Quote of the Day – Satan Speaks on Lockboxes

So, gaming industry, if your aim is to bring down the jackboot of government regulation on loot mechanics and destroy what was once a source of joy to millions of gamers, you’re doing a bangup job.

Satan, “guest” post at The Psychology of Video Games

The quote just sums up how lockboxes feel to me, but the real meat is in the five tricks video games can… and have… borrowed from casinos in order to hook people into spending on what is merely a hair’s breadth away from gambling before the law.

Exploiting the holidays isn’t even on the list, thank Overwatch!

Anyway, the linked article is worth a short time it takes to read.  I am sure you will recognize some, if not all, of the practices listed.

Quote of the Day – Sisyphean Task

Devs promise to change Battlefront II until players are happy

-Ars Technica article title

It is the rare headline that gets me to laugh out loud, but this one managed it.

EA’s Star Wars: Battlefront II woes around lockboxes and pay to win and the game in general continue unabated.  I’m not keen on EA when they’re having a good day… since a “good day” at EA usually means buying a studio they’ll close down sooner or later or screwing up a long treasured franchise… so this has been amusing to watch from the sidelines.

Fun created here… on an Orca graveyard!

Starting with what seemed to be like a “land war in Asia” grade mistake where players could unlock things either by playing or paying using the same currency, allowing players to immediately calculate an hours/money comparison, made more grievous by having it in a PvP shooter.  So the rage online was epic and the EA response on Reddit became the most down-voted item ever.  Call Guinness, we have another video game record for the books!

EA stuck to their guns… for a bit, then suddenly dropped the price of unlocks by a whopping 75% while trying to put all of this in back in the bottle by promising… well… you can see the quote above.  My immediate reaction on Twitter was:

Headline: "Devs promise to change Battlefront II until players are happy"

Me: Say "Hi" to Sisyphus for me when you see him in Hell!

— Wilhelm Arcturus (@wilhelm2451) November 16, 2017

I guess the devs ought to be familiar with Hell already, working for EA as they do.

At this point EA can only hope to fix enough so that the review scores from the big sites… which are all on hold right now, so the current Meta Critic score of 79 is based on four sites, three of which I would call “minor” and a fourth I haven’t heard of… won’t tank.  But good luck making any of the vocal members of their audience happy at this point.  On that front the pooch has already been well and truly screwed.  Anything short of removing lockboxes completely… and EA won’t ever do that… will fail to meet their stated goal.

Anyway, we shall see if anything is learned here.

Quote of the Day – The Optimism of Software Developers

Software developers at all levels tend to be optimistic – you have to be to build big things

Chris Roberts, EuroGamer interview

In my experience, developer optimism is the true state of affairs on every software project, big or small, and I can think of a few on which I have worked that wouldn’t have been started had we known up front how long they would take.

One of the tricks in managing software projects is understanding that the estimates that software developers give often need to be decoded to understand what the real number is likely to be.

There is an old saw about software project estimates that says you should take the time a developer says a task will take, double it, then go up a unit of measure.  So if your dev says it should take a day, you should assume it will be delivered in two weeks.

Of course you can’t develop a project plan that way.  If all your developer time estimates add up to a month and you say the project will take two years, you’re going to get fired.  And, in any case, with any software project you’ve probably been given the feature list and the deadline in advance, so you really have to start stack ranking features by importance to know where to focus.  Of course, marketing will rank every feature as a “1” so good luck there.

Still, if you know your team you’ll know how to interpret estimates.  You’ll know who chronically underestimates and who has other tasks that might interfere with the project.  I used to work with one dev who was always spot-on with his estimates of how long it would take him to finish any task.  The problem was that he was the key database guy on a product that was completely database driven, so spent more than half his time debugging field issues and helping out with new installations, tasks always deemed more critical than project work.  So his estimate of a day of effort for a task would be correct, you just wouldn’t know when he would have a day to focus on it.

And don’t even get me started on having a dependence on third party libraries and such.

Anyway, this is why most companies keep their projects vague and under wraps until they get close to launch.  Maybe a company will put out a road map with some general milestones, but even those tend to fall over beyond a six month window and get swept under the rug to be forgotten.

So running a project where you’re trying to do everything out in the open in front of customers… that way lies madness.  It would be nothing but outsiders kibitzing, asking for updates, and holding you to account for everything you’ve ever said would be a feature.

I am not sure why anybody would subject themselves to that.

Quote of the Day – Cat Ears in Space

My ideal patch would be one where they fix vuln timers on citadels, heavily nerf or remove void bombs on citadels, make sov nodes a damage capped structure not entosis based, make refineries mirror 90% of PoS mechanics, and add cat ears and an option to replace my engine trails with a stream of hundred dollar bills.

CSM 12 member Jin’taan,  Reddit Post

In one blow Jin’taan has hit on quite a few issues I fully support.

The CXM 12 Member from Provi Bloc

And not all of them are strictly null sec focused.  In fact, only ditching entosis is applicable directly to null sec.  The rest are pretty universal.  And cat ears… that could be the back door to getting hats to be a thing in New Eden.  I am glad he was on our ballot.

 

Quote of the Day – Playing the Meta Game

The MER [Monthly Economic Report] is the best recruiting in the history of EVE

-Aryth, Talking in Stations May 13, 2016

Catching up on some podcasts over the weekend, one of which was Talking in Stations episode where host Matterall spoke to CCP Larrikin and GSF Director and CSM 11 & 12 member Aryth.

Aryth has the up front part of the show where he talks about an Imperium attempt to play the meta to their advantage.

You may recall some months back Aryth and Innominate, the Imperium CSM members, asked that CCP not display, or obfuscate, or delay the section of CCP Quant’s monthly economic report that shows the amount of mining done in each region.  I am pretty sure I even mentioned this in passing at the time, though I cannot find the post at the moment.  Either way, this was mentioned in the March 2017 Monthly Economic Report and the chart did not appear that month.

