My story of EVE Online
Sony Online Entertainment (S.O.E.) is the current creator and publisher of Star Wars Galaxies, as I'm sure many know.
I've given my experiences with S.O.E. /SWG in the past, though not an especially resent account.
In a nutshell, S.O.E. has once again changed the core of the game and attempted to create a psuedo- first person shooter (FPS) game, removing the previous system (CU) which was very similar to the original system.
These "New Game Enhancements" (NGE) have alienated even more players than the CU did, which is pretty amazing considering how many people left after the CU.
They announced these sweeping changes ONE DAY after the launch of their highly hyped expansion 'Trials of Obi-Wan'.
The outrage was tremendous.
It only took a few days for S.O.E. to begin issuing refunds to players who had pre-ordered, if they wanted them.
Though never once admitting how underhanded this 'marketing tactic' was.
Regardless, this is not really about S.O.E., and you can find plenty of tales about S.O.E. and the NGE all over the web.
While watching my friends leave, yet again, from SWG, I wanted to find a new place to spend my virtual life.
I had heard a number of things about EVE Online, the complexity, the depth, the vastness of space, and, they had a 14 day free trial period.
EVE Online does live up to its description, at least as far as I have seen.
There are many skills to learn, which allow use of more, and more advanced, items and ships.
Skills are even learned while off-line, so there is no real 'grind' to advance as in every other game I've seen.
Space is immense with over 5000 separate star systems to visit.
Some safe, others not so.
There is no set path for a player to take, you can become whatever you wish.
Miner, manufacturer, pirate, leader of others, trader, smuggler, spy, or a number of other things.
Overall, the game isn't really as complex at it first appears.
There is a lot to learn, and the tutorial is very detailed and informative.
If you ever decide to play EVE, do not skip the tutorial, you will not understand how some of the important systems work.
There is complexity, but a lot of it is easily understood.
The advanced skills require lower class skills.
Advanced equipment requires advanced skills.
Not terribly difficult to understand.
There is just a lot to learn in the various 'professions' that exist within EVE.
When I started my trial was just before Christmas (2005).
Shortly after I started, all players were given a holiday gift of a 'snowball launcher and snowballs'.
Meant to be a fun thing for everyone to use.
They did no damage to anyone, just for fun.
As a new player, I was a bit short on the currency of the game (Isk [which is also the abbreviation for the Icelandic Kronur, which is where Crowd Control Productions, the games producer, is based]).
All new players are short on a game's currency, that's just the nature of being a newbie.
I did play with the gift for a short time, but found I would be better served by selling it in the game's market.
I listed the snowballs, and they promptly sold.
When I attempted to list the launcher, there was a problem.
I attempted to list the item for 50,000 isk, but by some quirk, it was listed for 50,000,000 isk.
Quite the difference.
There is a broker fee charged for each transaction on the market, intially 1% but is lowered based on your standings with the station you are selling in.
In my case, the fee for listing an item at 50 milllion isk amounted to 441,540 isk, when it should have been 441.54 isk for the intended 50,000 isk listing.
I'm positive that I entered 50,000 as the sale price, and immediatly noticed the hit to my bank account.
I attempted to file a support ticket immediately to get this in the queue as quickly as possible.
I went through the steps for filing a support ticket, but for some reason, it was not accepted and C.C.P. did not receive my ticket.
I didn't notice this right away, of course, as I waited several days for any kind of a response and received none.
I went to the EVE site and noticed a link to 'my' support page, but there was no ticket listed.
I use Mozilla to browse, and so I guessed that perhaps this was causing the error, as some sites do not play nicely with Mozilla.
So, I went into the game and used the in-game browser, assuming that it would work correctly.
As I attempted to submit a ticket with the in-game browser, I received a 'fatal error' and my ticket was, yet again, not submitted.
At least I had immediate feedback that my submission had failed.
I once again fired up Mozilla and submitted my ticket again, this time with success.
I realized that I was submitting a ticket during a busy time.
With many people off from school or work for the holidays, I did not expect immediate resolution to my issue, and was quite content to be patient and wait my turn.
What follows is the exchanges between Support and myself.
