When the server went up yesterday, players were met with many unexpected “surprises”.The Captain Quarters is, in this writer’s opinion, a good addition, but it’s so limited that it loses its novelty factor really quick.
Other players confronted the unpleasant reality of a forced trip to newegg.com for upgrades. The ones with a decent enough system to run the new graphics met the game’s new features and a clothing store that managed to rage players to levels even higher than their GPU temperature loads.
$60 Bucks or 1.4Bil isk for a god-damn monocle!?
Head over to the eve-o forums or other EVE related sites and it won’t take you long to figure out how much buzz has been made over the fact that a Monocle, or even a measley shirt, is worth more than a faction fitted battleship, a couple of PLEXes, or even more than the Retail Box version of the Eve Online game.
Enter the the not-so-Noble Exchange Shop, proof that once again CCP loses grasp of reality as is shown by prices on the new “vanity shop”. With products like a whooping $60 dollars / 3.5 PLEX / 1.4bil isk, for that now infamous monocle, the $22 dollar shirt or the “designer boots”. All of which might be a bit too much for many reasonable players.
Let’s check at the prices:
Exchange Rate: 3500 AUR = 1 PLEX = $17.50 = 400 mil isk at Jita (New Eden main trade hub).
- Looking Glass Ocular implant – 12k AUR -> 3.5 PLEX -> $61.25 ->1.4 Bil ISK
- Men’s ‘Sterling’ Dress Shirt – 3.6k AUR -> 0.97 PLEX -> $16.97 -> 388 Mil ISK
- Women’s ‘Sterling’ Dress Blouse – 3.2K AUR -> .91 PLEX -> $16.00 -> 364 Mil ISK
- Men’s ‘Comando’ Pants – 3k AUR -> .85 PLEX -> $15 -> 340 Mil ISK
- Women “Impress” Skirt – 3.6k AUR -> 0.97 PLEX -> $16.97 -> 388 Mil ISK
- Women’s ‘Sterling’ Dress Blouse P – 4.4k AUR -> 1.25 PLEX -> $22.00 -> 504 Mil ISK
- Men’s ‘Precision’ Boots – 1k AUR -> 0.28 PLEX -> $5.00 -> 112 Mil ISK
- Women’s ‘Greave’ Knee-Boots – 2.4K AUR -> 0.68 PLEX -> $12.00 -> 272 Mil ISK
How much for Caldari Captain Quarters?
These new prices don’t scale up well with the other features CCP had promised in repeatedly, neither will they hold up when larger and more interesting features might show up, namely the other faction Captain Quarters, the Station bars, or even the April’s fools scooters.
Some of our readers would be quick to point out “But guys, these are vanity items”, and while that’s true, the elevated prices are clear proof of how CCP is either ill advised by some marketing-wiz or simply disconnected with the current reality of most of their players. We would go so far as to assert that it’ll only be a matter of time before CCP moves into more aggressive ways to incentivize the Virtual Goods sales and it’s up to the player base (given that the CSM won’t make a difference) to be vigilant on this issue.
One other service we’re looking at is selling faction standings. We want to offer convenience for a price.
Greed is Good newsletter – Incarna
A month ago Eve News24 was sent an internal newsletter/bulletin via email from a throw-away account, we tried to contact back the sender to no avail, we even thought it could be a publicity stunt from CCP, the bulletin was claimed to be crafted by CCP employees for CCP employees, after reading the letter and hustle the urge to publish it, we decided to wait for CCP to release their Incarna patch and see how much of this translated to actual “game-content”.
The bulletin contained an amount of corporate and personal information which we have decided to suppress, yet we will feature four (4) interesting points of the piece:
Pros and Cons of Virtual Goods Sale
Here to CCP employees discuss the pros and cons of Virtual Sale of Goods within Eve Online.
Friends with Benefits: Implementing Virtual Sales in Incarna
This is the part that most players would be interested about, am just going to mentioned that this goes far beyond just be a ” good read”.
Dust 514: Window Shopping in the O.K. corral
The Dusk 90210 section of the newsletter proposes the fact that while there is just a one time retail fee, virtual goods will make Dusk 90210 worth “iterating”.
World of DarkNess
CCP Stephenie Meyer takes over the helm and expand a bit on the micro-transaction MMO we all helped develop.
It’s ok, calm down, CCP has that economy professor on payroll.
From the approximately USD $4.5 million dollars per month and about $54 million per year that CCP boast to cash on “active subscriptions”, I find really hard to see how CCP didn’t just chose to increase the base subscription by a couple dollars and offer a premium subscription to those who choose to Walk in Stations on top of it.
Want to create the ISK sinks? Give us the promised T3 battleships, frigates, combat, rebalance production, and stop the rampant botting that’s plaguing both highsec and nullsec.
a Massively.com commenter throws some “hope” in the table.
What about the rest of the bulletin?
I shared this piece to one of my advisors who gave me a very different perspective after reading the whole unedited release.
