Who Am I?
I have been playing Eve since late 2007. Most of my activities centered around PvP. While the single server aspect, and subsequent international player base intrigued me, what got me really interested in Eve was getting my ship blown up and losing my stuff. In my second week in Eve these guys hunted me down, killed me, and made my pod go splat. I was upset about the whole ordeal for upwards of 5 minutes. Then I realized “Wait a minute… I was being a complete idiot… And I just got killed for it and lost everything I had worked for… You can do that in this game! I love Eve!” and was hooked.
What Makes Eve Good?
Real Loss
Almost all items in Eve are destructible and have a market value. When I lose a ship and get podded I don’t spawn on a “Res Pad” with all my stuff. It’s all gone -every bit of it. Items lost in Eve are gone forever. I have to figure out how I am going to generate the income to replace them. This perceived loss creates an environment where choices matter significantly more then in other games.
Conflict & Challenge
Whether it be blowing up your enemy in space, or undercutting your rival on the market, Eve is about conflict and challenge. This isn’t pre-scripted conflict told to you in blathering dialog by some NPC with an exclamation mark over their head. Everyone involved are real life players, just like you. There are going to be winners and losers, and the outcome is uncertain.
Cumulative Advantage
Eve is about building an advantage. While it isn’t as simple as this, advantage can generally be viewed in three areas:
- Military Advantage
- Economic, Industrial, and Logistical Advantage
- Socio-Political Advantage
Cumulative advantage can build quickly or over time but its results are always quite obvious. If you’ve out gunned your opponent, are better monetized, have a better logistical chain, and can bring powerful friends into the equation then you’ve already won the fight. Just land the knockout punch and get it over with.
Not Because of Internet Spaceships
For me Eve is not enjoyable because it is a science fiction game. I could be happy if we were all elves firing lightning bolts at each other, or gas mask wearing mutants in some post-apocalyptic setting. What makes Eve interesting is that it’s a wild free-for-all where losses add up, where I am constantly challenged by others to kill or be killed, where alliances and choice make a difference. Eve is survival of the fittest. The smart and ruthless prevail. The foolish and lazy are given a quick trip home to update their clone.
Not even the graphics are really that important. It’s funny that the end result of most strategic and tactical operations is some tiny white boxes on a dark background with lines being drawn between them (Pew! Pewpew!) It looks like Atari 2600 on a really high resolution monitor but boy is it fun!
Cash Transaction in Eve
What if we could buy a ship, ammunition, even something as seemingly benign as a faction blueprint with cash wherever we were in Eve? How simple this seems… No pesky market to deal with, no middle men, no transporting, no 20 jumps to Jita. What’s wrong with that? And yet, all these steps, no matter how boring they seem, are what make Eve online the special game it is.
Buying an item for cash would bypass the entire Eve economy, and every aspect of the game. This isn’t simply about the person who is not able to sell a similar item on the market. It’s about the materials required, the industrial process, and the logistics required to move the item to market. It’s about the bypassing of the never ending price war. It’s about removing all risks involved in transporting the new equipment to its intended destination.
Worse yet, an advantage would be instantly been gained. Advantage that could be accumulated simply by spending real world cash would redefine how alliances (lower case ‘a’) are made and broken, how wars are won, and how success is achieved. The winners would most likely be those ones who simply spent the most cash.
In other words, everything that makes Eve great, the risk of loss, the challenge and conflict, and the accumulation of advantage through all these difficulties would be severely damaged, if not completely destroyed. Advantageous in-game items for real money would end Eve as we know it.
But what about PLEX?
You may be asking yourself where PLEX fit into this. To take the argument above in its purest form one could argue that PLEX give an advantage of isk and therefore break the system. At face value I would have to agree with this. However, looking more closely at the PLEX system I believe this is not completely true.
First of all, PLEX only cause an in-game transfer of isk from one party to another. That isk is not added or subtracted from the system, and must still be used within the system. This is very, very different from isk or an item just appearing out of “thin air” within the game.
Second, PLEX are part of a multi-faceted approach to countering RMT, and it appears to be working. This is one area players really need to be giving CCP some credit.
I believe the benefits of PLEX far outweigh any consequences they bring. The problems they have brought CCP, however are a different story (more on this below).
