There Ain't No Drama Like Spaceship Drama Cause Spaceship Drama Don't Stop (Now With 200% More Cats)
This week in Eve:
Incarna shipped! You can now walk in your spaceship. No one else can see you walk in your spaceship but yep you're walking. So there you go.
The in-game clothing store also shipped. You can now spend $60 on a monocle. To be fair, it's a really nice monocle and I think monocles cost about $60 in real life. Oh wait, sorry, I meant $6. So there you go.
Most players responded with "What was CCP thinking?" This being Eve, someone promptly leaked exactly what CCP was thinking. (hint: pretty much exactly what you think they were thinking)
The Eve player base responded with the calm demeanor you'd expect by, um, literally rioting. The devs responded with, uh, yeah.
People have been shocked by the price range in the NeX store, but you should remember that we are talking about clothes. Look at the clothes you are currently wearing in real life. Do you have any specific brands? Did you choose it because it was better quality than a no-name brand? Assume for a short while that you are wearing a pair of $1,000 jeans from some exclusive Japanese boutique shop. Why would you want to wear a pair of $1,000 jeans when you can get perfectly similar jeans for under $50? What do other people think about you when they see you wearing them? For some you will look like the sad culmination of vainness while others will admire you and think you are the coolest thing since sliced bread. Whichever it is, it is clear that by wearing clothes you are expressing yourself and that the price is one of the many dimensions that clothes possess to do that in addition to style and fit. You don't need to buy expensive clothes. In fact you don't need to buy any clothes. Whatever you choose to do reflects what you are and what you want others to think you are.
If you do not buy a $60 monocle A LOSER IS YOU. So there you go.
BREAKING BAD CEO EDIT: Apparently EveNews got their hands on an internal email sent out by CEO Hilmar Petturson to CCP employees regarding the rioting in the streets, er, spaceways? about Eve's newfound love for macrotransactions (when microtransactions just aren't big enough!). It's important to note that there's no confirmation Petturson actually wrote this. Because...
Naturally, we have caught the attention of the world. Only a few weeks ago we revealed more information about DUST 514 and now we have done it again by committing to our core purpose as a company by redefining assumptions. After 40 hours we have already sold 52 monocles, generating more revenue than any of the other items in the store.
That's right, biyotches, CCP made THREE. THOUSAND. DOLLARS. Truly, this amount of money from vanity store items is unprecedented in the MMO industry.
Currently we are seeing _very predictable feedback_ on what we are doing. Having the perspective of having done this for a decade, I can tell you that this is one of the moments where we look at what our players do and less of what they say.
Or, as Hilmar The Very Savvy Business Cat says...
But the best/worst part, that makes me really hope for Petturson's sake that this is some clever troll of a forgery or possibly the work of a very drunk Icelandic summer pub crawl, is this line:
But we have done more, not only have we redefined the production quality one can apply to virtual worlds with the beautiful Incarna but we have also defined what it really means to make virtual reality more meaningful than real life when it comes to launching our new virtual goods currency, Aurum.
I.... what was that, Hilmar The Cat That Leverages Synergy?
So there you go. You go.