the base cost has been $15/mo since 2003 that translates to a net price cut of (let's say an annual real CPI of 2.75% per year on the basis that it sounds about right) 20.0% since launch.
Most MMOs have a stable or declining price on the basis that their development costs are heavily front loaded - a fancy way of saying that the developer spends most of the money making the game and then much less updating it. And when they do release updates, they normally charge for them as an expansion. By contrast, CCP continued actively developing for years, and even now they do more dev work for EVE than any game of comparable age has ever had.
If they hadn't totally shit on their relationship with their customerbase they could have quite easily sold a $1-2 increase in the sub, especially if it came with an announcement in detail that more resources would be shifted back into EVE immediately after Dust launched. An extra $750k a month would have solved a whole lot of problems for them.
Likewise, making Incarna wholly optional, and saying that future development will be supported mostly or entirely by NEX income would reconcile a lot of players to both.
RPS trolls CCP in their latest article;
Rock, Paper, Shotgun Ltd. announces Rock, Paper, Shotgun is to go free-to-read, introduces new NanoPayment™ Technology™
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011...ad/#more-64058
[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/Mat4A.gif[/IMG]
However, this presumes that CCP has a decent gasp of PR and community interaction.
i wonder if those dudes are players cause man they post about CCP a lot
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Pretty damned harsh, but fair.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Well yes that's rather the weak point of all theseHowever, this presumes that CCP has a decent gasp of PR and community interaction.threads; they always end with "...if only they weren't run by a bunch of retarded snowniggers"
Speaking of retarded... Where's the damn minutes from the latest CSM summit? Trebor hinted at it being juicy. Fucking cocktease.
Yeah. can't recall who posted that article on the icelandic banking shitstorm, but after reading it the 'Vikings cannot into responsible economics' argument seems a lot more possible in regards to developing three games for the profits of one.Well yes that's rather the weak point of all these
There is a bit of a dilemma over the "CCP agreed that microtransactions will always be for vanity items only" part of the minutes.
Since the original financial document upload has been taken down or removed, and I haven't seen a new one posted.
Linky- http://dl.eve-files.com/media/corp/H...ments_2010.pdf
Lots of people are still unironically asking this question. "Why the hate for power MTs when PLEX are already power MTs?"
Think about what happens with the PLEX transaction. The originating player buys a GTC from CCP or some other retailer and redeems it into 2 PLEX. At this point CCP count their product obligation as fulfilled; the player has receive what he has paid for, regardless of what happens to it in the future. So far, this is pretty much identical to any other MT: gief publisher monies = can haz in-game itemz. But what can you actually do with your PLEX?
Well first you can add it on to your own account, which enables you to play the game for another 30 days. Of course this isn't really a MT in any way that people care about, just a slightly roundabout way to pay a subscription, but I presume we can agree that this promotes gameplay, insofar as it means that the original purchaser will play EVE for +30 days.
Secondly, you can sell it to another player for ISK. This is where it gets interesting, and where it starts to look like RMT and so forth. The most important difference is that the ISK exchange is between two players, not between a player and CCP. This sounds too obvious and trivial to be worth mentioning, but so many people don't seem to understand how important this subtle difference is. Player A sells a PLEX to player B for 400M ISK. (In and of itself, this is a player interaction just like any other market trade, BTW) The amount of ISK ingame stays the same. The ISK that player A receives, he receives apparently without doing any work for it, but the important thing is that work was done for that ISK. So player B had to do missions, convert LP, play the Jita market, risk his ship ratting, run a research POS and sell BPCs or do whatever other activity he engaged in to raise that 400M ISK. If Player A wasn't lazy or time-restricted or whatever other reason he'd rather pay $17.50 than make 400M for himself, he would have done all those activities. As it is, Player B did it on his behalf, but those activities still had to take place, with all the normal implications for wider interaction with the EVE economy and community. To the rest of EVE there is no functional difference between player A selling a PLEX to player B, and player A using his ISK making alt AB to make 400M.
Additionally, the value received is determined directly by player supply and demand. The amount of ISK you can get for your $17.50 is always dynamically set to exactly what the EVE playerbase as a whole thinks it should be. If CCP sold ISK directly, they'd pick a value (and you can bet your ass it would be hilariously wrong) and stick to it.
