Von Neely
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I played EvE for several years as well. Your monologue about Goon strategy is valid, and I don’t see it contradicting anything that I said earlier: Their primary weapon is vast numbers and the organization that allows for actual teamwork even with such vast numbers in play. I am not contesting this – I said the same thing myself, so I’m unsure what you meant to prove by repeating it more verbosely.
Here is the only question/argument I could find in your reply: “That’s what a dedicated playerbase gets you, how can you see the future and know for a fact CIG money men can’t copy some parts of this for future funding?”
That is a good question. If CIG was smart they would certainly rip-off a lot of EvE’s ideas (no shame in that, it’s how the Roman Empire got built, after all). Yet I don’t see them doing that because CR’s ego/”grand vision” won’t allow for external influences. The classic “it’s not a good idea unless I came up with it” fallacy.
Furthermore, at this point it would not matter if they did start stealing ideas from EvE because, as I stated before, they’ve already crossed the point of no return. The “lifetime ship insurance” automatically creates a infinite power gap between those whom have it and those who do not. To use a metaphor, imagine a single hornet. Now imagine that this hornet is immortal – if struck down, it will rise again like “Wolverine” from the “X-Men.” That hornet decides to attack, let’s say, a gorilla. It stings the gorilla. The gorilla squashes it. Hornet comes back, stings the gorilla again. Gorilla squashes the hornet again. Hornet comes back, stings the gorilla again. Repeat this as many times as needed until the gorilla is dead. The hornet then flies away triumphant.
“Lifetime ship insurance” is a game breaker and it’s already in the game. What’s worse is that it’s something that is bought with real money. This is not only bad because it’s obvious pay-to-win, it’s horrifyingly bad because they can’t ever take it back. If they ever realized/accepted that this was a bad idea & tried to cancel it, what would happen? At the very least they’d have to refund all the money that they made from selling that particular item (see the entire rest of this blog for why that won’t happen). At the worst they’d have to refund the money and vex those same backers enough that they backed out completely – which would lead to more refund requests and more bad publicity from the burned whales.
CIG has trapped themselves pretty bad with that. Yes, they might be able to survive pay-to-win ships if they adopted EvE’s “no refunds upon death” policy, but then whales would stop buying them. Yes, there are lunatics in EvE who will pay $1000+ of real cash to get into a Titan. They have whales of their own, but they’re not entirely funded by whales. Meaning if all the people who sell PLEX for shiny new ships were to suddenly quit the game itself would survive. CCP are not dependent on PLEX/whales/legitimized RMT. CIG, on the other hand, are entirely dependent on the sale of spaceship pictures. To risk losing sales for any reason – even good, logical reasons like “not breaking the entire game” – isn’t an option for CIG even if they wanted to.
And they don’t want to.
So something occurred to me a while ago. At this point, they’ve sold so many uberships to whales that even if, by some miracle, they managed to deliver the entire 2.0 multiplayer game universe that they promised the entire game will still die horribly. Not right away, mind you – it would take a year or so – but in the end, it would die. Why? For that, we need to look at a different game, one done right, that being EvE Online.
In EvE Online you can, as with dang near any MMO, spend real money for game money. However, their developers (CCP Games) made a clever move a few years ago and moved RMT into their own offices, legitimized it, and started pocketing the money themselves (they call this “PLEX” – look it up if you’re interested). You can then take that game currency, go out and buy yourself the biggest, baddest, most unstoppable Titan class doomships in the game. You can kit it out, go on a rampage, and laugh manically from your newly purchased throne… for about five minutes, at which point Goonswarm will hot-drop in “numbers do not go that high” amount of ships right on top of you and nuke your precious doomship into flaming pixels in about thirty seconds flat. Your pilot will respawn. Your ship won’t.
That’s the important thing in EvE. No matter how much of a badass you are, no matter how big & fancy the ship your flying, you can still be taken down. And when that ship goes down it stays down. So yes, you can pull out your credit card and buy your way into the big shiny, but how long you last there is another story entirely. You can always slip, fall, and end up slogging next to the rest of the proles in a single day. Nothing last forever in EvE, unless you never leave your hanger.