Customer (xxx xxx) 12/31/2005 11:24 PM
Autoresponse 12/31/2005 11:24 PM
Customer (xxx xxx) 01/01/2006 12:52 AM
Auto-response 01/01/2006 11:25 PM
Response ([GM]Wyrm) 01/02/2006 04:24 PM
Customer (xxx xxx) 01/02/2006 05:35 PM
Customer (xxx xxx) 01/03/2006 03:08 PM
Response ([GM]Guard) 01/11/2006 01:15 PM
Customer (xxx xxx) 01/11/2006 05:07 PM
Response ([GM]Guard) 01/12/2006 08:32 AM
Customer (xxx xxx) 01/12/2006 04:28 PM
Response ([GM]Guard) 01/12/2006 04:45 PM
Let me clarify straight away that I did not intend to imply that C.C.P was taking a tyranical attitude.
A better wording would have been 'I left Star Wars Galaxies hoping to find a new home, a refuge from the tyranny of S.O.E., but apparently that new home is not with C.C.P.'.
Maybe not considered a huge difference to some, but to me it is.
I noticed when listing other items for sale, that the text box for price was a bit, odd, I would say.
It automatically entered an average price for whatever item you were selling, and if you clicked the box to enter your own price, it would sometimes remove the last digit, as in 5,342.13 would become 5342.1, and sometimes it would remove everything right side of the decimal.
Therefor, I was careful about listing items for the correct price.
Perhaps some will just write this off as 'some noob whining about 400k, which can easily be made back with a short time of gameplay'.
And you are welcome to do so.
That is true, I could make up that 400k in a few hours of gameplay time, but what are you going to do when support won't help you?
I had a legitimate issue and support was unwilling to help me with it.
Once again, the few cheaters have ruined the system for the honest majority.
Though I do have to give them credit, as S.O.E. typically does not reply with more than a generic cut-and-paste answer (and it's the luck of the draw if that answer even applies to your question), and I received a real response from a real person.
The only way to truly make your voice heard is with your wallet.
I found EVE an interesting game, and vision, with it's single server for all subscribers (which no other game has done [excepting old MUD's and the like]).
EVE has been in live for about 2 years, and so I guess they are doing ok, even though they don't have the huge subscriber base like some other games.
I can understand the reasoning of their policy of no refunds, yet at the same time, they are losing a subscriber for 400,000 units of game currency.
A bit of a double standard on my part perhaps.
Kinda sounds like I'm just a big whiny crybaby.
And maybe that really is the case, though I've never felt the need to express it publically before now.
Even when S.O.E. (now twice) revamped their combat systems and made almost all existing gear useless (flat removed some items from the game, with no form of compensation, costing players hundreds of millions worth of credits) for the player that owned it, I only briefly mentioned it to a few in-game friends, who coincedently, agreed.
Along with a host of others on the SWG forums.
But this was not the only reason I chose to not renew my subscription to EVE.
The first few days that I played, it was enjoyable.
After about one week, the lag made the game an impossibility to enjoy.
Lag is a killer in any online game, and when that lag affects combat, it makes a game unplayable.
Taking 45-60 seconds for a command to be completed when it takes 2-3 commands to react to an attack, and the total of the combat would take no more than 2 minutes normally, means the player loses.
Changing states from docked in a station to launched in space, or jumping from one system to another can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 5 minutes.
Since the game is based in Iceland, and they are 6 hours ahead of my time, that means that my prime playtime coincides with their peak usage time as well, and the server has hit several peak online user numbers recently of approximately 20,000 players online at once.
Maybe I'm now just getting a taste of what is typical for a European player of American online games.
I also understand that they are working to upgrade the server cluster to new AMD 64 IBM Blade servers.
Unfortunately, this won't be complete until sometime in February, approximately 3-4 weeks from now.
A big reason that I left SWG is that I will not pay a company to be a beta tester of it's product.
SWG has so many bugs that have been around for a long time.
EVE does not quite fit this category, but it is close, as the service I'm paying for is completely unacceptable.
I want to play when I'm able to, not be stuck with only playing from 10pm to 1am because that's when the server population goes down enough to decrease the lag to an acceptable level.