Conversely, if Player A was simply able to buy ISK directly from CCP then all that activity would not take place. In addition, it is quite possible that Player B simply wouldn't be playing, as for many people, being able to play for free is all that keeps them subscribed. Even if they kept their mains going, the number of "ISK making alts" would plummet, as the Player B's partly have them to pay for PLEX. So Player C cant buy his faction ammo from B, sell his stuff at Jita to B, gank B's ratting Drake or do whatever other interaction might take place, or at least has less opportunity to do so. Player interaction is reduced, player population is reduced, gameplay is reduced.
Additionally, because the amount of ISK you can buy is limited by the amount of ISK that other players are willing to spend on PLEX, there's a hard cap on how much ISK you can buy this way. It's a pretty high cap, but it's there. If CCP sold ISK directly, they'd sell it at the rate which maximised the amount of money people give them, which obviously means that they'd have every incentive to sell it for ever cheaper prices, since they can spawn as much as they want for free. Hello galloping inflation! Apart from anything else, the last thing the EVE economy needs is another massive ISK fountain like CCP selling ISK for a buck a billion.
It's even worse if CCP directly sell items; not only are all the effects above seen, but instead of A using his purchased ISK to buy stuff, supporting all the supply chains that create ships, modules, etc, he bypasses all that and just gets an item magically appearing in his Hangar instead. Although from A's immediate point of view, he doesn't see a whole lot of difference, suddenly EVE has a great deal of things less to do, and less to care about. Why make ISK when the best ships are in the NEX store? Why do invention when the best modules are in the NEX store? Why run missions when the best ammo and implants are in the NEX store? Why run plexes when Y- and Z-type stuff is in the NEX store? Why mine? Why run a moon?
And when there's less point doing all of those things, then why bother to PvP about them anyway? EVE devolves towards being a shallow, mindless shooter.
Excellent points, Malcanis.
I have seen a LOT of people saying that same thing about CCP already doing MT with PLEX.
In the future I will point them to this post.
Holy excellent wall of text.
http://evemaps.dotlan.net/corp/RPS_holdings
Feel free to copypasta it as your own. Until recently I could just ignore people who didn't understand the difference; now I need as many people as possible to see it.
So I took a quick look at battleclinic and at a rough estimate over 200 kills were posted in the last hour or so. Some of those were pods, some of those were noobships but even if we throw half of those numbers away - and a quick glance at a random killboard page suggests this is absurdly high - thats still over 100 dead ships an hour.
100 dead ships an hour.
This should give you a sense of scale of the economy of EVE, because there's plenty of replacement ships on the market for people to buy. Now stop and ask yourself: How many people would actually have to buy MT ships to actually adversely affect the market significantly?
Compare that to how many people bought monacles...
Oh, and it's broadly isk neutral for exactly the same reasons plexes are. There'd be a slight amount of extra isk in game because of insurance. I would expect the insurance to be trivial compared to the price of the hull because the price of the hull would be driven by the plex cost.
Right, because a $70 worthless vanity item will sell at the same rate as one which has a real effect in game. Compelling logic there, Holmes.
Seriously, I put some effort into that post. If you disagree, fine; explain where I got it wrong and I will update it.
It still has the possibility of being wildly-inflationary. If demand rose enough, the isk-price of plex could skyrocket, driving up the price of everything else as a result of all the players who fund their accounts via in-game plex. It's not so much the possibility of NeX being an isk-fountain so much as the possibility of NeX being a huge agitator of inflation that worries me.
uh, ok, how about the argument "i don't care if MT causes the economy to tank and the world becomes fallout3 in space"
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FO3 in space sounds pretty cool
Oh wait Mothership Zeta sucked
I don't really have any particular ideological issues with MT (even non-vanity items) in the game, though $70 virtua-monocles are the height of foolishness.
However, there is no way that I am paying a monthly subscription to a competitive pvp game if it has non-vanity items for sale.
I'd say that it's obviated by the fact that you care enough to reply to my post, or even that you post to this forum at all.
ad hominem.
so MT kills the economy, makes shit next to impossible to buy, and carebears miserable. what's the downside?
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It also kills your posting quality.
Success, I've already had the opportunity to link this once to someone.
