An open letter to CCP

After thinking long and hard, I have decided that the best way to communicate the below, was to do an open letter to CCP… so here goes.

Dear CCP,

Firstly, before I say anything else, I’d like to say thank you for the time and energy you’ve spent in creating Eve Online and Dust 514.  Eve is a game that has captured my imagination and commitment for longer than any other game I have ever experienced, and Dust 514 has been something I’ve spent many hours sniping and firing grenades at other people.

In many ways I can understand why numerous other commentators have compared playing Eve to being in a relationship, as you can experience joy one moment and anguish the next; your time and money disappear and you’re never entirely sure how and why.  The problem with relationships is that sometimes one of the parties loses focus, or perhaps the communication between those involved is poor, or maybe one of the people involved has an idea they want to peruse.  Relationships also sometimes sour because those involved can simply slowly drift apart.

Where am I amongst all of this?  Sadly I think I’m at the point where I think: the lines of communication have broken down; some focus has been lost; and I think perhaps CCP have been slowly drifting in one direction while I have been reluctantly trying to follow and adapt.

I’ve reached the stage where I am going to leave Eve Online, and I’ve realistically already left Dust 514.  My accounts have all been unsubbed and will all expire within the next 30 days.  Why?  What’s happened?

To be honest, I think that in Eve Online and Dust 514, CCP actually have two excellent products.  The problem is, that both games have lots of problems and don’t really work together.  So many opportunities have been missed, and that can be seen by the concurrent user statistics for Dust 514 especially that can be viewed at Chribba’s excellent Eve-Offline.Net website.  With the average for the past year being somewhere around 3,000 users, and the maximum recorded being just under 10,000 on 19 May 2013, it’s clear that there’s something wrong with Dust 514.  The figures for Eve don’t make pretty reading either.

Still, I’ve been a citizen of New Eden since 14 March 2010 when I was drawn in by an online advert on some website I can’t remember. After a bit of research and reading some stories, I downloaded the client and loaded it up.  The game was difficult to get to grips with to say the least.  I followed the tutorials and managed to work out what I was doing – sort of.  I was soon in a Badger Mk I with a Mining Laser on in an asteroid belt, coming back maybe 45 minutes later when my hold was filled.  Yes – I was sort of half way up the infamous Eve learning cliff.

 

Not a problem, soon I was into manufacturing and had discovered that Eve came with two clients: one from CCP to interact with the game’s database, and one from Microsoft to run the spreadsheets needed to actually play the game.  Again, not a problem as I love spreadsheets.

Through all of this, however, Eve hadn’t just captured my attention, it had drawn me in so deep I didn’t really know which way was down and which way was up any more.  Also, I’d met some really great people, and also several really not so great people.  I’d also once again been blown away, this time by the passion, dedication, creativity and innovation of the Eve Online community.  Great bloggers like Rixx Javix who made me want to write my own blog, essential sites such as Eve-Central who inspired me to rent my own VPS and learn how to plug-in to the Eve Market Data Relay to help me with my own industrial activities.  There simply is not a game that I had come across where the creators were open enough to allow access to a good API, and where so many talented people had done something with it.

A huge moment for me was Incarna.  I actually thought Incarna should have been the start of something great, however unfortunately what was released should never have been released.  For me, it would actually have been better if CCP had just said that they were holding it back until this new and cool FPS was released where the communities would be able to interact.

Instead of playing Dust, I’ve been playing Warframe, which was introduced to me by one of the people I have met through Eve, and am now fortunate to call a friend.  Why am I playing Warframe?  Well, firstly it has PvE, which is something Dust 514 sorely needed at release date.  Secondly, it hasn’t been ruined by cloaking devices.  Yes – I think the most recent injury to Dust has been the introduction of the cloaking device, which has taken away a good deal of the frontline combat feeling of the game.  The other big problem with Dust is the fact that the lack of PvE, and the massive incomes possible from Planetary Conquest, means that the average player who is not in the select group of players successfully undertaking PC battles, is left scratching around for ISK facing up against Proto equipped squads.  Scottie also has much to blame for this, although with a shrinking pool of already low numbers, matchmaking must be a difficult task.

