Thousands of EVE online players riot over microtransactions

Thousands of EVE online players riot over microtransactions(mmodata.blogspot.com)

78 points by utoku 15 years ago | 40 comments

wccrawford 15 years ago |

You know what the best way to protest a game is? Stop playing for a while and send an email.

I know this sounds absurdly little, but look at it this way: If you're out doing other things, you might find something you like and -never come back-.

This scares the bejeezus out of game developers who exist solely on the fact that people are addicted. If their playerbase actually went and did other things, they couldn't keep going.

So yeah, a few thousand people clogging up the arteries of the system is impressive, but having your numbers drop from 30,000 people at a time to 25,000 at a time is really scary.

DannoHung 15 years ago | |

Okay, two things that are relevant to this particular instance of outrage that you may not be familiar with regarding EVE:

1) The real rage is not over the Incarna vanity items, which are priced silly, but ultimately pointless. It is over a leaked memo which suggested that RMT was planned for game affecting items like ships, weapons, and faction standing.

2) If you quit EVE for even a little while, you are ceding control over space and resources to other players in the game. EVE is one of the few games that has fulfilled the promise of a truly persistent and meaningful game world. In the major alliances, there are political and military structures designed to ensure control over null-sec systems and the planets and facilities that can produce high-grade equipment.

For your suggestion to work, either players would have to decide that their protest is worth throwing away the time and effort they've put into territorial control and asset development OR that everyone in the game would have to agree not to take territory while the protest was going on.

tsotha 15 years ago | | |

People in empire corps could take a month off without risking anything. When I was playing all the action was in 0.0, but most of the players were in high security space.

kevingadd 15 years ago | |

One of the big problems with 'stop playing' protests is that gamers have to pay for a month of playtime in advance, and in many cases, they pay in 3-12 month intervals to save money. This is the case for World of Warcraft subscriptions, for example - they give you a discount if you pay up front.

If you stop playing after you already paid, the company isn't really going to suffer any immediate impact, and any visible dent in their metrics will probably be deferred until they see people not renewing subscriptions. A delay that large will basically kneecap any attempt at drawing attention to players' reaction to a change.

cynest 15 years ago | | |

Also, Eve especially has problems with continuous commitments to your alliance. No spaceholding alliance would give up defending their space to protest vanity monocles and the possibility of microtransactions.

JamesBlair 15 years ago | |

In EVE (and many other MMOs), unsubscribing doesn't immediately deactivate your account, it just stops adding time to it. Quite a few players have unsubscribed. By using their remaining time to protest ingame, they're ensuring that other players see their protest, not just CCP.

lloeki 15 years ago | |

> You know what the best way to protest a game is? Stop playing for a while and send an email.

By not playing, you're not making anyone else currently playing the game aware of the protest. Although you're making CCP aware of your protest, you're becoming essentially invisible to the other users.

joblessjunkie 15 years ago | |

Especially when the "protest" generates news, and gets the product name in front of casually interested gamers who might actually sign up for new accounts.

ctide 15 years ago | |

That doesn't work when most hardcore Eve players aren't paying for it in cash, they pay for their subscription with in game currency.

dekz 15 years ago |

> for people not familiar with EVE: Jita is the main trade hub of the game. Since EVE only has one server, that makes Jita the de-facto capital of the game, and it's main system. There are other simmilar (but smaller) trade hubs (Amarr and Rens, among others), and those are seeing protests as well. Those systems have a hard limit to their population, and when it's capped, the gates close. The protests seem to have capped both Amarr and Jita, and are therefore stopping people from entering the picketed systems, slowing down the player-driven market inside them.

http://www.ps3trophies.com/forums/pc/63552-eve-online-virtua...

Periodic 15 years ago | |

This has a much bigger impact than canceling your own subscription. It raises the danger that you might impact other players to quit. If I were a new player and I found that the servers were too clogged over protests, I might be inclined not to continue. If I were a more casual player, I might go outside, go play another game, or do something else and find I have better things to do than play Eve every night.

This is actually how I quit MMOs in college. When it started to feel like a job when I logged in every evening due to the commitments the game placed on a guild for "serious progression" I stopped logging into avoid it. Then I realized fairly quickly that were many other things I'd rather be doing and I cancelled.

Get someone to stop logging in for a week and you could very well lose them.

andrewcooke 15 years ago |

i don't know much about this, but it seems that they've introduced vanity items at "real world" prices. so you can buy, say, "designer" clothing for several hundred dollars. at the same time, the hardware you use in the game is staying at a much lower level. now obviously they can't charge realistic prices for spaceships, but the resulting contrast seems to be surprising a lot of people.

from a non-involved viewpoint it's an interesting take on what "price" might mean in post-scarcity environments.

bastiat 15 years ago | |

There are no prices without scarcity.

FiddlerClamp 15 years ago | | |

In this case, it's what the market will bear. If people buy $500 designer clothes in EVE, the management will continue to sell them.

