Then I’m looking at Team Fortress 2 being given away entirely free with it’s cash shop being filled with fun and flavourful cosmetic gear that you can, if you’re moderately lucky, get in the game anyway.

And then I’m feeling a little sad for CCP.

Partially cause TF2 has http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36lSzUMBJnc

I think that CCP need to stand firm. Very few people are actually quitting and this really is a storm in a teacup. You could already pay to win, it’s exactly what the Russian billionaire who set up Red Alliance famously did. And the monocle rage is hilarious.

Consider a pyramid. At the top you have the people who wipe their behinds on £100 bills and will buy $68 monocles just to annoy poor people. Say 0.01%. Just under them you have the people who couldn’t care less about wasting $10 and who would have bought monocles just to annoy people who couldn’t afford them had they gone on sale for $10. Then you have the 99% of people under that who wouldn’t waste the money even if it was “good value”.

It’s the second category that have started the bandwagon. It’s not people like me who would never actually wear one. It’s the people who wanted to buy it but couldn;t because it was too expensive. Nothing is worse for vain people than to have their noses rubbed in the fact that other people out there are richer and more vain and can get cooler stuff.

If they want to survive, they must back down.

To players of all games, you don’t have to sit back and take the derision many game developers show to you.

It is the person who pays for dinner who usually has the upper hand. And we all are paying for that dinner.

“I can tell you that this is one of the moments where we look at what our players do and less of what they say.”

I get the impression this implies that players (as if this group is completely uniform) complained and then turned around and paid anyways. I’m sure the vast majority of the players speaking against it, didn’t buy it either and If we are talking about what players -actually did-, that was to NOT buy the monocle (with only 52 sold).

An excellent post Spinks!

Is a freakin’ awesome title.

http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?title=interest&videoId=156547 …about 1 minute in.

“years from now this is what people will remember.”

If they genuinely believe EVE will be remembered for a single (and, actually, pretty sparse) cabin that’s taken 6 months to be developed, I don’t know where to go with that. I was drawn to EVE (and I’d imagine a great many others were as well) at the prospect of a full, player-controlled universe, not by walking around a totally irrelevant room that’s actually reduced in functionality from its predecessor. In 6 months other games have developed whole zones that have more content per square meter than EVE’s lonely little cabin does. It’s a pathetic offering, not a breakthrough of immense proportions.

“After 40 hours we have already sold 52 monocles”

In a game of 300,000+? That’s not good, Chuck. Can you imagine if Blizzard sold (52*15; the rough equivalent of items per user in the West) just 780 sparkle lions in the first 40 hours? It would be a catastrophe, not a brilliant sale. It suggests not only how overpriced it is, but also how little people care about something that *no one else will see*.

“This should not come as a surprise to anyone.”

O’rly? Because I thought CCP’s view was:
“EVE will never have microtransactions.”
But then:
“Microtransactions will DEFINITELY ONLY JUST BE COSMETIC. PROMISE. XXXXX.”

Explain to me why people should have expected you to outright lie. Or, rather, why people should ever trust you again, since evidently everyone should be unsurprised when you do a U-Turn.

“All that said, I couldn’t be prouder of what we have accomplished as a company, changing the world is hard and we are doing it as so many times before! Stay the course, we have done this many times before.”

What he doesn’t seem to understand is that he did all this without costing the players more. Perhaps CCP need to hire people who actually play the game, not economics professors.

It’s incredible just how far CCP have plummeted in my estimation as devs. For a brief period I had them right up there, when I started to really enjoy EVE.

Now, they’re worse than Astrum Nival and gpotato.