Well, unfortunately for you, this is not anything different than now, However a few zingers in this, Aside from the whole “CCP is really into Money Trading [MT]” thing the whole piece shows off, the big eye raisers to me are the focus on MT instead of balance when looking at how combat-changing virtual goods can be sold in DUST/WoD, the idea of buying EVE faction standing with MT, the super low employee salary satisfaction (financial trouble?), and that IA is part of the stats team. I mean seriously, IA is there for a reference book and stats? Pretty sure that was sold to be much more serious. Also it’s lovely how the pro-MT guy is one of the designers.
CCC – EN24 Advisor
Dude you are so banned.
That’s up to CCP actually, but it’s a good thing I’m not bound by a pesky free-license, right?
You can read the whole leak:
Click to Download from eve-files
the password for the pdf is ‘dominixevenews24′.
Note for mac users: the PDF won’t work for the Preview app, if you don’t want to install Acrobat reader, just drop it on top of a Google Chrome window and enter the password when prompted.
R
If you would like to send intel or contribute feel free to use the form below:
[spoiler show="Submit Intel Here"]
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CONFRIMIGN – DO ANYONES HAF THE MISSIGN PAGES?
ALSO I THINK MAYBE IT HAF FINNACINAL INFORMATIOSN WHAT DO GET TAKE OUT BEFOR LEAK – ALL VER CONVENEENT.
KEEP UP THE GOOD POASTIGN!
Riverini… call a real and proper show of displeasement next sunday in jita.
Lets see if the servers hold everyone thats enraged by this.
The leak was real… Go to the Eve-O general forums and follow the apology thread that CCP Pann posted. She comes right out and says it wasn't a fake… If you don't want to search through that 60+ page and growing thread, I'll post what Pann said here.
CCP Pann:
The newsletter was not fake. I guess this is how it feels when someone reads your diary, something you hadn't intended anyone else to see. Not to deflect the heat but to explain why what I'm about to say, I wasn't involved with writing it. The only reason I mention that is because I am not going to presume to know the minds of the people who did have comments in there. I am not going to throw people I love under the bus or to the lions or whatever. I can't/won't answer questions about what they said or why they said it.
Our newsletters are written as a means to bring about discussion (that sometimes can even become heated debate) among our coworkers. That's really all I can say about it. I am not a game designer. I'm a mouthpiece. I'll admit it. By the time I get involved, the decisions have been made. Not making excuses for myself, just explaining.
That's gotta be a bitch. You break the story and they give the interview to massively.com. No matter what people say about you, you're about the only news organization there is about gaming on the internet, you're the only one who will actually do pieces that aren't PR for the relative company you're writing about. Props on this story, good work.
WHY DO YOU THINK THEY ADDED THE ABILITY TO GIVE "UNALLOCATED SKILL POINTS"….??..?? IF THEY START SELLING SKILL POINTS, IM GONE FOR SURE, THIS GAME IS BEGINNING TO SUCK!
Waa the frick boo.. They are VANITY items so you can grow ur e-peen. They do not affect the game in any fashion or form. As to the CPU intensive and completely frikkin useless walking in the station Captains Quarters.. they can be turned off if your computer cannot handle it.
If CCP wants to charge a liver for the damn things, so be it. This would be a completely different debate if any of these vanity items served a useful purpose in-game or provided an attribute or mod increase.
OMFG once again evenews24 screws the pooch
http://files.ancyker.com/eve/ccp_bulletin_origina…
THE REAL bulletin, apparently once again EN24 released a redacted copy with pages missing, apparently the fact is its not POLICY, it's just an internal debate back and forth between devs to discuss the pros and cons, wtf !!!!!
EN24 sensationalism FAIL
too bad thats not the original copy
http://files.ancyker.com/eve/ccp_bulletin_origina…
is the original newsletter without EN24 edited out pages
[...] on the night of the 22nd of june, an internal bulletin was leaked. Apparently some people like Mynsee and Teadaze had already seen a similar one, and confirmed that [...]
[...] an interesting read was internal document, that should not have got out side of CCP but it did, an Eve News 24 post which brought this to light for many of the eve community, was interesting but then again if this [...]
[...] what is alleged to be an internal document laying out CCPs strategy for mictro transactions. http://www.evenews24.com/2011/06/22/greed-is-good-purportedly-leaked-internal-bulletin-shows-ccps-re… about 1/3 of the way down (Near the bottom of the actual story) there’s a link. Read it. [...]
[...] at least its a monocle and not gameplay related stuff. Oh wait! They want to directly affect gameplay with AURUM too! This memo is just such a heaping pile of shit that I’m literally at a loss [...]
My personal opinion is these protests aren't likely to be as effective. If as the Greed-is-Good memo seems to imply: money is that important, then show them how important money is. A real impacting protest: such as all the protestors in EVE cancelling their account renewals (for those that are on a Month to Month and didn't pay years in advance as well as an IN-Game shut down, such as no-one logs onto EVE for a pre-determined number of days. Those kind of actions would be more effective, particularly combined than all the lasers fired at an indestructible object.