However, in the long term chart was not changed and resumed its position in the Monthly Economic Report lineup for April.

April 2017 – Mining value by region

There it highlight once again that in Delve we were ratting and mining like crazy.

On the show Aryth revealed/claimed that the request to suppress the information was done in order to bring attention to the report… after all, if Goons want to hide it, it must contain something good… to spread the word that if you want to mine (or rat) in null sec, then the Imperium is a destination you should consider.

Whether or not you believe this is really a “now it can be told” example of Goons playing the meta game, membership has been up.

Of course, we will see how well mining survives the next round of null sec directed nerfs.

If you are interested in hearing Aryth opine on the meta or CCP Larrikin talk about the Blood Raiders Shipyard before the event wentlive, you can find Talking in Stations linked above or over on SoundCloud.

Quote of the Day – The PCU Will Crater

As you can see, going free-to-play and increased botting activity could only stabilize them for one year, the concurrent logins are exactly where they were a year ago and the summer dip is just coming. Unless they have one more “free to play” level stunt in their sleeves, a year from now they’ll be under 20K concurrent players.

Gevlon, Seems I was right about New Jita

More proof that EVE Online is a special game, Gevlon cannot stop writing about it.  And not just derisive comments in the flow of a narrative about another game, as he does with World of Warcraft, but full on posts about New Eden.

Anyway, he is on the “EVE is dying” path, ever popular with those who dislike the game, with what can be construed as a very specific claim.  He is saying that the average concurrent player logins will be 20k in a year.  (Data source: EVE Offline)

PCU for the last 12 months with avg at 35K

In a post rife with abductive reasoning, unsupported declarations about RMT and botting, and an ongoing tendency to strip facts of their context in order to give them new meaning, he has foreseen the death of EVE Online.  Or, if not death, then a state of decline well beyond anything witnessed previously.

But you cannot argue with him, because he won’t admit any possibility beyond his own conclusions.  His world view is set in stone.  So I’ll just put this post up and we’ll come back to it in a year and see how things have played out.  It is very easy to apply your own narrative to things that have already happened, to claim that CCP “knew” things.  It is altogether a different beast to be able to predict the future.

Finally, I borrowed the term “crater” in the title from Dinsdale.  He likes to say that the PCU has already cratered, while Gevlon is saying that is a coming event. It amuses me that two people who are so angry about the game differ on that front.

Quote of the Day – CCP Picks Winners

Goons were untouchable until they failed to deliver the $150K. Then they became outcasts overnight and the IWI RMT block became above the law – until they met with real life gambling law. Then IWI got banned overnight and the devs found their next “winner”: whoever controls the trillions-for-nothing Perimiter citadels.

Gevlon, You can’t compare reality with a dream

So there you have it, the Imperium lost the Casino War because it failed to raise a $150,000 payoff for CCP.

Signs of a vast Goon conspiracy

I love me a good conspiracy theory, and here is Gevlon continuing to justify his leaving EVE Online… so long after he left that you have to wonder who he is really addressing here… the goblin doth protest too much methinks… by claiming that CCP picks winners.  It also seems to invalidate his claim that he beat Goons by funding Mordus Angels.   If CCP picked the winner, then I guess he didn’t really enter into it.  After the failed Kickstarter, Goons were doomed already.

This is especially timely as the CSM 12 elections are going on right now and CCP is working to try and get the non-null sec part of the game to actually give a shit and vote.  CCP isn’t actively campaigning against null sec.  But getting out the vote clearly works against null sec sweeping the election yet again.  Is this how one picks winners? (Cue “CCP could be doing more!” comment)

I would actually like to put Gevlon’s conspiracy up against Dinsdale Pirannha’s, because the Din/Vin spin is that Goons run CCP and that every thing they do is strictly to benefit them.  In his world, Goons were slated to win the war (quote on record), banning IWI was just removing an RMT competitor, and Goons really own whatever citadel is making money one jump from Jita. (Also something about fellatio now and again because Din is so angry he has to personify the imagined collusion into a sexual relationship.)

My own observation of the current “winners,” which is anecdotal, but which has persisted over months, is that citadels one jump from Jita do not have all that much impact on the market.  I extract and sell a skill injector every week at the Caldari Navy Assembly Plant at Jita Planet IV moon 4, and the prices listed in Perimeter have no bearing on what I can get for the injector.   I look at the market, sort the prices low to high, scroll past all the low ball Perimeter listings to where the Jita price stands, list in that range, and the injector sells within hours despite being priced as much as 20% above the Perimeter citadel price.

I am sure some people buy in Perimeter.  I would if it were my ISK.  But clearly the habit and the implied safety of Jita 4-4 is strong enough to be worth a bonus.  Plus it is still the place to buy everything else.  Perimeter is really only trying to corner the PLEX and skill injector market.  Nobody is hauling all of their production to a third party citadel.

And those citadels are not even that safe.  A reader sent me a PLEX in game for answering some questions, contracted to me from a citadel in Perimeter. (Thank you, btw!)  Only when I went to collect it, I found it was in the safety tab of my assets window with a timer before it would appear in an NPC station.  The citadel it was in had been destroyed.  Oops.  Now I have to wait until I can buy it out of hock.

Anyway, this sounds like a classic choice of malice over ignorance.  Do you think CCP is picking winners?  Is CCP just bad at predicting consequences?  (Or believing when players point them out in advance?)  Or is this just along the lines of Malcanis’ law (another Gevlon favorite), where anything aimed at helping newer players ends up helping the entrenched older players even more so?

Looking forward to the inevitable Gevlon and Dinsdale comments on this.