
Thousands of EVE online players riot over microtransactions - utoku
http://mmodata.blogspot.com/2011/06/riots-in-eve-against-microtransactions.html
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wccrawford
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
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
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.

~~~
mattmanser
Yeah, but the impact of a RMT system on non-vanity items has the greatest
effect on the players who actually engage in pvp a lot, the null sec players.

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dekz
> 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...](http://www.ps3trophies.com/forums/pc/63552-eve-online-virtual-jita-
protest-over-ccps-microtransaction-system.html)

~~~
Periodic
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.

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andrewcooke
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
There are no prices without scarcity.

~~~
FiddlerClamp
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.

~~~
bastiat
There are NO prices without scarcity.

~~~
rcxdude
yes, and in this case it's an artificial scarcity. CCP controls access to the
items, and thus has complete control over their price and scarcity.

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JonnieCache
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
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.

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MaxGabriel
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
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](http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=932)

~~~
ajacksified
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...](http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/November_2010_Prioritization_Crowdsourcing_\(CSM\)))
and explaining their prioritization... but I think the riots have trouble
focusing on the real issue, which is simply communication.

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kylemaxwell
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-...](http://www.evenews24.com/2011/06/25/ccp-hilmar-global-email-shows-
the-reasoning-behind-ccp-zulu-devblog/)

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Apocryphon
Emergent gameplay!

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sp332
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
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.

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nocipher
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.

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antihero
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
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
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.)

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zemanel
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!!!