Zulu just posted his blog and it was basicly a big one finger salute to the community and full of :smug:
Community is not amused CCP!!
[...] or Dodixie and voice your concerns. If you need a reason why, this devblog should be adequate, this leaked internal memo should be adequate, banning Helicity Boson for voicing his opinion should be adequate, leaving the CSM out of the loop [...]
[...] someone thought it was a good idea to leak “Fearless”, CCP’s internal newsletter. EVE News 24 claims they had it for a while already, yet what we get from them is a version that is missing a [...]
[...] Do not claim the veracity of this email it came to us via a Drop Box (just as the newsletter), we didn’t published immediately out of the respect we feel for CCP games, yet the evidence [...]
[...] licence when someone is accepting donations and/or in-game money. Anyway, before that heated down, an internal CCP newsletter leaked out, describing possible plans for EvE micro-transactions for not only vanity items, but ships, ammo, [...]
I can't understand the page formatting on this blog at all, what am I even looking at, are these comments is this an article, where is the leaked bulletin? —- then it looks like part of the article is inside of the comment section. The usability is so bad I still can't figure it out after five minutes.
Is there any way to actually read the goddamn pdf? IE a hosting site that isnt a titanic pile of shite?
Nice post article faggot, I'm actually starting to like your ~words.
[...] a new thing, but what’s made it interesting, as someone who doesn’t play the game, is a leaked document which lays out a path towards pay 2 win and buying non fluff like ships and superior [...]
ok here is the flaw in this equation… in the US plex use to be same as subscription… $14.99… now its $19.99. did they tell us that plex was going up? if not that is messed up.
[...] Greed Is Good: Purportedly leaked internal bulletin shows CCP’s “refreshing” new direction. [...]
by the time i got to page 8 my jaw was hanging slack, and my head leaned forward to ensure i was reading this idiocy correctly. I work in retail and let me tell you if one of our corporate newsletters EVER came down the pipes with that tone and the rampant jevenile inuendos, the writers would be fired so goddamned fast they'd still be waiting for a paycheck a month later….wondering where their jobs went.
So the cats out that WoD will be micro-transaction based and likely to follow the pricing model of EVE…yea, there go all my hopes of seeing the WoD fully realized in digital format. Sorry CCP but I'm not touching ANY of your games from here on out.
To hell with captains quarters make that and option for players, under no circumstances allow the sale of any item that might effect play outside of the station and get something set up to let players on older machines and laptops to play again shader 3 does nothing for me in game that shader 2 didnt except deny some of my corp mates on older machines are missing in action these days
The outlawing of shader 2 forced me to unsubscribe to the game in disgust. Sounds like now they may allow turning off of the CQ but requiring shading 3 is still in effect eventhough it IS NOT NEEDED OUTSIDE OF THE CQ!. I've also noticed that the HD requitements have balloned from 8 GB to 20GB!?!?!
False assumptions, ignorance, and a bunch of pussies that need to get a life. I thought 95% of the EVE population was male, but it sure doesn't seem that way to me. The mob needs to grab some cranberry juice and a box of tampons. CCP has investors that put pressure on them to make more money yet you crucify the developers at CCP. Brilliant you ignorant mob; just brilliant. Not to mention more money can be spent on development of great games when their revenue increases. The game isn't without its issues, but the protesting is just ridiculous and childish.
[...] (I thought it was funny, but w/e). Then Incarna was released with $70 Monocles, and EN24 leaked the Greed Is Good CCP internal newsletter, which showcased their apparent love of all things [...]
[...] which is a fair assumption. However, if you take a look at this comparison of prices on this Evenews24 post, and then look at the t-shirts available (physical) on CCP’s store, you’ll notice that [...]
I'll respond to the parts that weren't silly ad hominem attacks…
"CCP has investors that put pressure on them to make more money yet you crucify the developers at CCP."
First, wtg with the 'crucify' hyperbole. Goes great with the developer who mentioned 'Hitler' and fans throwing his corpse into the ocean. People are just voicing their opinions here.
"Not to mention more money can be spent on development of great games when their revenue increases."
Right, because CCP has been so poor up to this point. There are multiple fixes and balances people have been asking for for years that CCP hasn't implemented, despite 'increased revenue'.
"The game isn't without its issues, but the protesting is just ridiculous and childish. "
Yeah, idiots! Stop questioning what the people who take your money do. Just pay them, shut up and stop voicing those opinions of yours!
[...] on the night of the 22nd of june, an internal bulletin was leaked. Apparently some people like Mynxee and Teadaze had already seen a similar one, and confirmed that [...]
[...] peu près au même moment, un document interne destiné aux employés de la compagnie intitulé "Greed is Good?" (l'avarice c'est bon?) est reçu par un joueur et partagé massivement. Le document explore la [...]
[...] peu près au même moment, un document interne destiné aux employés de la compagnie intitulé "Greed is Good?" ("L'avarice c'est bon?") est reçu par un joueur et partagé massivement. Le document explore la [...]