Greedy Goblin

Friday, December 16, 2016

I might play EVE, after all

EVE Online is flat out the best game design out there, matched by superb programming and graphics quality. Too bad that it's ran by completely corrupted devs who sell in-game power for favors. "Favors" can range from simply being in their social media circles to give part of RMT money, but the point is that they don't even bother to conceal what's going on.

I have a permanent page collecting their most obvious actions, including saving criminal friends from real world justice system, running cyberbully campaign, "balancing" the game on the written request of the pre-selected winners, officially campaigning to their customers to give money - not to their company but to - a zero-experience publisher company created by their buddies or colluding with underage gambling organizations.

Because of these I stopped playing EVE and won't be back. However there are reports of the company is being considered for sale. Of course these speculations can be off. Maybe we shouldn't bother about this particular one. However the bigger arc here is more important. Somewhere, some time someone can buy EVE Online, either the title or the whole company creating it. And no buyer will ever tolerate the open selling of corporate property by thieving employees. It's not something that a complete audit can reveal, it's something the culprits were casually bragging about on public forums and posts. Probably the current management considers them valuable enough to turn a blind eye on their side business, but no investor can legally do this. They are reporting to individual investors and the last thing they need is some of them raising questions about the legality of their operations.

Anyway, when (and likely not "if") Blizzard, Riot or some other multi-media mogul buys EVE or CCP itself, the back-end of the game will be changed seriously. Yes it's possible that the game will be packed with pay-to-win. But even a "fair" pay-to-win (when purchases are visible) is better than the current corruption. It would be like Black Desert Online but with a purpose (I wasn't bothered by noobs buying silver for real money to still be much more poor than me, I was bothered by no goal beyond getting more gear you don't need). EVE has lot of potential and I still have fond memories of it. If Falcon and the rest of the corrupted cyberbullies, rape-jokers and neo-Nazi enablers are out, I would definitely give it a shot.

19 comments:

Doktor Jeep said...

I too am waiting for Falcon to go. Reason being, the community is toxic and it's toxic "Because of Falcon"™.

We all know Eve is harsh and had always been so, but only since the advent of CODE., a movement born of being butthurt over the loss of agro-fu can flipping without real consequence, that the community has spiraled into this dark sperging "HTFU loser" mindset. I played from 2006 to 2016 and remember a time when "pirates" acted like pirates instead of murder-crazy killmail addicts.

CCP, through community management, had the power to fix that. Had, because that window is closed: most of the players it mattered to are gone. Instead they have Falcon who to this day I can't tell if he's malicious or just plain incompetent.

CCP also screwed the dog where casual players are concerned. Many (especially the gankers) would say the game was "too harsh" for casual players. That would be incorrect: the game was too drawn out for casual play. They took exploration which was great for solo play for people who had maybe an hour here or there, and made that super simple grind-fest. Then added additional exploration content and special missions that require some help. All well and good for the "HTFU this is an MMO" crowd but as usual what people feel and what reality says is going on (people wanting to play but not having the time to wait their entire 1-2 hours game time for 3-5 people to fleet up) is a different matter.

But yeah, if Eve ends up in the hands of people who actually want the game to kick some ass again, I might return. That would also require Falcon to be fired too. I won't return as long as he is working there. I just don't want to encourage bad behavior. I get the impression that while the rank and file developers are just doing their jobs, there is a kabal of people there, Falcon being one of them, who have been entrenched in their jobs and sealed up in their bubbles far too long.

Anonymous said...

Some highup from Microsoft was found on facebook to be flying to Reykjavik at the same time, whatever that implies.

Unknown said...

It is still CCP's policy to outsource swathes of the game to organised groups aka their friends. This, at the expense of solo casual play. I doubt any potential purchaser of CCP is that interested in Eve beyond being a cash cow. VR is the point of interest. So I wouldn't get your hopes up.

Anonymous said...

Any others remember the olden days when m0o were the "Big bad guys" (2003)? They were pirates AND successful - the current mmo culture just was not prepared for a game where you could be successful at the direct cost of your fellow players - it was awesome! However, with our standards today they would be regarded as gentlemen bandits if anything.

Falcon is a typical douche/fuckboi - and his community "management" is just making it toxic and negative to the point where you don't want anything to do with the game.

Sack him already - name one thing that he has improved?

Diver said...

I'm really looking forward for it to hapen, not the eve changes itself but you back to the game.

Anonymous said...

While a new owner may clean house and get rid of blatantly incompetent employees like Falcon, it will also severely impact Eve's gameplay. I think it's very unlikely a new owner (especially someone like Blizzard or Riot) will keep Eve as-is. They will force "player-friendly" changes. You can kiss your ass goodbye to in-game scamming, suicide ganking and general "be the villain" gameplay.

Eve will stop being Eve and slowly be turned into another generic MMO.

Gevlon said...

I don't think that losing suicide ganking, highsec wardecs or scamming would be a big loss. The main drive behind EVE is fleet battles in nullsec. Lowsec piracy and the lawlessness of WH are also good scenes. Most players are NOT engaged in "asshattery" aka attacking players just to make the player mad despite no in-game point.

Unknown said...

@Anon

Suicide ganking, scamming and hisec wardecs are all bullshit mechanics. They add very little content to the perpetrators but remove extreme amount of content from the victims. They pretty much make any hisec corp impossible and increase the burden on transporting goods - the most boring and useless "content" there is. If we removed all of that the 1% of scanners would quit in rage, but we would gain 10 times more players who just don't want to play victims.

Basil said...

