CCP shooting blues

Posted on 2011-06-22 by Ecliptic Rift

TL;DR: The Business Development (BizDev) team at CCP has gotten out of control and simply does not understand their market nor the culture surrounding their primary service. Their corp mates need to pod them back into station before they shoot any more blues.

CCP launched Incarna yesterday, and the players have not responded well. After last week’s controversies regarding ships via microtransactions and charging $99 to sites that allow donations or ISK payments, CCP doubled down with their prices for the avatar vanity items, which range from about $20 for some clothing items up to $70 for cybernetic monocles. None of these items serve any mechanical purpose, but they do have costs comparable to space stations and capital ships.

I’ve looked forward to this expansion for a long time: years, literally. Roleplay and immersion make up the core components of my playstyle, so Incarna, the “immersion expansion”, seemed targeted directly at my friends and me.

So when CCP announced that we would only walk in stations by ourselves for an indeterminate amount of time, I swallowed my disappointment. When they announced we would only get Minmatar quarters at first, with the other styles coming at some nebulous point soontm, I likewise sucked it up and smiled. Performance issues, patch deployment problems, and other bugs come with the territory, since Incarna represents possibly the most complex update EVE has ever seen from a technical perspective. Those things happen in large engineering projects, and they get fixed.

What has angered most players, though, goes much further than technical problems.

I can’t think of another MMORPG community quite as intensely passionate as ours. Most companies would mortgage their souls to get this sort of engagement from their user base. As we say here in Texas, “dance with the one who brung ya”: your audience is your audience. But now that this BizDev team has gotten their fingers into things, they’ve made decisions that completely ignore that key business lesson their industry has learned over the years. Just ask SOE after the NGE fiasco.

So Incarna revamps the New Player Experience (and needfully so), makes the game more accessible to new players, and then prices the so-called “microtransactions” way outside what a new player can afford and what an experienced player is willing to afford. This says to me that Game Design and BizDev just aren’t on the same page. And most players don’t see that distinction. They just ask themselves if CCP is even trying anymore.

In fact, I wonder who is on the same page as BizDev, because it seems to me they’ve gotten off into their own world.

Related posts:

  1. Big CCP announcement next Tuesday
  2. Alleged leak of internal CCP memo
  3. Will Incarna be another NGE?
This entry was posted in Articles and tagged , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.
  • http://twitter.com/Freebooted Seismic Stan

    Whilst I share your mild disappointment with the modest amount of content in the initial Incarna release (four years of development for a limited solo experience is a tad underwhelming), I choose to at least see the potential as well. They must have other content on the back-burner, I’m hoping they give us that strategy game to play against folk in the next room.

    The microtransaction stuff is not really that big a deal though, is it? So they prices are ridiculous and nobody buys them. Either CCP lowers the prices until they are being brought or the feature dies. I don’t understand why people have to get all apoplectic about it. It’s not like it’s compulsory.

  • http://twitter.com/doycet Doyce Testerman

    Sorry, but no. You’re wrong about this.  This price point was on purpose, and it was the right decision. Prices HAD to be high. Maybe not THIS high, but high.

    If the prices were lower, there would be run on PLEX (there already has been a minor one, even WITH the store prices this high), and the folks depending on buying them to continue playing would be shit out of luck.

    By placing the initial prices in the store this high, you cut down on demand from all but the fattest, most indolent of wallets. Once the initial fervor dies off, you introduce a few new items at the high water mark, and lower the price on the older stuff a bit.

    Repeat. 

    Keep repeating. 

    In six months, you’ll be able to outfit yourself from head to toe in NEx stuff for less than a plex, and the economy won’t have fucking tanked.

    I say again, this isn’t CCP ignorance — this is a faucet handle — CCP trying to keep plex level for those folks who buy them to keep playing. There is a very good reason that the one item that you can see in your pilot’s portrait costs the most — it’s where the demand would be highest, and the faucet tightest.

    It’s the only option they had, at the outset.

  • J Calvert

    The bigger issue is performance.  WiS/CQ just performs horribly.  Machines that could run 3-5 clients smoothly ($45-$75/month), now run 2 clients ($30/month).  CCP is very dependent on customers with multiple accounts for a significant portion of their revenue.  They can’t afford to have those customers go emo. 