Oh, most it of it except the last two paragraphs would be a valid point except for the fact this is about the first place I've read anything about selling isk directly. Hint: they do not need to sell isk directly as any player will be able to turn plexes into isk by either selling them directly or purchasing NeX item and listing it on the market.
As for the last two paragraphs, well I thought I made it pretty clear that it would require people to buy a lot of MT ships/ammo/whatever to adversely affect the market. Also, most industrialists simply move on to other products if the supply of what they manufacture outstrips demand. I'd be pretty suprised if the MT ships were significantly used in PvP simply because they will likely get blobbed to hell on account of being so shiny. (That said, PL is probably working on a new fleet composition already - I hear they are calling this one the "Fatcat").
People buying plex to convert to isk in the game should be capable of working out whats the most profitable way to sell it. If the price of a plex goes up because most plexes are being used to buy NeX items and relist them, then relisted NeX items will be less profitable than selling PLEXes directly. At which point people will start selling PLEXes directly and so on.
That's not what an ad hominem is. If I'd said "hahah this is wrong because that jizz-sucking retard Faife said it" that would be an ad hominem
Saying "it's evident that you do care because you care enough to post" is not. It's not a particularly strong argument, but then your terrible post doesn't really deserve one.
Well done for noticing that CCP have not proposed that they sell ISK. Man, I must go back and revise my post so that it merely explains the difference between selling PLEX and CCP selling ISK.
Oh wait, that was easy, because that was my point in the first place.
in other words you have no actual reason to be against MT. got it. me neither. fuck the spacebears
all I see is fatuous crying that their space sim will have fake items. they can fuck off to farmville for all I care
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OK I posted a bunch of reasons to be against MT but you ignored them for some reason. If you'd prefer EVE to have a cash shop, that's your right of course, but don't say "there's no reason to dislike them" in reply to a long post detailing the reasons why they're disliked.
What's your in-game profession? Unless it's by scamming I'm pretty sure I can provide a trivial example of how a cash shop would undermine it. In fact even if it is by scamming then a cash shop would undermine, it because cash shops devalue ISK.
And for good measure!
For years, conversations would go:
[login]
You: Hey, what are you guys doing?
Your corpmates: Spinning our ships
Now conversations will go:
You: Hey, what are you guys doing?
Corpmate #1: In my CQ watching the telly...but they're just showing the same infomertials over and over
Corpmate #2: Looking at a wall (this is the guy who disabled station environment)
Corpmate #3: Walking to my ship. I started 5 minutes ago.
Corpmate #4: I'm on my wife's PC. My own caught on fire after running 2 clients with incarna turned on
Corpmate #1: lol
Corpmate #2: noob
You: turn off station environment, dumbass
-------
Surprise Sex is the Best Way to Wake Up. Unless You're in Prison...
I'm sorry, I obviously misread that first bit and didn't understand it meant "How dare you disagree with me you curr".
Your discussion regarding the differences between selling PLEX and selling Isk directly is entirely accurate. It's also pretty irrelevant as the latter isnt on the table and the difference between the has little impact on the question "Why the hate for power MTs when PLEX are already power MTs?". The NeX goods work on the exact same principle as PLEX - a money rich, time poor pilot buys an item which he then sells for in game currency. The only difference is that his customer is a player with more isk than sense rather than some student that should probably be in a lecture hall somewhere.
The main issue is the bit you have skimmed over, the question items created outwith the ingame economy reducing demand for items created by the ingame economy. That's the bit I'm addressing, and here my statement: The ingame economy is large enough and the likely demand for MT items is small enough that it will not be significantly adversely affected by some people buying MT items rather than items built in game.
If you think that more people will buy MT ships than player made ships, go ahead and explain why...
I feel that a "~citation needed" is justified here.
People pay 30-40x ISK as much for a HAC as they do a T1 cruiser. If T4 cruisers (or equivalent magic ship of choice) are introduced in the NEX for the cost of a PLEX apiece, why wouldn't people buy them and ignore T2 ships to the maximum extent that they can afford?
Even if the choice is only for reskinned existing ships, there's still a massive problem. For instance, I live in Curse, not the safest region in game. If I log in tomorrow and lose my Loki through being slightly drunk and dumber than usual, then I will want to to replace it. If I can do so through the NEX for a similar price to buying it from Jita, why wouldn't I?