I don't think you're being logical about this. A new investor would be no different that the existing owners, except that their tolerance for risk and appetite for growth would be balanced differently. That doesn't necessarily imply that they'd make any of the changes you propose. The only changes they'd make are things designed to improve the balance sheet, and I don't think anyone can convince this theoretical investor that these are significant, financially, and need to be addressed.

More likely, an acquisition would come with a complete shakeup- usually this means layoffs, and if you're lucky, the people you identify as responsible for this are overpaid and underproducing and would be let go. Not because of their policies, because of their salary's effect on the bottom line.

Gevlon said...

@Basil: 99% of the companies don't tolerate blatant thievery and toxicity. Any random company would fire these crap.

marseillefrog said...

Falcon should have been fired years ago. Guys is useless. Also, if people are unsure at how bad that he is. Watch what happens when is fired. He'll never get another job at a different games company anywhere. I'd trust him to be janitor at the local school that's about it.

Anonymous said...

I really hope a f2p shark like GameForge buys it. Eve should die a slow an painful death. That would be the ultimate collection of tears.

Anonymous said...

CCP would have to work hard for me to make a comeback to Eve because I felt kinda left for dead in that game. Never had the time or will to join fleets so I was playing T2 industry/invention/Trader/Occasional exploration and occasional lvl4 mission with a vargur.

T2 industry: My pipeline was smooth after a few weeks once my spreadsheets in excel were fine tuned and it was an okay-ish money maker for the years I played.
But eventually you feel you are done with all this, finding materials, transporting, filling the industry slots,waiting, retrieving the producted goods and selling in a hub.

Trading: Never went up to the point where you ship stuff from a hub to another using paid transport service, but I still made hundreds of millions per month with low investment.

Explo: Was fun years ago, now it's quite meh, because I got used to it I guess. Also loot spew... My easy plan was to find a wh to nullsec and from there I scanned the surrounding systems (often empty local) to find sites to do.

Mission: The vargur can do any lvl4 without a dent in the armor but isk/hour is pretty abysmal and it was so boring...Would have been fun with a friend, but by bringing a friend in mission, you are not nearly doubling your completion speed but you are still dividing your isk/hour in half.

I never joined a corp because it would expose me to wardec = no transporting manufactured or traded goods and no occasional missioning with the vargur = why would I login...
I know you were always a fervent supporter of removing highsec wardec and I thank you for that.

So what's left for a semi-casual player in Eve who already did all the aforementioned stuff? Not that much...

Provi Miner said...

dam nice haul of tears here. So I play an hour or so a day or every other day. I fleet up maybe 2-3 times a month for an hour. I shoot people in the face, I bait gankers and you can not be scammed if you think things through. How solo am I? well aside from about 3 hours a month out 30 or so (that's 10%) the rest is solo where I am just chilling doing my own things mostly just chatting with associates running a few missions, do some market warrioring, maybe an hour of mining (just to do it) and yep I plex, yep I get kills, yep I build things, yep I destroy things almost all solo. never been ganked since I learned that procs are dam near invincible, DST's laugh at 99.9 of the gank camps, BR's laugh at 100% of them. So I get it when you're a scrub flying a ret you deserve to get ganked, as for war decs? WTF are those oh you mean that week were I use my alt toon to move my stuff while I sit in null and laugh at the wasted isk? the point is if you choose to live in high you should probably put some effort into it and find how to make yourself successful in spite of the dip wads running around. Pro tip auto pilot your capsule and some ass hat will pod you.

Hanura H'arasch said...

Your e-mail seems to be broken:

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

gevlon@freemail.hu

Technical details of permanent failure:
Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the server for the recipient domain freemail.hu by fmx.freemail.hu. [84.2.43.65].

The error that the other server returned was:
550 5.7.1 Message denied by policy.


Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that Dropbox is going to disable public folder support in March, and that will break all the killboard links sadly.

Anonymous said...

It just takes to long to get stuff. Its faster to load up a game of league of legends then it is to grind for gear and stuff in eve. A 1v1 dueling system where you don't lose your ship at the end would be fun. Then again at that point your basically playing hearthstone in space so maybe I'm just full of it.

Gevlon said...

@Hanura: could be maintenace. Now it's fine.

Anonymous said...

1st) CCP managed to acquire fresh money for being able to spell "virtual reality" correctly.... and made a game that had about 100 ... in words one hundred... active players prior to the PSVR launch. I might be wrong and PSVR has totally changed it but before that it was just a remake of the DUST514 "success"
so that story got a 300 mil evaluation, but that story now has been told and guess what it is not worth 300 mil not even closely. How likely is it to cash the investment successfully without a new totally hype business case? Close to zero?

2nd) always funny how people blame the faces they see for CCP sucking bad. A community manager will being highly visible and being able to manipulate the community for the good or the bad is not the problem. Executive producers, marketing directors, directors communications and the brilliant guy who opened up just another office he isn't able to keep together and act as on company.... those are the guys to blame ....

Unknown said...

hm... which would be the new challenges?

as someone who has achieved so much, what is keft to that is exciting and not repetitive?

people whine about grinding in BDO, but the grindfest is the same in eve, only with less boobs...

nothing has changed for the better and if ccp is sold, then solely for VR reasons. No investot is interested in eve. it might well be that a new owner will simply inform the customers tha no further dev time will be "wasted" on eve and that the servers will be ultimatively shut down soon, no refunds possible, thank you and have a nive day...

unless falcon has some much desired vr skills, he better starts looking for his next employer...

if trading means so much to you, why not trade online with the budget you would otherwise spent on subscriptions? just saying...