When the server went up yesterday, players were met with many unexpected “surprises”.The Captain Quarters is, in this writer’s opinion, a good addition, but it’s so limited that it loses its novelty factor really quick.
Other players confronted the unpleasant reality of a forced trip to newegg.com for upgrades. The ones with a decent enough system to run the new graphics met the game’s new features and a clothing store that managed to rage players to levels even higher than their GPU temperature loads.
$60 Bucks or 1.4Bil isk for a god-damn monocle!?
Head over to the eve-o forums or other EVE related sites and it won’t take you long to figure out how much buzz has been made over the fact that a Monocle, or even a measley shirt, is worth more than a faction fitted battleship, a couple of PLEXes, or even more than the Retail Box version of the Eve Online game.
Enter the the not-so-Noble Exchange Shop, proof that once again CCP loses grasp of reality as is shown by prices on the new “vanity shop”. With products like a whooping $60 dollars / 3.5 PLEX / 1.4bil isk, for that now infamous monocle, the $22 dollar shirt or the “designer boots”. All of which might be a bit too much for many reasonable players.
Let’s check at the prices:
Exchange Rate: 3500 AUR = 1 PLEX = $17.50 = 400 mil isk at Jita (New Eden main trade hub).
- Looking Glass Ocular implant – 12k AUR -> 3.5 PLEX -> $61.25 ->1.4 Bil ISK
- Men’s ‘Sterling’ Dress Shirt – 3.6k AUR -> 0.97 PLEX -> $16.97 -> 388 Mil ISK
- Women’s ‘Sterling’ Dress Blouse – 3.2K AUR -> .91 PLEX -> $16.00 -> 364 Mil ISK
- Men’s ‘Comando’ Pants – 3k AUR -> .85 PLEX -> $15 -> 340 Mil ISK
- Women “Impress” Skirt – 3.6k AUR -> 0.97 PLEX -> $16.97 -> 388 Mil ISK
- Women’s ‘Sterling’ Dress Blouse P – 4.4k AUR -> 1.25 PLEX -> $22.00 -> 504 Mil ISK
- Men’s ‘Precision’ Boots – 1k AUR -> 0.28 PLEX -> $5.00 -> 112 Mil ISK
- Women’s ‘Greave’ Knee-Boots – 2.4K AUR -> 0.68 PLEX -> $12.00 -> 272 Mil ISK
How much for Caldari Captain Quarters?
These new prices don’t scale up well with the other features CCP had promised in repeatedly, neither will they hold up when larger and more interesting features might show up, namely the other faction Captain Quarters, the Station bars, or even the April’s fools scooters.
Some of our readers would be quick to point out “But guys, these are vanity items”, and while that’s true, the elevated prices are clear proof of how CCP is either ill advised by some marketing-wiz or simply disconnected with the current reality of most of their players. We would go so far as to assert that it’ll only be a matter of time before CCP moves into more aggressive ways to incentivize the Virtual Goods sales and it’s up to the player base (given that the CSM won’t make a difference) to be vigilant on this issue.
One other service we’re looking at is selling faction standings. We want to offer convenience for a price.
Greed is Good newsletter – Incarna
A month ago Eve News24 was sent an internal newsletter/bulletin via email from a throw-away account, we tried to contact back the sender to no avail, we even thought it could be a publicity stunt from CCP, the bulletin was claimed to be crafted by CCP employees for CCP employees, after reading the letter and hustle the urge to publish it, we decided to wait for CCP to release their Incarna patch and see how much of this translated to actual “game-content”.
The bulletin contained an amount of corporate and personal information which we have decided to suppress, yet we will feature four (4) interesting points of the piece:
Pros and Cons of Virtual Goods Sale
Here to CCP employees discuss the pros and cons of Virtual Sale of Goods within Eve Online.
Friends with Benefits: Implementing Virtual Sales in Incarna
This is the part that most players would be interested about, am just going to mentioned that this goes far beyond just be a ” good read”.
Dust 514: Window Shopping in the O.K. corral
The Dusk 90210 section of the newsletter proposes the fact that while there is just a one time retail fee, virtual goods will make Dusk 90210 worth “iterating”.
World of DarkNess
CCP Stephenie Meyer takes over the helm and expand a bit on the micro-transaction MMO we all helped develop.
It’s ok, calm down, CCP has that economy professor on payroll.
From the approximately USD $4.5 million dollars per month and about $54 million per year that CCP boast to cash on “active subscriptions”, I find really hard to see how CCP didn’t just chose to increase the base subscription by a couple dollars and offer a premium subscription to those who choose to Walk in Stations on top of it.
Want to create the ISK sinks? Give us the promised T3 battleships, frigates, combat, rebalance production, and stop the rampant botting that’s plaguing both highsec and nullsec.
a Massively.com commenter throws some “hope” in the table.
What about the rest of the bulletin?
I shared this piece to one of my advisors who gave me a very different perspective after reading the whole unedited release.
Well, unfortunately for you, this is not anything different than now, However a few zingers in this, Aside from the whole “CCP is really into Money Trading [MT]” thing the whole piece shows off, the big eye raisers to me are the focus on MT instead of balance when looking at how combat-changing virtual goods can be sold in DUST/WoD, the idea of buying EVE faction standing with MT, the super low employee salary satisfaction (financial trouble?), and that IA is part of the stats team. I mean seriously, IA is there for a reference book and stats? Pretty sure that was sold to be much more serious. Also it’s lovely how the pro-MT guy is one of the designers.
CCC – EN24 Advisor
Dude you are so banned.
That’s up to CCP actually, but it’s a good thing I’m not bound by a pesky free-license, right?
You can read the whole leak:
Click to Download from eve-files
the password for the pdf is ‘dominixevenews24′.
Note for mac users: the PDF won’t work for the Preview app, if you don’t want to install Acrobat reader, just drop it on top of a Google Chrome window and enter the password when prompted.
R
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