So now you’ve got SC and the whales, gobbling up uberships as fast as CIG can dream them up. Naturally, in the age old appeal to blatant power-gaming & ego stroking, every one of these new ships that comes out is designed to kill every previous ship that came before it. It’s an absurd level of blatant power creep, and in a game that hasn’t even come out yet. But wait, it gets better, because CIG has also been offering new whale packages that take this from the tolerable EvE level of slight annoyance at wallet-warriors to outright anger: They’re offering lifetime insurance.
And in that one swoop they’ve broken the game irrevocably. Why? Because now when that whale buys spends ten grand on a unstoppable ubership, it’s forever. When Goonswarm shows up and blows them into flaming pixels it’s not just the pilot who’s going to respawn as if nothing ever happened. He’s going to get his ship back, too. How many times? All the times. Over & over unto infinity. It doesn’t matter if you park five hundred gankers outside their station running combat bot macros 24/7 and blow him up sixty four times a day. He will just keep coming back. That whale has just won Star Citizen… and has done so using nothing more than his wallet. You can’t beat him. No matter how good you are, no matter how many friends you bring, no matter how hard you try or persistent your personal jihad, you will lose simply because he will outlast you in his immortal ship that, by the way, you will never fly because you’re not made of money.
There is a saying: “Goons ruin everything.” I’m not a Goon, but I’ve encountered them. I don’t like them, but I respect them, because I know what they’re really doing. Goons don’t actually break games. Rather, the go into a game and find all of the game’s flaws, weaknesses, crap rules & poor design choices. Then they exploit the crap out of them. Why? To be jerks? Partly, but also to expose these problems. When one guy exploits something the devs can ignore it. When a thousand people exploit something together, as a team, record it to video and post it on YouTube… now it’s something the devs can’t ignore. Now they have to fix the problem. Goon logic is like this: Annoying pothole on your street? Fill it with garbage, rebar, broken glass & old tires, and then set it on fire. Crude? Rude? Disgusting? Sure. But see if the city doesn’t come out and fix that hole within one day. Just watch.
But immortal uberships? Not even Goons can fix/break that problem. So here is what you’re going to end up, even if the game is finished:
First month = Hundreds of thousands of people swarming to the game, so many that a few whales in uberships are hardly noticed… except for the endless “duel me noob” that is spammed into every chat channel approximately ever two seconds. Some of them form guilds/clans/companies and set out to the frontier to build up their thing.
Second month = Players begin to notice that there are a few groups that seem to be shooting to the top of the food chain rather quickly. Upon investigation, it is obvious that the whale are exploiting their immortal uberships to bolster their team’s assets while crushing opposition via however many suicide attacks as it takes, because why not? Resentment begins.
Sixth month = The only viable, competitive group entities left are those run by whales. Likewise, the power of those groups can be directly measured in how many immortal, whale uberships they can bring to bear. The more the better. “Not millionaires need not apply” becomes the new running joke in SC.
One year = Now that word has gotten around that the whales are gods of the game, immortal, unstoppable Highlanders, everyone who can’t (or won’t) throw in new car money into the game has given up and gone home.
Past one year = The empty chasm of space is occasionally still visited by the occasional new player, lured in by ease of the games new “FTP” offer on Steam. They normally last about two minutes into the game until they’re discovered, hunted down and exterminated by level five billion pilots flying diamond encrusted battleships made out of gold that go from zero to sixty in a proton fart, can out-maneuver a hummingbird on meth and are covered in 16′ gatling cannons, then called “noobs” over chat right before they log out, uninstall and never look back. Silently, the lonely whale drifts among the nebula, wondering why he has no friends… as he reads today’s desperate plea from CR to raise the $2.5 million it will apparently take to keep the server running for another month.
Sad and bored, the whale reaches for his wallet once again…