Warframe recently deployed a massive update, introducing the ability to fly through space, literally through the wreckage of space ships and structures, as well as asteroids. Once again, it’s easy to spot places where Eve and Dust should have been leading the market.  We had the trailer showing us how the new implants for the Dust soldiers were found… and here’s a game showing us how CCP could have taken that vision and made it a reality through their game.

I am hugely saddened by all of this.  I’m not sure how this has happened.  Maybe it’s simply down to CCP overstretching and finding out that the ground underneath them wasn’t as strong as they thought.  It isn’t bad luck, as they haven’t launched a ground-breaking format which hasn’t been adopted.  Dust 514 is/was, after all, a multi-player console FPS.  Bad advice? Bad timing? Bad management? Maybe. Probably not. Possibly.

I’m not “on the inside”, so it’s impossible for me to judge the finer points.  However, what I do know is that the latest changes are the tipping point for me, and from what I can see, many others.

I have given away all of my assets, used the Eve Character Bazaar to sell my main characters, have distributed the proceeds from the character sales to in-game friends, and have unsubbed my accounts.  From the small group of people I know in-game, four people have definitely decided to stop playing Eve, and I can state with confidence that combined with me this means that a minimum of 25 accounts have unsubbed.  Looking through the forums when I was selling my characters, the number of Capital Ship pilots who were being sold suggests that this is a bit of a trend.

So the question is, what do I expect (if anything) from this letter?  A response? Acknowledgement? Rebuttal? Change? No. I don’t expect any of these. After the years of playing the game and most of the time enjoying it and blogging about it, I just wanted to say something before I left.

If anybody ends up playing Warframe or Elite: Dangerous, then feel free to look me up.  In Warframe I’m CarolynSicling, and our clan is new and looking for recruits.  In Elite: Dangerous, I’m Commander Allum, and as it’s still in Beta, things will no doubt grow and develop, but I’ll eventually be looking for a Corporation, or whatever it ends up being called, to join.

My best wishes to everybody who has read this blog, met me in game, or works for CCP.  Hopefully I will meet (or cross) some of you in other games in the future.

Eve Scientist

aka Lorna Sicling (sold)

Please note that my Eve Online accounts have been unsubbed, and will therefore all cease to be active within the next few days.  The majority of my characters have been sold through the CCP forums in accordance with CCP’s Terms & Conditions, and therefore should you see “me” in game, it will actually be somebody else.  Comments to this blog post will continue to function and be received by me at an external email address.

An open letter to CCP

CCP's first salvo of silver bullets results in friendly fire

I’ve been very quiet over the past few weeks.  Apologies for that – RL stuff and things in Eve have drained my time.

Anyway, a couple of things to mention.

Firstly, the changes to invention proposed in this dev blog.  Some good things such as:

• balancing datacore use – the new purpose based system makes much more sense to me


• multiple outcomes for invention – I have the hang of it and then I need to work harder, this always needed some love

However, as usual there’s some bad things:

• Merging Invention and  Reverse Engineering – these are completely different activities, the only reason to merge is to dumb things down


• Only needing skills to level 1 for Tech II construction – really? Integrating capital class jump technology into a T1 battleship is easy you say?

Serious point here.  Can somebody at CCP please start using a dictionary when making changes.  For years we had refining skills which covered refining ore, but also reprocessing modules.  Now, they’ve effectively nerfed refining modules so only ore is refined, but instead have renamed it reprocessing.  Do you refine a piece of iron ore or do you reprocess it?

Now, they’ve decided to do the same with invention and reverse engineering.  We take a tech I blueprint and, after looking over it and using our extensive and expensive science skills, we apply ourselves and invent something new, a tech II blueprint copy.  Alternatively, we take a piece of advanced and virtually incomprehensible alien technology and take it apart, scan it, poke and prod it until we manage to construct a design for something that behaves in a similar way… we’ve managed to reverse engineer it.

Why oh why can CCP not just stick to having things named correctly, or just come up with a new name altogether.  I can understand that CCP are merging the activities code into one section for simplicity and to make it easier to update and manage – well done and congratulations – but why can’t they then have things split into two trees, one named invention and the other named reverse engineering?  Perhaps I’m being too picky, but I think it’s just lazy.

