The CCP Dichotomy

For the past couple weeks, I’ve been a little confused about CCP’s behavior. Great, responsive moves that suggest they have the future of Eve well in hand are followed up by evidence of tone-deafness that causes me to lose all hope in their stewardship of the game.

I really want Eve to succeed not only at retaining existing customers, but also drawing in new players. To that end, it’s very important to me that CCP’s cash flow and balance sheet remain healthy and robust. More money for CCP means more development resources and money for salaries to draw the best and most innovative employees. All of that is a win for Eve players.

A lot of players are angry at CCP right now. And I think they have a right to be angry… but I don’t think viewing the company as a unified whole is fair. You’ve got two competing interests in CCP right now; one of them extremely positive, the other negative or – at best – incompetent.

The continued growth of Eve isn’t happening. CCP stopped revealing the growth in subscriptions, which – combined with the drop in logged-in users – suggests that subscriptions have been declining. I think it’s been about two years since we’ve seen anything about subscription numbers.

A lot of folks blame the death of ISBoxer and the reduction in opportunities for super pilots to participate for those drops, but I don’t think so. ISBoxer really only harmed those players who fly more than, say, 3 accounts at once (less than that can be effectively multiboxed manually), and I can’t believe those numbers were incredibly high. Plus, we’ve had more supercaps and titans die since FozzieSov than ever before, so I can’t really believe super pilots getting fed up is a legitimate source of any theoretical drops.

Not only the absence of that data, but the length concerns me; even if subscriptions dipped at some point, you’d guess CCP would come clean when numbers picked back up, with a “Well, subscriptions dipped during this period, but we attribute it to X/Y/Z, and now we’re seeing subscriptions rise again.” That’s an inevitable message, after all, unless CCP never again shares subscription data. That they haven’t come out with that story tells me the subscriptions have not picked back up.

Long story short (too late…), I get that CCP is looking to revamp the game to draw in those two core audiences. Until that happens, though, I see why they want to develop alternative revenue sources.

Let’s look at the changes CCP has made to the game itself – the development strategy and follow-through. In the past year, CCP is delivering on a lot of player requests over the years. They’ve revamped the sov system with FozzieSov and occupancy sovereignty. While players have some complaints about some of those changes, the simple fact is that they’ve accomplished great things with them. CCP devs have made it impossible for one group to completely dominate null-sec. They’ve reduced renter empires to a thing of the past. (You can argue the fiefdoms we’ve got now are the same, but it’s not. Owning protection racket money isn’t the same; you still have your name on the map, which is a big thing for making players feel vested in their space.) They’ve made it possible for smaller groups to take sov. They’ve enabled harassment operations against big players (as TISHU has been doing to SMA), and they’ve neutered the ability for “one fleet to crush them all” to effectively counter it.

All of those changes have been requested by the gameworld for a long time, and it’s causing a lot of fun for nearly everyone involved. Jump fatigue added to the benefits by preventing one group from effectively smothering all supercap usage across the whole gameworld. Sure, PL is still a powerhouse, but they aren’t able to kill every super in use anymore, and that’s opened up a lot of fun for a lot of other folks. Supers are dying at an incredible rate, making life fun and interesting for everyone.

And the combination of all of these has made coalitions much less viable, and neutered them as an offensive force. The CFC is the last one that exerted its power externally to exist (Provi and DRF are regional powers only), and they haven’t had any meaningful deployments or conquests in years. The reason? Why conquer when you can’t hold? And why contest their overpowering numbers when you can just deny them content until they get bored and leave, then conquer it all back later?

Now, CCP is changing capital usage to eliminate the unstoppable Archon blob, adding citadels to simultaneously deliver on the demands to revamp the POS code, providing wormholes a place to set up a market, and creating destructible stations for players to fight over – those conflict drivers. They’ve prevented T3Ds from entering small complexes. They’ve added the ship skins players have been asking for.

That’s an impressive list of accomplishments, and all of them in response to player requests and testimonials about their experiences. Sure, some players are upset, but they tend to be the minority compared to the hordes of players enjoying themselves. In fact, other than walking in stations, what HASN’T CCP dev rolled out recently that players have wanted?

That’s not to say everything’s gone smoothly, of course. Waving a magic sov wand isn’t as engaging as players hoped (though I’d argue the meta hasn’t rolled around to respond fully yet). But CCP dev is listening. FozzieSov is transitory until citadels come out, and will undergo some changes in the coming months/year.

And CCP’s reactions have been pretty reasonable as well. Players complained about their plan to create a new Force Auxiliary skill – requiring a whopping 210 days of training for players to get to 5 in all four races just so they could do what they can already do today – and raised good arguments, and CCP reversed that decision out. They’ve been responsive about the way they implement changes, while sticking to their guns on the need to make those changes.