    I predict the “temporary” option to disable CQ will be there for a long, long time.

    DP

  • http://twitter.com/doycet Doyce Testerman

    I’ve seen some muttering that most of it is — and this amuses me — hair rendering. Specifically, every strand getting individually animated every split-second. (x2, if you’re standing anywhere near the mirror.) This strikes me as the basic problems of implementing a whole new MMO engine of a type CCP has no operational experience with.

    I hope they fix it before two of my friend cancel subscription — DP’s right, this performance issue is by far and away the real problem.

  • http://eclipticrift.com Ecliptic Rift

    I can see this as a possible PLEX sink, but (a) that should drive up PLEX demand and thus the price in ISK, and (b) it might be more effective at a slightly lower price point, like 1 PLEX.

  • http://eclipticrift.com Ecliptic Rift

    I’m disappointed that they chose to price the MTs so high, per what I mentioned above. It’s just out of whack. And in general, I LOVE the concept of Incarna. Let’s see how the implementation goes over the next six months.

  • http://twitter.com/doycet Doyce Testerman

    See, but that ‘single plex’ pricepoint the danger, right now. Consider:

    Some yutz like me sees the monocle and screams “It MUST BE MIIINE.”What happens?

    If the monocle is about the price of one PLEX, I hem and haw, I grouse and bitch, but ultimately, if I really want the G-D thing, I’ll buy the PLEX and then the stupid monocle.  I’m either buying a GTC or buying it in game. If I buy a GTC, I get two PLEX. What to do with the other? Let’s check the marke–well HO! Look! All the cheaper PLEX have been gobbled up! I can sell my second price for inflated prices, so at least I get a big pile of money to stare at with my stupid monocle.  If I instead buy the PLEX with ISK (which I, personally, never do normally), then I’m one of the people snapping up the cheaper PLEX and driving the price up. Worse, as I said, this is something I never normally do, so my Impulse PLEX purchase has decreased supply below normal levels, thus increasing demand.

    At that price point, there are a LOT of people who would be able to talk themselves into buying a plex for the NEx, especially if all their buddies are also doing it. The market would explode, and the PLEX prices wouldn’t level off until their price individually finally became so high that getting one to buy a monocle was back into the realm of ‘not worth it’. That would hurt. A lot.

    However, if the monocle is the price it currently is? Something like four plex? Fuuuuuuuu no. Not ever. No. No no no.

    What happens to the PLEX market as a result of my rejection?

    Nothing.

    Now, there are people for whom 4 or 5 PLEX ain’t no thing. Some of those folks like monocles. They’ll buy the damned things. Fine. Wonderful. CCP indirectly gets some money for the PLEX purchased, maybe the market surges a bit, but that isn’t going to last because ultimately those rich monocle-lusters are fairly limited in number. The market recovers.

    Given a little more time, the monocle price drops. Now it’s just two PLEX.

    I still want it, but my desire has ebbed a bit. Maybe even enough that I still say ‘no’, though more folks will find this price point bearable and say ‘yes’.  More monocles sell, and again the PLEX surges temporarily, but it’s bearable because while more people are buying the thing this time around, it’s half the price, so that balances. Market recovers.

    Repeat, until impulse PLEX purchases for monocles have no more impact than impulse PLEX purchases for Navy Megathrons.

  • http://twitter.com/doycet Doyce Testerman

    I occurs to me that the other way they could prevent PLEX inflation would have been to make all the cosmetic items really really cheap, rather than really really expensive. That would have (a) protected PLEX prices equally well (b) prevent the rage of people who weren’t going to buy them anyway (c) made CCP less money in the short term.

    Basically, they had to pick between B and C. :P

  • Ciarente Roth

    What worries me about this – as a player who has no problem with microtransactions for vanity items and has used them in other games – is the devblog saying they’d use purchases from the NeX store to gauge interest in and fund further customisable content. Now, I *want* more content, and I’m willing to pay for it – I’m right there in the ‘disposable income both IG and IRL want to play space barbie’ demographic. But if even *i* look at the prices and think that I’m not willing to pay that much (not can’t, but won’t) – how is CCP going to make the money to make more content? Are they going to take people’s issue with the price-point as a sign of lack of interest in the content?