I'm finding it increasingly difficult to respond constructively to this sort of thing.
Go if you're going, and don't expect me to follow.
Simply ask yourself why people do 'this sort of thing'. Then try to respond that with reasoned arguments.
Why do you find it difficult to respond constructively. Is there something about 'this sort of thing' that sets you off?
Being understanding is generally one of my strong suites, Merdaneth. But there are limits.
What you are attempting to do is "vote with your pocketbook"-- use your leverage as a consumer to convince CCP to reverse certain policies. Very well; that's your prerogative, as is attempting to convince others to do the same. And I do understand your frustration with faction warfare, in particular.
That's all well and good.
What gives me a roaring headache and makes me want to delete Backstage from my list of bookmarks, refuse to accept all OOC contacts, and stick forevermore to just playing my character without regard for anybody else's out of character opinion on
any subject whatsoever is the unending
bitching.
You can't please everybody. CCP can't please everybody. You, obviously, are not pleased, and you have your reasons for that.
And yet you clearly still love the game.
Yours may be well-reasoned arguments; they may not. CCP may actually be suffering from fits of horrid greed and from a tendency to ignore serious problems. Corporations, after all, are by nature amoral entities that exist for no purpose but to make money. On the other hand, CCP may just be having a devil of a time coming up with good solutions for some of those problems.
Talk to Eve players, and we tend to act like CCP's problems are in some way unique to CCP, as though they're unusually incompetent or unusually dishonest, but talking to players from other games, it seems that EVERY GODDAMN ONE has this kind of moaning going on pretty much constantly. In fact, in my experience it happens in every group of people with any hierarchy to speak of in numbers greater than twenty or so.
And what's more, the complaining occurs, and is virtually impossible to suppress,
whether the complaints are well-founded or not.You can bet that CCP is well aware that if it pisses enough of us off, the results will be bad for it. MMO's apparently follow a predictable pattern: if the player count actually stops rising, the MMO is doomed: the result is nigh-on-irreversible decline. There's not a goddamn thing you can tell them by cancelling your subscription that they don't already know from all the forum complaints. And yet you, as I say, obviously still love the game.
So the person who is really going to be losing out here is you.
CCP will be down a subscription, but your specific subscription is an acceptable loss if they can keep drawing in others-- and not being able to get out of your ship is a major gap in immersion that keeps a lot of people, such as my wife, from joining. When IC bars can exist in-engine, and not just in-chat, she'll be resubbing.
All this trouble CCP has been going to-- PI, DUST, Incarna, all the little bits and pieces we've got that haven't quite come together-- are working towards something, a much larger universe. If CCP were content to just have a happy little spaceship game and keep it all working smoothly, Eve would have a normal MMO life cycle: start, grow, diminish, die.
That's not what CCP has in mind. They're more ambitious, shooting for a comprehensive sci fi universe where various little unimpressive stubs grow and interconnect to produce a truly vast, interlocking network of players playing various roles in various positions of, indeed, various games. When the execs talk about keeping Eve going indefinitely, they're being serious: they don't want to sell you a ship, they want to sell you a universe.
And that, I find much more admirable than the usual run-of-the-mill "build the game, take their money, move on to the next thing" corporate attitude.
Because they are thus ambitious, a few things are going to end up going by the wayside because CCP's focus is presently on getting itself fully ready for the steps it means to take in the next several years. That means getting PI functional to prepare for DUST, and it means getting captain's quarters functional to prepare for the "real" Incarna.
Neither is in a finished state. Nor is FW, but CCP's got larger problems, notably its struggles to engineer a system that will actually permit small to mid-sized entities to flourish in nullsec and will discourage overly massive fleet fights full of proliferating supercapitals. That's a pretty freaking intractable problem, and you'll have to excuse me if I don't blame CCP in the slightest for giving fixing that particular horror-show priority over FW. FW, while nifty in concept and important to some of us, doesn't crash nodes when it gets out of hand.
Eve is unique. It's uniquely vast, uniquely unified, uniquely cutthroat, and uniquely ambitious. It is not uniquely polished; that's WoW's schtick. You will not find anything like it out there, and you will not be able to get CCP to slow down its ambitions for the sake of a feature that turns out to have been taken out of the oven a little early.
And if it dies because a bunch of people who really love the game want to make a goddamn superfluous point by closing their accounts while screaming "Fix FW!" or, more reasonably, "Fix 0.0!" that will be a damn shame.
CCP will be partially to blame for that if it happens, yes. For ambition to be worthwhile, one must be capable of achieving it.
If you were genuinely tired of the game, I'd understand much better. But now, if you don't get what you want and nevertheless renew your account, you'll appear to have been just an over-dramatic whiner. If, on the other hand, you actually quit, you'll have abandoned an entirely unique game (and universe) you still cared about and enjoyed greatly, and you will have nothing to show for it.
You see, CCP may listen to us about macrotransactions. It may listen about making CQ optional, unless there's some technical issue there. It will not, however, listen to you about its priorities; it's put too much into developing its "future vision" to stop now, or even to slow down.
If you insist on cancelling your account because of this, well, go ahead. Maybe enough of you will decide to "make a point" that you can put the game you love to death. That's probably more likely than a reversal of course.
And if CCP really is as incompetent as the "bitter vets" keep claiming, maybe that would be a mercy. At any rate, you'll do a fine job of doing in your own fun if you carry it through.
Personally, I'd rather see what they come up with to keep me paying my hard-earned iskies, until I genuinely conclude that the game no longer deserves them.
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Topic: Sending a message about Incarna and the future of EVE (Read 12180 times)