You can disagree with their rationale, but the fact is CCP is listening to players in the way they develop the game. They have their vision for where they’re taking it, and it’s actually proving to be a fairly good one that we can work with. More than that, though, it’s their prerogative to make what changes they feel are necessary. Yet they aren’t declaring them by dictate; they’re involving players in focus groups, testing, and dev blogs months in advance (for the most part…) of the launch. They’re responding to player feedback.

Put simply, the development team is doing everything they can to do things right, are taking hard, necessary steps, and I genuinely believe they’re trying to put together an engaging system that creates positive customer engagement. They don’t always get it right, but their hearts are in the right place to leverage all of the assets available to them as effectively as possible.

That’s the development team. Then, there’s the customer relations side of the equation, headed by marketing. If the developers are an example of how you should change fundamental aspects of your 10+ year game, CCP marketing and customer interaction efforts have been a textbook example of how to ruin your company and brand equity.

Let’s hit the big one immediately: Marketing screwed up colossally on extractor aurum prices. On the one hand, the price of extractors is set to generate the cost of two subscriptions for every one month’s worth of training – one month to actually train it initially and a second month’s work in aurum to extract it. That takes the “micro” out of micro-transactions.

They demonstrated a tremendous amount of greed by exploiting those players who unsubscribed years ago. PLEX records were broken the first couple days after the patch because players wanted to strip their old characters; that meant CCP earning money for players to reactivate lapsed accounts to reactivate accounts, revenue for aurum, and revenue for buying extractors directly. Skill extractors cost more than every single estimate pre-launch.

But more than that, they waited until the last possible moment – around 5-6 pm Iceland time on the Friday before the patch – to announce the high pricing of extractors. They knew players would be outraged, and they waited as long as possible to drop that bomb. The timing suggests they didn’t want to deal with the immediate feedback, and so snuck it in at the end of a work week. That’s cowardly, exploitative, and – not responding to anything until Monday – poor customer relations.

The pricing of an extractor was more than the lowest tier of aurum purchase, and was structured in such a way that players would end up with a bunch of “wasted” aurum, and their solution was a short-term sale that served as a bandage on a bullet wound in customer relations. There was no acknowledgement of their attempt to screw us, no apology for the blatant money-grab and insulting pricing. They threw us a bone as if we should be happy to have anything from the table.

Add to that the CSM, whose members have been loudly and universally complaining about their poor relations with CCP. In a well-working system, the CSM should be nothing more than a permanent focus group. The perception of it now is that it’s a player board of directors with some sort of real power. In either interpretation, responsibility for such a group would fall within a marketing, customer relations, or public relations function at a company.

And look what they’ve done with it! If they intended it to be a focus group, they’ve allowed the sense propagate that it’s more than that. They’ve allowed it to become a celebrity-making tool and a group that believes – and which the gameworld believes – should have a platform of objectives to accomplish, should be accountable to the player base in some way, and should be listened to in any real way. If it isn’t just a focus group, they’ve treated it horribly and performed end-arounds that betray its vestment and overall trust in CCP. A focus group doesn’t need to be consulted on all things; a player advisory council should be.

Regardless, CCP isn’t clearly identifying what it is, what it should do, and what expectations it and players should have of it. What they do say is contrary to the reality of the experience. All around, it represents a failure of marketing and client relations strategy.

All of this followed the hiring of a former EA “pay2win” head of marketing. To quote a reddit thread, it’s not that CCP doesn’t know what it’s doing; it knows exactly what it’s doing. It’s trying to squeeze the existing player base for what money it can. It’s identical to what it did with the price of skins. And that suggests a lack of faith in the future of the game; “get dank coin while the getting’s good!”

I’m not saying CCP should charge nothing for skill extractors, skins, or avatar clothing. I’m just saying their policies are directly crowding out people who would otherwise participate by being so damned expensive and being deployed in such an insulting way that belies such bald-faced greed. I know I was directly crowded out of the skill extractor experience, and I’ve been crowded out of the skin experience as well.

It’s also directly a slap in the face of the developers who are trying very hard to make the game engaging and well-balanced. Was all of the goodwill the devs had gained by trying to improve the problems with the game undermined by Marketing’s aurum/extractor pricing profit-grab? It certainly made their jobs harder.

This isn’t an isolated incident, but a trend. Developers respond to client feedback and refine that feedback with significant overhauls to core gameplay systems, and Marketing/client relations piss it all away with greedy, short-sighted decisions.

I’d be very frustrated if I was on the CCP development team right now, particularly if I was the public face of that team.

And I’d be very nervous if I was the CCP VP of Marketing. Good ones open up new revenue streams and cultivate a desire to participate in them. Bad ones anger the customer base with exploitative and insulting offerings that squeeze as much out of players as they can.

[ed. note: CCP Fozzie corrected me to clarify that he made no public comments about likely skill extractor pricing, so I've removed that quote. Many apologies, Fozzie.]