Biting your hand.

Working assumption: CCP needs more than they currently get from EVE to keep the freight load of WoD and Dust development rolling, and reckon just overheating a tad the old locomotive boiler won't do it.

In short, they need to borrow money, and they're fine with selling their coal-car to buy a new suit and enough bubbly, leather seats and drapes to impress the bankers — hoping EVE will be nice enough to keep running on its momentum and look the part until moar funds are secured.

The sad thing is they probably are going to drive their entire train off the rails and into the ground before even they run out of coal, when they could still save the entire operation by showing the least bit of common sense — although I'm not entirely sure to which extent it's still up to them by now.

A quick reminder.

We're shooting pixels at pixels. 

At face value this is an activity devoid of both purpose and meaning.

The one reason it matters to us is because we agree to believe others care for the same thing(s) we do.

In that sense we're sharing some essential values, and thusly create worth out of nothing.

The Perpetuum temptation

Time and time over I've had to justify to others (and occasionally to myself) my lasting involvement with EVE online, considering how frequently it may seem I scorn EVE, its parent company CCP and even the EVE player community, parts or whole. 

I could write walls of text about the many things that make it all interesting to me (and I have the walls of text to prove it), but it can be boiled down to a simple choice of nothing vs something, however unsatisfying:

CCP may be a greedy, unfriendly, obnoxious shopkeeper with a bad temper and a family of inbreds for staff, and sure, they tend to drop cigar ash and the occasional gravel-for-capers on the pizza, and sure, you have to suffer redneck patrons chanting klu-klox anthems and puking in the dining dining room during happy hour, but New Eden's the only pizza place in this sad town, where you can't import a wood oven for under 60 million bucks.

Food, not filler.

In case you feel like reading more about CCP's suicide attempt (still bleeding as we speak), here's a pretty decent write up of the situation with some nice background from Brendan Brain, over at Massively.com.

Don't be put off by the doomsayer title, because: 1) the content is better than the cover in this case, and 2) it could actually be spot on.

Biting the hand.

tl;dr

EVE is not a global brand, it's a niche game that gets a lot of media attention, as a result of which its parent company is suffering from delusions of grandeur.

More accurately, EVE is a cult, meaning it matters quite a lot to a very small subset of the general population, everyone involved tends to suffers from chronic cognitive bias and the occasional hallucinatory excursion, and sane people either laugh at you, avoid you, or both — but you make great gossip material.

Words of wisdom for CCP: it's freakishly hard to transition from a barn-sized cult to a mainstream church: secret societies typically don't survive an open-door policy.

My suggestion: keep EVE players happy as pigs in the mud, EVE is the PR machine that will give to any 'mainstream' spinoff you churn that edgy shine kids love so much.

*

My name is Hilmar,

…and I have no clue why people pay for EVE online.

I postponed my followup post about 'how to do virtual sales right' (in the context of EVE online) because the proverbial feces scattered through the revolving contraption in the meantime, specifically as this went public.

Long story short, we're led to believe an internal email from CCP CEO Hilmar Pétursson to "ccp global list" (which we have to assume is the general mailing list read by many to most employees — at least on the EVE front) has been leaked to EVEnews24.

There's no bulletproof certainty about the source, and EVEnews24 editor's confidence is not entirely reassuring considering their track record, but it looks solid enough for the community to have gone up in arms over it. [Update: it has been confirmed since to really be Hilmar's.]

I'm going to play along and comment the thing under the assumption it's the real deal, because while I'm not entirely sure the community outrage is as well-placed as it should, there is cause for concern, here.

Slight bump.

Some stuff happened around the issue raised yesterday, and forced me to reconsider today's post.

Meanwhile, some people are getting a bit hissy about the whole mess.

Livecam from Jita protest (people took to shoot the Jita Memorial en masse as a way of shouting their discontent).

Greed is good, needy is bad.

Hello all (three of you),

it's been a while, but this week's lineup of EVE things gone wrong is just too massive to let pass without comment.

First, there was the release of Incarna 1.0, soon followed by patches 1, 2 and 3 in as many days.

This went about as smoothly as any major patch does: extended-extended downtimes, black screens and melted graphic cards — business as usual, by CCP standards.

Things got a bit worse when people figured the conversion rates on vanity items in the new 'Noble' shop expected them to burn more cash on their avatars wardrobe than the average EVE player spends to cover his XXL meatspace self.
The most forgiving souls will want to believe somebody @CCP fubared a decimal separator… alas.

1 AUR = half a U$D cent, do the math.

My first response was to point'n'laugh, but for some reason, there was much outrage about that.