If it had been just one or the other, I probably would have stuck with EVE.
-------------
I did end up resubbing to EVE after about a month off.
I enjoyed the game play and the depth available, which most every other game lacks.
I like to think when I play games, and that's why I like things like the Myst series.
I've given my experiences with S.O.E. /SWG in the past, though not an especially resent account.
In a nutshell, S.O.E. has once again changed the core of the game and attempted to create a psuedo- first person shooter (FPS) game, removing the previous system (CU) which was very similar to the original system.
These "New Game Enhancements" (NGE) have alienated even more players than the CU did, which is pretty amazing considering how many people left after the CU.
They announced these sweeping changes ONE DAY after the launch of their highly hyped expansion 'Trials of Obi-Wan'.
The outrage was tremendous.
It only took a few days for S.O.E. to begin issuing refunds to players who had pre-ordered, if they wanted them.
Though never once admitting how underhanded this 'marketing tactic' was.
Regardless, this is not really about S.O.E., and you can find plenty of tales about S.O.E. and the NGE all over the web.
While watching my friends leave, yet again, from SWG, I wanted to find a new place to spend my virtual life.
I had heard a number of things about EVE Online, the complexity, the depth, the vastness of space, and, they had a 14 day free trial period.
EVE Online does live up to its description, at least as far as I have seen.
There are many skills to learn, which allow use of more, and more advanced, items and ships.
Skills are even learned while off-line, so there is no real 'grind' to advance as in every other game I've seen.
Space is immense with over 5000 separate star systems to visit.
Some safe, others not so.
There is no set path for a player to take, you can become whatever you wish.
Miner, manufacturer, pirate, leader of others, trader, smuggler, spy, or a number of other things.
Overall, the game isn't really as complex at it first appears.
There is a lot to learn, and the tutorial is very detailed and informative.
If you ever decide to play EVE, do not skip the tutorial, you will not understand how some of the important systems work.
There is complexity, but a lot of it is easily understood.
The advanced skills require lower class skills.
Advanced equipment requires advanced skills.
Not terribly difficult to understand.
There is just a lot to learn in the various 'professions' that exist within EVE.
When I started my trial was just before Christmas (2005).
Shortly after I started, all players were given a holiday gift of a 'snowball launcher and snowballs'.
Meant to be a fun thing for everyone to use.
They did no damage to anyone, just for fun.
As a new player, I was a bit short on the currency of the game (Isk [which is also the abbreviation for the Icelandic Kronur, which is where Crowd Control Productions, the games producer, is based]).
All new players are short on a game's currency, that's just the nature of being a newbie.
I did play with the gift for a short time, but found I would be better served by selling it in the game's market.
I listed the snowballs, and they promptly sold.
When I attempted to list the launcher, there was a problem.
I attempted to list the item for 50,000 isk, but by some quirk, it was listed for 50,000,000 isk.
Quite the difference.
There is a broker fee charged for each transaction on the market, intially 1% but is lowered based on your standings with the station you are selling in.
In my case, the fee for listing an item at 50 milllion isk amounted to 441,540 isk, when it should have been 441.54 isk for the intended 50,000 isk listing.
I'm positive that I entered 50,000 as the sale price, and immediatly noticed the hit to my bank account.
I attempted to file a support ticket immediately to get this in the queue as quickly as possible.
I went through the steps for filing a support ticket, but for some reason, it was not accepted and C.C.P. did not receive my ticket.
I didn't notice this right away, of course, as I waited several days for any kind of a response and received none.
I went to the EVE site and noticed a link to 'my' support page, but there was no ticket listed.
I use Mozilla to browse, and so I guessed that perhaps this was causing the error, as some sites do not play nicely with Mozilla.
So, I went into the game and used the in-game browser, assuming that it would work correctly.
As I attempted to submit a ticket with the in-game browser, I received a 'fatal error' and my ticket was, yet again, not submitted.
At least I had immediate feedback that my submission had failed.
I once again fired up Mozilla and submitted my ticket again, this time with success.
I realized that I was submitting a ticket during a busy time.