What about Vanity Items?
I have no issue with vanity items. They give no advantage, and just like PLEX can be sold on the market to cause a movement of isk. They are completely different from items that give advantage or are in any way are directly related for the daily conflicts in Eve.
Other Ideas Worth Considering (WARNING SPECULATION AHEAD)
The Glut of PLEX, or “Why CCP REALLY REALLY wants you to buy a monocle”
Examining the Jita regional market show an average of approximately 2,500 PLEX sold every day. This comes to around 75,000 PLEX, or 6250 years worth subscriptions moving monthly through Kimotoro, alone. My guess is there are large stockpiles of PLEX in Eve -enough that a large portion of the player base doesn’t need to pay a monthly subscription for quite a long time. While this was large boost of quick revenue for CCP, it has certainly hurt their sustained income flow. Chances are CCP wants you and I to burn our PLEX on vanity items as fast as our little hands can click that “buy” button… In fact, I bet they are desperate to have you and I do this.
Most companies work off a quarterly profit system. As the amount of PLEX in game surge, less players are paying a monthly subscription. Worse yet, the player base has no need to purchase more PLEX quickly because they are only useful at a rate of 1 per month. This probably means quarterly profits from subscriptions are at a terrible low, even as the player base is growing. And we wonder why CCP is talking internally about expanding in game items…
Dust 514 and Cumulative Advantage
A few years ago CCP T0ri said something quite peculiar on stage at Fanfest regarding Dust: “No, you cannot buy win”. Dust is going to a subscription free game dependent totally on micro-transactions. How can you not sell players “win” and make money? The answer is you can’t. Buying “win” is what Dust is going to be all about. But wait a moment… Isn’t dust going to allow Eve players the ability to fight over planetary control? And don’t planets give you resources that actually have considerable value in Eve? Then that means people buying “win” in dust have an advantage and… Uh oh… That advantage is transferred to Eve where it can accumulate in the form of profits for players who spend the most money in Dust… I see a considerable problem here. Is there anyway to avoid this problem? Interstingly, yes I think there is. I’m even going to go so far as to lay these ideas out for you right now.
Items
All items in dust will need to be destructible (real loss!). Perhaps something will be salvageable from corpses and destroyed equipment, but like Eve, what “drops” and what does not should be fairly random. There should be a base set of items that all players gain access to that cost nothing. I suppose you could compare this to the Civilian modules in Eve. Destructible items are good for the game and good for CCP’s revenue.
Currency
Dust will need to have one, and only one form of currency for anything but vanity items. That currency is ISK. However, unlike Eve, the prices for all items will need to be set by CCP, not the market. There will be no “manufacturing” like in Eve. Items are just there to be purchased. There would be three specific ways players could accumulate isk to buy equipment. The first would be by engaging in PvE and PvP operations outside the scope of Eve player initiated invasions. Perhaps through…(drumroll)… Faction Warfare mechanisms. The second would be through payments from players and organizations in Eve. The third would be through purchasing isk directly as a micro transaction. That’s right, buying isk with real life cash.
One Way Economy
Eve players could hire Dust players and pay them for their services. However, no isk from Dust could ever make its way back into Eve. This is the key point to the entire system. This way the advantage Dust players could gain by “buying win” would only be felt on the battlefield within Dust, itself.
With an endless loss of items through death the “isk sink” would always be draining. It would be the job of Eve players to help fill the sink back up, but our only advantage in doing so would be the possibility of success in planetary control. (Remember, your opponents can hire and finance mercenaries, as well.) Also, CCP would still have its much needed cash revenue.
EVE is JUST A GAME! Why are you wasting your time writing all this garbage!
First of all you need to go watch this Youtube clip of Herm Edwards 100 times. Back? Why do we read books, paint pictures, play sports, or do anything not directly related sustaining ourselves on this cold, hard rock of a planet? Probably because there is some inherent value in creative thought and the developmental process… But that is another essay or book to be written. This has also been a great exercise in formulating, and (attempting to) articulating ideas to others.
I hope this short essay has gotten your thought wheels turning. Eve is in for some big changes. Each of us needs to have a clear idea of what we expect, find acceptable, and unacceptable to properly decide how we will handle these changes.
MJ
No comments:
Post a Comment