No reason at all really. It just kind of sucks for the guys who live in wormholes selling T3 salvage, the guys who build T3 ships, and the guys who would like the chance to gank my Blockade Runner moving it to G-0Q, because they get cockslapped in order for CCP to get some extra dorrah.
Also: how dare you disagree with me, you curr?
It's hard to make a statement about the average number of ships a player loses each month without some serious data mining and that would be
So heres a quick rough and ready guess: I've lost 4 this month, not including pods. I also quickly checked the record on battle clinic of a good pilot. She'd lost 4 too. And I checked the record of a middle of the road large 0.0 alliance member, who'd lost 7.
It should be pretty self evident that people arent going to replace every loss with a MT ship. Even at 1 plex a ship, which is ridiculously low when you think about the monocle, it's going to make the game a hell of a lot more expensive to do so.
How many Golems have you lost in pvp?It's hard to make a statement about the average number of ships a player loses each month without some serious data mining and that would be
So heres a quick rough and ready guess: I've lost 4 this month, not including pods. I also quickly checked the record on battle clinic of a good pilot. She'd lost 4 too. And I checked the record of a middle of the road large 0.0 alliance member, who'd lost 7.
It should be pretty self evident that people arent going to replace every loss with a MT ship. Even at 1 plex a ship, which is ridiculously low when you think about the monocle, it's going to make the game a hell of a lot more expensive to do so.
That's what the expected loss-rate would be for something like this, since it's the same target segment.
I once lost 3 Paladins missioning over the course of a month
It's still a valid point though, MT ships are going to mostly be high sec e-peen. That implies even less of an impact on the economy as these ships, myself excepted, rarely die. Epic tears when they do get suicide ganked ofc...
We could all start alts and constantly suicide gank MT ships on gates. The MT market would either take off or die depending on the mission runner reactions to losing multiple hundred dollar ships.
Who am I kidding, these guys would quit the game after the first or second.
Utterly wrong example. There are no Marauders being massively used in PvP.
For the sake of argument, if Marauders weren't PvE ships, and gave juicy advantages in PvP that justified their cost, we would have invincible Marauder fleets.
Which would force opponents to field opposing Marauder fleets, in equal or greater numbers.
Maybe there would not be that many Marauder losses, as the smaller Marauder fleet would lose their nerve and not engage to fight another day.
But Alliances would certainly pool their resources to be able to field as many Marauders as possible, to the detriment of other investments.
Hey, guess which ship type makes a more appropriate example.
[I]I'm stupid. Unfortunate, but there it is. Living in a world of geniuses is so hard![/I]
Wrong. Alliances can't replace Marauders at 500 million a pop like Maelstroms.
Closest example would be PL's fotm Machariel fleet they were using a few months ago, but PL is not the rule by any stretch.
I believe he's referring to supers
I thought it was a Tengu reference. Tell us the answer!
Who are you kidding, CCP would remove suicide ganking.
Its an awful big crystal ball you have there Malcanis.
if ccp hasnt removed suicide ganking by now, i dont think they will. i would love to suicide on MT ships. Can wait to see how "cheese off" they will be
Diplomacy is a continuation of war using other means
"Your group of 1400mm Howitzer Artillery II completely misses MT Bitch's T4 übership, causing no damage".
Also, expect to be podded by Concord and fined 3 PLEXes if you attempt to gank an MT ship.:
But if players get ships for 'free' then that mean that all the time he spent getting ships will now become worth-less. His very spaceidentity is threatened.
SOMETHING MUST BE DONE. THIS IS SOMETHING. WE MUST DO IT.
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Counterpoint:
CCP is having money issues. this is an attempt to raise money in the short term, survive until Dust launches without more loans, then hope that Dust pays off in the medium term, and WoD in the long term.
the whole "hurf burf economy will hurt" "hurf burf spaceimmersion" is a bunch of pointless shit that is irrelevant to the decision which was completely motivated by the fact that the company needs money.
this thread is like watching a bunch of brits arguing whether the titanic is sinking because there were too many irish or too many scots involved in the building process. who fucking cares? shut up and let us enjoy the goddamn disaster.
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