With many people off from school or work for the holidays, I did not expect immediate resolution to my issue, and was quite content to be patient and wait my turn.
What follows is the exchanges between Support and myself.
Customer (xxx xxx) 12/31/2005 11:24 PM
This is my third attempt to contact you on this issue.
I tried to submit a second time in game a few moments ago and received a 'fatal error' in the ingame browser.
I attempted to list an item (snowball launcher) for 50,000 isk on Dec 28, but the system decided I wanted to list it for 50,000,000 isk instead, causing me to pay a 441,540 broker fee.
If I use 'modify order' will I be reimbursed the amount of broker fee to a proper level?
If not, this system is highly exploitable.
List for low, modify order to high price, thus avoiding large broker fees.
Account name is xxx and character name is xxx xxx.
I realize that this is still a trial account, but am seriously considering subscribing, but getting NO response from customer service for 3 days does not make CCP look good in my eyes.
This is not meant to be a threat in any way, but customer service is an important part of any game, and it does affect my decision to subscribe or not.
441,540 isk is a substantial amount for a 9 day old player.
All I'm looking for is a reimbursement to the proper broker fee for 50,000 isk, which should be 4,415, making my reimbursement 437,125 isk.
Autoresponse 12/31/2005 11:24 PM
Hi
Your incident has been submitted, and will be answered as soon as possible. If you wish to update it, please log on to the 'my questions' link on support.eve-online.com and do so from there.
Thanks.
EVE ONLINE Customer Support Team
(I have removed the links to some basic, and unhelpful, FAQ answers.)
Customer (xxx xxx) 01/01/2006 12:52 AM
Forgot to add that this item is still listed for sale at the original, errored, price of 50,000,000 at Jita 4, Moon 6, School of Applied Knowledge.
Auto-response 01/01/2006 11:25 PM
Hi
Due to the extreme load we are experiencing at Customer Support, we have not been able to answer your request.
Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause you and we want to thank you for your patience.
We can assure you that your request is waiting in line and will be processed as soon as possible.
If some of the information below might have been missing in your request, we recommend that you send us all information, which you think might help us solve the issue to speed up the process.
Below are some examples of what this might be:
1. Hardware problems: Detailed info on your computer specs. (Preferably use the DirectX diagnostics tool to acquire this information)
2. Game play problems: username. (if you are not sure whether this is relevant, please include it anyway)
3. Reimbursement requests: location (such as station or system names) and as exact time details as possible.
Please note that filing multiple requests on the same issue will only slow down our service.
Thank you again for your patience!
EVE ONLINE Customer Support Team
Response ([GM]Wyrm) 01/02/2006 04:24 PM
Dear Customer,
Following the recent Red Moon Rising addition to EVE Online we have been facing many game issues, as well as server problems. The result of this is that our incident backlog has now grown to the point where we are unable to keep up with it. Many of these issues have already been fixed and/or are no longer relevant.
For this reason, we are forced to send you this message asking you if your case still needs our attention.
If so, please accept our sincere apologies for the inconvenience. All you need to do then is update your incident and we will help you as quickly as we are able to. If you have multiple incidents, please update only one, as filing multiple cases only slows down our response time and lowers our service level.
Before you update your incident though, there are a few things we would like to point out before proceeding further:
1) If you are/were experiencing a minor bug of some sort, we would like to point out that numerous fixes have been deployed since you filed your petition and small patches and server side fixes will continue to be deployed in the following days and weeks. Hopefully your bug has either been fixed or will be soon.
2) If your petition was asking about a new feature in Red Moon Rising, we would like to ask you to make sure to read the patch notes carefully: http://myeve.eve-online.com/updates/patchnotes.asp - The patch notes include links to many forum threads or dev blogs where features are explained more detail. It might also be a good idea to look in the Knowledgebase on support.eve-online.com or ask on the forums.
