As most of you have heard by now Eve has witnessed over the passed four days some of the biggest protests and riots that any game has seen in the last couple of years. CCP is loosing subscribers fast to other games after having broken player trust through the advent of their cash shop which was suppose to be for vanity items only. When it happened: It all started with the inclusion of the major content patch for eve called Incarna, which had a lot of solid updates to the entire game engine, including captains quarters which was one of the most anticipated changes of the entire update. But with this update also came the new cash shop for eve. Now when you think of a cash shop you think of pay 2 win weapons and things that imbalance a game to a point that its just not fun anymore. CCP promised the player base that this would not happen, and that it would only be vanity items that were sold on the cash shop, and that nothing would ever be sold that could imbalance the game in any way. So the day of the patch came and to the surprise of everyone in the EVE community, the cash shop was not what they expected. That costs what! The cash shop was horrible, below are a list of some of the outrageous prices that CCP has deemed worthy to charge players for vanity items. These prices are all in cash money my friends. – Looking Glass Ocular implant – 12k AUR -> 3.5 PLEX -> $61.25 ->1.4 Bil ISK – Men’s ‘Sterling’ Dress Shirt – 3.6k AUR -> 0.97 PLEX -> $16.97 -> 388 Mil ISK – Women’s ‘Sterling’ Dress Blouse – 3.2K AUR -> .91 PLEX -> $16.00 -> 364 Mil ISK – Men’s ‘Comando’ Pants – 3k AUR -> .85 PLEX -> $15 -> 340 Mil ISK – Women “Impress” Skirt – 3.6k AUR -> 0.97 PLEX -> $16.97 -> 388 Mil ISK – Women’s ‘Sterling’ Dress Blouse P – 4.4k AUR -> 1.25 PLEX -> $22.00 -> 504 Mil ISK – Men’s ‘Precision’ Boots – 1k AUR -> 0.28 PLEX -> $5.00 -> 112 Mil ISK – Women’s ‘Greave’ Knee-Boots – 2.4K AUR -> 0.68 PLEX -> $12.00 -> 272 Mil ISK These prices are just a few of the the many items currently available on the cash shop that are in terms of real world money worth more than something you would by for yourself in real life. Players made some noise about what was going on and how rediculous the pricing was but it wasn’t until a document was leaked that detailed the future plans for the cash shop that all of the problems started. Cash shop blues: The leaked internal CCP news letter went into great detail on CCP’s future plans for the cash shop and the future of what they were planning on selling in the shop. The purportedly legit document said that they had plans to not only break their promise to the player base but to start selling: faction standing,ships,ammo and a myriad of other things that would literally break the game that so many people have come to enjoy. Selling these items would in turn make 0.0 space, the space were the hardcore PvP players live and what the game is founded on basically useless and would kill off an entire portion of the game. Grab your torch & pitchfork: In the wake of all of this controversy the player base has responded by taking to the forums and in the game to voice their opinions and their displeasure at CCP for breaking the trust that has been building for over seven years while the game has been active. Below is the forum post started by CCP Pann a developer for the game that ballooned into a 415 page thread of angry players voicing their disgust for CCP. http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard…readID=1536065 Players also started a mass scale riot in the game world as well to lag out the servers so that they would crash over and over again. The riot is taking place in the main trade hub of EVE called Jita, in which a massive amount of players have gathered around and are attacking a invincible statue causing the server to strain and lag a lot. Resulting in crashes and overall server stability to go down, the players seem to be serious though, because the riot has lasted 4 days already with no signs of stopping any time soon. Emergency Meeting? It was such a big deal that CCP is flying each member of the CSM(Counsel of Stellar Management) a group elected by EVE online players to represent the player base to the developers, to Iceland for an emergency meeting in person to discuss where to go from here. This means that they are undergoing serious pressure, because this type of emergency meeting has never happened in EVE online. To put it in perspective it would be like Blizzard calling five to six players from around the world and flying them to their headquarters to personally have a conversation with them on how to A. quell the riots going on and B. possibly even save their game. Final Thoughts: With all of the controversy surrounding CCP at the moment and hopefully some resolution coming soon to the problem, everyone is holding their breath until the CSM summit is over. We wont know whats staying, whats going, or even if EVE can recover from this lapse in judgement from CCP. Here is hoping that in the coming week we get more info on what happened at the CSM summit and we will keep everyone posted on any developments of this story. |
CCP did what?