JonnieCache 15 years ago |

Virtual riots. Fascinating. SPACE ANARCHY!

Are they destroying in-game property by their actions? Or is it just noise? The post talks about the capital 'burning.'

All we need now is lulzsec to inject their galleon into the server to take everyone's credits in some kind of hilarious mirroring of the mtgox debacle.

Surely the opportunity for nautical/piratical double entendre, and apocalyptic nerd-drama is too much for them to resist?

EDIT: do the SA forums still control the eve universe these days?

sanswork 15 years ago | |

Just creating noise mostly.

http://dl.eve-files.com/media/corp/verite/influence.png

The top left yellow area is SA forums. Below them TEST ALLIANCE PLEASE IGNORE is mostly Reddit.

MaxGabriel 15 years ago |

When I played Runescape, we had similar massive riots over the removal of free trade and the old pvp system (wilderness pking). The pkers were on average decidedly less mature than the average player, so there was really poor communication from them, but also from the company Jagex, who struggled to explain the 'why' behind the changes.

Can anyone who plays Eve comment on how the company is responding?

ajacksified 15 years ago | |

I'm a (retired) director of one of the larger corps in EVE, and I've been discussing the points of contention with members today.

Most of it stems from the fact that those rioting feel the prioritization of the walking-in-stations expansion and the addition "vanity items" is poor judgement. There are bugs, missing features, and new changes that are viewed by the rioters to be of far greater importance than the time spent on this latest update.

There's a semi-offical "voice of the riot" here:http://eve.beyondreality.se/NeXCQResponse.html

And CCP's response here: http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=932

ajacksified 15 years ago | | |

And now that you've read that, I'll keep my opinion separate: I think the riots are out of line and unnecessary. CCP does need to do a better job at addressing the complaints (requests are listed here http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/November_2010_Prioritizati...) and explaining their prioritization... but I think the riots have trouble focusing on the real issue, which is simply communication.

protomyth 15 years ago | | |

Going by what CCP said, their internal newsletter really is a collection of position papers not necessarily reflecting the true views of the authors. This is much like internal position papers to a political campaign (argue the other guy's side so we can hone our argument). That is truly something I would not want leaked and could cause some serious damage.

cynest 15 years ago | |

I remember when that happened. Cancelled my sub immediately afterwards. The reasoning was to kill real money trading by any means possible. The problem with runescape at the time was that the economy started to revolve around using alchemy to transmute mainly items into gold, adding new money to the system, and each step along the way was incredibly repetitive and easily bottable, resulting in a feedback loop. I'm not quite sure why Jagex thought their solutions were the best available, seeing as fixing all prices hurts the entire economy unnecessarily.

kylemaxwell 15 years ago |

And now an email from the CCP CEO has leaked, which ignores the significant problems with the deployment and essentially says that he will not listen to the users (cloaked in some otherwise reasonable language).

http://www.evenews24.com/2011/06/25/ccp-hilmar-global-email-...

Apocryphon 15 years ago |

Emergent gameplay!

sp332 15 years ago |

Live video of the Jita protest: http://en.justin.tv/deamosseraph It's really quite impressive!

Edit: there's another one at Amarr, http://www.justin.tv/dnah_pmip#/w/1381178160/2 but it's not as big.

antihero 15 years ago | |

I wonder if Concorde will destroy their ships and camp whatever station they're around, forcing them to stay in the same place for bloody hours, deprived of resources needed to stay alive.

nocipher 15 years ago |

I partially believe that CCP will end up being okay after the dust settles just because I have never known of any gaming community to have a truly successful protest. The sad part is that the precedence this sets is antithesis to good customer service.

antihero 15 years ago |

Really, people are getting this raged about shit in an online game? Take to the streets, my friends. Fight for the real world, not an imaginary one.

cowkingdeluxe 15 years ago | |

You shouldn't shit on what other people do for fun or in their free time.

Some people use online games like this to escape their real life, whether its to escape disease, sickness or other less serious things.

lutorm 15 years ago | | |

I don't have a problem with people using games to escape their real, shitty life. But then picking a game that makes you so angry you want to riot sounds like a strange choice. I mean, if you are going to riot, there's plenty of things to protest about in your real, shitty life that impact you more. (Granted, it also takes a lot more effort to deal with.)

dpcan 15 years ago | |

If your imaginary world is all you have, is it not your real world?

pnathan 15 years ago | | |

After a few years working in academia, I have a simple statement:

That which pays thy bills is the real world.

It can correspond to another statement: that which feeds thy mouth is the real world, too.

I can't eat virtual bread. It's not the real world.

zemanel 15 years ago |

i believe also that a lot of players weren't happy with the upcoming Dust514 being Playstation only.

Some would like it on other consoles (XBOX) and the rest feels betrayed for playing eve for so long and not being able to play on the PC.

Thats it! I'm quitting this game and giving all my ISK away for this 1 Tritanium!!!