3) If you are merely reporting a bug, rather than trying to get rectified the results of it, we point to the bug reporting tool found here: http://bugs.eve-online.com/newbugreport.asp
4) If your question is on game design matters, such as an item that was nerfed, then the support team can unfortunately not help you. The best way to reach the game design team is through the Features and Ideas Discussion section on the forum: http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=channel&channelID=3523
5) Last but not least. If your question was about the condition of the server, lag, stuck issues etc, then we are currently doing everything we possibly can to reduce the lag and improve the server performance. One of the things we are working on now is to upgrade the whole cluster to AMD 64-bit IBM Blade servers. You can read all about what we are doing to improve server performance in a recent dev blog by Hellmar: http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=299
If your problem cannot be solved by any of the aforementioned means, please update your incident and we will help you out as soon as we can.
Best Regards,
The EVE Online Support Team
Customer (xxx xxx) 01/02/2006 05:35 PM
Yes, I'd like this issue resolved.
Character - xxx xxx
Listed - Snowball Launcher for 50,000 isk, system set price at 50,000,000 isk causing 441,540.46 isk broker fee
Listed at Jita 4 - Moon 6 - School of Applied Knowledge on 2005.12.28 18:12
Want refund of difference to proper broker fee for item listed for 50,000 isk, or total amount, whichever is easiest for you.
Customer (xxx xxx) 01/03/2006 03:08 PM
The account name has changed from xxxx to xxxx because of a character transfer (EVE for Christmas subscription transfer).
Same person, different account logon name.
All other info is still correct.
Response ([GM]Guard) 01/11/2006 01:15 PM
Hi xxx,
Our apologies for the late reply. We have been very busy lately.
Broker fees were intended to counter the very frequent and annoying problem of players setting items up for sale at ridiculously high prices in order to try to decieve other players. After broker fees were introduced that problem dissapeared almost. Broker fees are not returned under any circumstances as that would make this system useless. The player is shown the broker fee amount before he presses "ok" and it is the player's responsibility to put things on the market for the intended price. We can not help you with this.
If you need further assistance, please don't hesitate to contact us again. We'll do all we can to help.
Best regards,
The EVE Online Customer Support Team
Customer (xxx xxx) 01/11/2006 05:07 PM
That system would be perfectly acceptable under normal circumstances, but in my case, I listed the item for 50,000 isk, which was changed by your system to 50,000,000 isk.
A server side error is not my fault.
If the item had actually sold, or even had a chance to sell for 50 million isk, I would not have even submitted a ticket, but 50 million was approximatly 1,000 times the average listed price.
Why would I intentionally list an item for 1,000 times the average price when even the (then) current highest listed price had no chance of selling anyway?
Exactly, I wouldn't.
Response ([GM]Guard) 01/12/2006 08:32 AM
Hi xxx,
Before broker fees were introduced players would very frequently put a few extra zeros in their sell orders in the hope that players wouldn´t notice. The broker fees stopped that. There is no bug in the game that causes the price to be anything else than entered by the player himself and therefore there can be no return of broker fees. Had you looked at the sell order window before pressing ok you would have seen the warning in red about the amount being way higher than the average regional price and you would have seen the broker fee amound displayed.
Best regards,
The EVE Online Customer Support Team
Customer (xxx xxx) 01/12/2006 04:28 PM
It wasn't necessarily a bug proper that cause this error, it could have been a packet error.
I attempted to file a ticket immediately, but because of an error in the submission system (your side, general web error, I don't know), it wasn't submitted.
I stated in the original ticket that I was more than happy to pay the correct fee for a 50k listing, as that was the intended price.
I would have settled for a refund of 400k, which is still substantially higher than the proper listing fee for 50k.
Either way, you are obviously unwilling to refund any amount, and based on this and the unbearable lag, I will not be renewing my account.
I left Star Wars Galaxies hoping to find a refuge from the tyranny of S.O.E., but apparently it is not with C.C.P.
Good luck with your future endeavors.
Response ([GM]Guard) 01/12/2006 04:45 PM
Hi xxx,
I am sorry that you are leaving because we are unwilling to reimburse for unverifiable bugs. We feel this is not tyranny but more in the way of us trying to protect the game as a whole and that is what we are doing by placing these broker fees and not reimbursing them. Our bug hunters have not been able to reproduce any bug that makes the price higher than what the player himself puts in. Reimbursing broker fees would make them useless as a deterrant against intentional overpricing as we can not reimburse some and not others. If you are not happy with this approach and and don´t understand the position we have to take to protect the playerbase agains scamming then that´s the way it has to be. I am sorry that we are unable to help in a case like this and wish you luck with life outside of Eve.
