I can't say I'm surprised that they made such poor choices in directing the game. They want it to not be a niche game but that's what they have and they should probably be happy that they have what they have. Unless you're engaged with other players it isn't even a game at all. It's actually more like playing a video game within a video game. Shallow doesn't even describe it-I've felt more engaged playing missile command.
That said it sounds like they're going to try to fix things which is good. I hope the game does well. I enjoyed my time there-I just never want to go back to it for the sake of my daughters :)
I was in one of the larger player alliances before I quit;
I'd compare it more to having a second job within a video game.
By the end I spent more time working in excel and managing people (read: herding cats) to prepare for the game than I did playing the game.
Generally in the Eve universe you are never safe, except when "docked" in a space station. In previous versions, you were presented with a view of your ship floating in the space hangar, and due to the "camera" mechanics of the UI, you could spin around your ship at like 300+ RPM.
An utterly pointless exercise in which millions of man-hours have been spent while simultaneously chatting on TeamSpeak or Jabber or doing market research, or whatever. But all players seem to share a tongue-in-cheek fondness for this feature.
As far as the item shop, it turned out that a monocle cost around $80 after converting isk (in game currency) into real money via the purchase of plex (Eve supported gold buying). The items were grossly over priced which made CCP seem like a desperate broke evil corporation with which the player base has lost most of it's trust with.
As far as the direction of the game, with the introduction of a long awaited feature, Captains Quarters, that was not even completed upon release, it made it seem that CCP was not willing to listen to the wants of the player base in which direction they should devote their programming hours. Plenty of activities in Eve have not been updated nor has the game play had an injecting of new and invigorating play style in a few years. With CCP's latest move, it has made me and other players think twice about investing more time in a game that the developers seem to no longer care about.
"...without disrupting the space combat simulator that many of you are, or at least were, very much in love with—and without delaying..."
It's one thing for a CEO to say they were wrong. But for them to say that customers might have been right to fall out of love with their only product - that takes balls.
Time will tell if Netflix did the right business move or not... but way they communicated it will certainly go down as a bad approach.
A friend once linked me some picture of the "eve learning curve" and it was a precipice, never inspired me to want to play it
found the image
http://dragsa.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/eve-online-learnin...
The penalties for dying are higher than in games like WoW, and you can everywhere be killed by players. There is no real safe haven (though you have dangerous and even more dangerous space) That does make it realistic and give to interesting game dynamics.
I don't have time nor motivation to play time sink games any more these days, but I did enjoy it a lot more than, for example, WoW.
Ship Spinning http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfY0-fbZOXc
I was impatient when I should have been cautious, defiant when I should have been conciliatory and arrogant when I should have been humble
He aims to resolve all the nonsense of the last few months by:
doing what we say and saying what we do
He addresses and apologies for all the ways CCP seemed to have become EvilCorp™ over the last few months.
