EveOnline CEO: a letter to the followers of eve | Hacker News Reader

EveOnline CEO: a letter to the followers of eve

eveonline.com

84 pointsbjclark23 comments

I stopped playing the game after my first child was born years ago but I still have an affection for the game. CCP is both brilliant for making it and foolish in their managing of the game. I recall during a war that had virtually every PvP player engaged that lasted years the side I was on felt like we were actually fighting the company itself since one of their employees was involved with cheating on the other side's behalf. As I recall the employee was never fired for acting in a way that managed to really piss off thousands of paying customers. Many left but many stayed just to not be whiners about it.

I can't say I'm surprised that they made such poor choices in directing the game. They want it to not be a niche game but that's what they have and they should probably be happy that they have what they have. Unless you're engaged with other players it isn't even a game at all. It's actually more like playing a video game within a video game. Shallow doesn't even describe it-I've felt more engaged playing missile command.

That said it sounds like they're going to try to fix things which is good. I hope the game does well. I enjoyed my time there-I just never want to go back to it for the sake of my daughters :)

>It's actually more like playing a video game within a video game

I was in one of the larger player alliances before I quit;

I'd compare it more to having a second job within a video game.

By the end I spent more time working in excel and managing people (read: herding cats) to prepare for the game than I did playing the game.

This is well-written, candid and interesting, but I feel like I'm missing out on a lot because I've never played EVE. Can someone who is familiar with the issues (for example, what is "ship spinning"?) give an overview of what led to this?

Ship spinning is an incredibly trivial feature that corresponds to an utter lack of motivation to actually do things in Eve. Veteran players have a somewhat love/hate relationship with the game, warning new players that "Eve is a terrible game".

Generally in the Eve universe you are never safe, except when "docked" in a space station. In previous versions, you were presented with a view of your ship floating in the space hangar, and due to the "camera" mechanics of the UI, you could spin around your ship at like 300+ RPM.

An utterly pointless exercise in which millions of man-hours have been spent while simultaneously chatting on TeamSpeak or Jabber or doing market research, or whatever. But all players seem to share a tongue-in-cheek fondness for this feature.

So, it seems like "ship spinning" is the equivalent of wandering around World of Warcraft capital cities only by way of spamming jump? Thank you for the details.

It's worse than that since you do it out of reflex and it is less engaging than what you're describing (though I never played WoW).

In some ways 'ship spinning' in eve was the iphone equivalent of dragging a screen past its boundary and watching it snap back in place.

Dragging the camera (with a mouse down, move and release) would cause it to rotate around the player's ship until some artificial 'drag' decided the spin should slow to a stop. It was one of those innocent and functionally useless UI features, that is surprisingly satisfying to preform.

|In some ways 'ship spinning' in eve was the iphone equivalent of dragging a screen past its boundary and watching it snap back in place.|

...I'm not the only one? Oh thank god

I can't believe how many hours of my life have been spent jumping around Ironforge aimlessly.

It's not that ship spinning is some preferred activity in Eve, it's simply a preferred activity vs. Captains Quarters (CQ). The problem with CQ is that it did not run very good on most machines and the movement of the characters was very stiff. Also the load times to get to CQ were longer than that of ship spinning.

As far as the item shop, it turned out that a monocle cost around $80 after converting isk (in game currency) into real money via the purchase of plex (Eve supported gold buying). The items were grossly over priced which made CCP seem like a desperate broke evil corporation with which the player base has lost most of it's trust with.

As far as the direction of the game, with the introduction of a long awaited feature, Captains Quarters, that was not even completed upon release, it made it seem that CCP was not willing to listen to the wants of the player base in which direction they should devote their programming hours. Plenty of activities in Eve have not been updated nor has the game play had an injecting of new and invigorating play style in a few years. With CCP's latest move, it has made me and other players think twice about investing more time in a game that the developers seem to no longer care about.

'Ship spinning' also covers an easier way to access certain well-used menus for managing your ship, without having to open the 'Ships' window. The 'spinning' part is a minor loss, not being able to easily access cargo/fuel/hangars is a major UI drawback.

The line that made this seem more than a PR move to me was this line:

"...without disrupting the space combat simulator that many of you are, or at least were, very much in love with—and without delaying..."

It's one thing for a CEO to say they were wrong. But for them to say that customers might have been right to fall out of love with their only product - that takes balls.

Can't help but to contrast it with the Netflix "apology" note, which basically said "we're sorry... that you're mad, suck it, we did nothing wrong". This one accepts full blame for mistakes, and that's a welcome thing.

Time will tell if Netflix did the right business move or not... but way they communicated it will certainly go down as a bad approach.

Are there any other persistant/mmo style space sims, but favouring action over the simulation?

A friend once linked me some picture of the "eve learning curve" and it was a precipice, never inspired me to want to play it

found the image

http://dragsa.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/eve-online-learnin...

I think the image is more supposed to show how harsh and unyielding Eve Online can be. The game offers many ways in which the players can work together or screw each other. It's not for the faint hearted :-)

The penalties for dying are higher than in games like WoW, and you can everywhere be killed by players. There is no real safe haven (though you have dangerous and even more dangerous space) That does make it realistic and give to interesting game dynamics.

I don't have time nor motivation to play time sink games any more these days, but I did enjoy it a lot more than, for example, WoW.

Captain's Quarters http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5IOVRRV-Ow

Ship Spinning http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfY0-fbZOXc

I alway thought that the whole point of EveO was that you were locked permanently locked into your ship (like The Matrix meat batteries). I had no idea there was supposed to be a world beyond the ship.

Anyone care to do a tldr;?

It's worth reading as an example of how to try to acknowledge you made massive mistakes, pissed away good will, and want the community to know that you've heard them, and you want to make things better.

CCP's CEO is acknowledging that he was, in his words:

I was impatient when I should have been cautious, defiant when I should have been conciliatory and arrogant when I should have been humble

He aims to resolve all the nonsense of the last few months by:

doing what we say and saying what we do

He addresses and apologies for all the ways CCP seemed to have become EvilCorp™ over the last few months.

What are some of the ways?

At the risk of sounding facetious: by continuing to work on the features they promised for the last version which they hope will cover the lack of development on the parts people actually enjoy.

While it is still better than Netflix's outright rejection of customers, it still misses the point. CCP's development effort is squarely on Dust 514, which may acquire a new audience -- not Eve Online.

CEO mea culpa; vows fix.

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