Thank you for playing.
If you need further assistance, please don't hesitate to contact us again. We'll do all we can to help.
Best regards,
The EVE Online Customer Support Team
Let me clarify straight away that I did not intend to imply that C.C.P was taking a tyranical attitude.
A better wording would have been 'I left Star Wars Galaxies hoping to find a new home, a refuge from the tyranny of S.O.E., but apparently that new home is not with C.C.P.'.
Maybe not considered a huge difference to some, but to me it is.
I noticed when listing other items for sale, that the text box for price was a bit, odd, I would say.
It automatically entered an average price for whatever item you were selling, and if you clicked the box to enter your own price, it would sometimes remove the last digit, as in 5,342.13 would become 5342.1, and sometimes it would remove everything right side of the decimal.
Therefor, I was careful about listing items for the correct price.
Perhaps some will just write this off as 'some noob whining about 400k, which can easily be made back with a short time of gameplay'.
And you are welcome to do so.
That is true, I could make up that 400k in a few hours of gameplay time, but what are you going to do when support won't help you?
I had a legitimate issue and support was unwilling to help me with it.
Once again, the few cheaters have ruined the system for the honest majority.
Though I do have to give them credit, as S.O.E. typically does not reply with more than a generic cut-and-paste answer (and it's the luck of the draw if that answer even applies to your question), and I received a real response from a real person.
The only way to truly make your voice heard is with your wallet.
I found EVE an interesting game, and vision, with it's single server for all subscribers (which no other game has done [excepting old MUD's and the like]).
EVE has been in live for about 2 years, and so I guess they are doing ok, even though they don't have the huge subscriber base like some other games.
I can understand the reasoning of their policy of no refunds, yet at the same time, they are losing a subscriber for 400,000 units of game currency.
A bit of a double standard on my part perhaps.
Kinda sounds like I'm just a big whiny crybaby.
And maybe that really is the case, though I've never felt the need to express it publically before now.
Even when S.O.E. (now twice) revamped their combat systems and made almost all existing gear useless (flat removed some items from the game, with no form of compensation, costing players hundreds of millions worth of credits) for the player that owned it, I only briefly mentioned it to a few in-game friends, who coincedently, agreed.
Along with a host of others on the SWG forums.
But this was not the only reason I chose to not renew my subscription to EVE.
The first few days that I played, it was enjoyable.
After about one week, the lag made the game an impossibility to enjoy.
Lag is a killer in any online game, and when that lag affects combat, it makes a game unplayable.
Taking 45-60 seconds for a command to be completed when it takes 2-3 commands to react to an attack, and the total of the combat would take no more than 2 minutes normally, means the player loses.
Changing states from docked in a station to launched in space, or jumping from one system to another can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 5 minutes.
Since the game is based in Iceland, and they are 6 hours ahead of my time, that means that my prime playtime coincides with their peak usage time as well, and the server has hit several peak online user numbers recently of approximately 20,000 players online at once.
Maybe I'm now just getting a taste of what is typical for a European player of American online games.
I also understand that they are working to upgrade the server cluster to new AMD 64 IBM Blade servers.
Unfortunately, this won't be complete until sometime in February, approximately 3-4 weeks from now.
A big reason that I left SWG is that I will not pay a company to be a beta tester of it's product.
SWG has so many bugs that have been around for a long time.
EVE does not quite fit this category, but it is close, as the service I'm paying for is completely unacceptable.
I want to play when I'm able to, not be stuck with only playing from 10pm to 1am because that's when the server population goes down enough to decrease the lag to an acceptable level.
If it had been just one or the other, I probably would have stuck with EVE.
-------------
I did end up resubbing to EVE after about a month off.
I enjoyed the game play and the depth available, which most every other game lacks.
I like to think when I play games, and that's why I like things like the Myst series.
posted by urbnsol at 2:11 PM
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