The Day That EVE Online Died

Massively’s Brendan Drain has typed an editorial about what he considers “an unmitigated disaster for CCP Games”, a series of fiascoes which occurred these last two weeks, such as high-priced microtransactions and severe technical issues with the captain’s quarters asynchronous loadings. Here’s a sampling:

One of the main worries with the captain’s quarters was that they may take longer to load than the current ship hangar. These fears were initially dismissed with a promise that it would be just as fast to do anything after the patch as it would be after. While the Incarna environment loads asynchronously in the background and the full UI and neocom are available immediately, the loader does cause computers to stutter, slow, and stall momentarily. Some players have reported lower frame rates in captain’s quarters than they get in Crysis II on full graphics, and the forums are filled with reports of overheating GPUs and system shutdowns.

I personally found the captain’s quarters to be extremely cool and newbie-friendly for the two minutes mine worked before switching off my graphics card and causing a bluescreen. Anticipating these issues, CCP temporarily added the option to disable the captain’s quarters. Management had to be convinced to let this option exist even on a temporary basis, and CCP has stated several times that it has no intention of letting players opt out of Incarna forever. CCP intends Incarna to be as integral a part of EVE as mission-running or fleet warfare and perhaps worries that if players aren’t forced to use it, they’ll opt out of the new paradigm.

This attitude mirrors that seen during the launch of EVE Gate, the web-based social networking platform for EVE. When EVE Gate launched, all player information and profiles were made public by default. CCP worried that if the system didn’t opt players in by default, nobody would use it and it wouldn’t be useful as a social networking tool. When the service went live, a surprising number of players logged in just to turn it off and make their details private. We’ve seen the same thing with the captain’s quarters, with a huge section of the forum community opting to make use of the temporary off switch.