Ok, that’s as much time as I’m going to spend on invention stuff for now, as there’s more to come on that I’m sure.  The biggest point is the travel dev blog.

I read it through, and then I read it again just to make sure, and then a corp mate helpfully posted this link which shows CCP dev responses.

The funniest thing in the whole dev blog is the example of Little Bobby Tables moving his Archon in appendix A.  I got to the point where Bobby decides to fly his Archon 40 gates through null-sec.  Unfortunately CCP Greyscale missed out the end of the story where, 3 jumps in, he gets tackled by a roaming gang and, shortly thereafter wakes up in a clone vat with an insurance payment.  Yes, the limiting of force projection is a good idea, but by quoting sheer stupidity in one of his examples, it doesn’t help soften the blow within the dev blog.

Once again, CCP’s activities have destroyed an entire game play style.  If you rely on people such as Black Frog Freight, Galactic Hauling Solutions or PushX (not advertising or endorsing any solution), better start thinking of an alternative as CCP’s first salvo of silver bullets aimed at null sec will headshot these operations.  It’s a real shame, as these groups (and others like them) have worked hard to build up a business to service the usually smaller operations in lo-sec and null-sec and provide them with a way to exist.

For me, it will mean that I’d need to double the number of cyno toons to be able to continue to operate as an industrialist in null sec.

By the way, that’s partly why I’ve been so quiet.  Having got bored and stale as renters, we moved corp to join a sov holding PvP alliance in order to help ramp up their industrial wing.  I’ve been busy setting up T1, T2 and T3 manufacturing lines and things are now progressing nicely, producing fleet T2 and T3 fits for sale on the market and by Alliance contract.

However, post patch, with fatigue affecting both jump bridges and jump drives, initial calculations on fatigue and the idea of funding another one, probably two accounts just for cyno toons, I’m starting to look at this and wonder whether CCP really have any idea what the implications of these changes will be.  Yes, perhaps if we had player constructed stargates available to build and deploy at the same time as these changes…. but that’s probably around a year away I’m guessing.

Other people have suggested so many different changes, such as the need for the cyno on a ship to spool up before it can jump.  Why can’t the fatigue be applied to that instead, so that maybe radiation builds up to the state where it takes longer to spool up each time, so the more jumps you do in a short period, the longer each jump takes to actually do.  This would have meant the need to defend the final few cynos for the jumps to be possible.

Essentially, with the changes happening now and in the future, CCP are taking the stack of cards that is null sec and the Eve economy, knocking it down and giving us a new pack of cards and hoping that we will be able or bothered to rebuild it into a working game again.

I’m very concerned about this, and not entirely sure I want to go through the effort and expense of being able to be part of the rebuilding process.

On a final note, I’ve been playing Warframe  a bit recently, as I was getting a bit fed up of Dust as the low player numbers there coupled with the matchmaking system seems to result in most matches comprising at least one full squad of full Proto gear players funded by Planetary Conquest ISK, or lots of people running around in cloaks with shotguns.  The actual gameplay in Dust can be very engaging at times, but the ability to make ISK to run good suits is not great unless you’re chosen by the good and great to receive some of their Planet gained wealth.

Yesterday I unlocked the Clan Key, and travelled to the Clan Dojo, which my Clanmate is building.  CCP – you really need to look at this and learn.  As a clan, you’re able to construct a very nice looking complex where people can have 1v1 fights to test equipment and learn and practice moves.  You can also make things for clan members to use too.  If, when we had Incarna, CCP had given Corporations and/or Alliances the ability to construct something similar in NPC stations or Outposts, then I believe that it would have been successful, and would not have resulted in the terrible consequences that followed.  Even if not applied to Eve, if something similar had been put into Dust when it was launched, then perhaps the concurrent player count would not be the poor few thousand it is now, but would have been in the 10,000′s as such a title should be.

Anyway, these are my thoughts.  I will welcome comments such as “QQ poor indy noob carebear thanx for the tears yummy” and so on.  Constructive comments also very much appreciated.

CCP's first salvo of silver bullets results in friendly fire