A Terrible Day

I had a really shitty day yesterday. The company I work for is having lay-offs despite making hundreds of millions of dollars in profit last quarter. Two people in my group were laid off in the afternoon. I spent the day talking to them as though there was nothing wrong. Yet in the afternoon their world crashed all to make a 0.001% improvement on some billionaires short term investment portfolio.

Pretty shitty day for me.... really shitty day for them. When I got home I had a nice stiff drink. After getting the kids to bed I logged into EVE and was faced with this...

IMHO this door image is a massive fuck you to the EVE community. In every game I have played there has always been a bunch of graphics settings. People with state-of-the art computer systems could have a higher resolution, better textures, etc. However most games tried their best to accommodate players with lower quality computers. Sure the graphics weren't there but they did whatever they could to let you play the game and enjoy the experience. Not EVE. Rather then give us the hanger that we used to see, or a view of our spaceship, they went with what they must have known was a totally immersion breaking image. Quite frankly they are saying to the entire player base who turned off CQ that they don't want us to enjoy the game. THIS 'DOOR' SCREEN HAD TO BE DELIBERATE.

That is why I quit last night. CCP does not want me to play EVE. It is as simple as that.

Of course that was not the only problem with Incarna. They also had all this greedy crap about charging ridiculous prices for monocles, plus the newsletter where they basically said that they need to milk EVE players for all they are worth to develop the WOD game. Even if that means doing the very things that EVE players have been begging and ragequitting over. CCP does not want players who care about the sandbox to play EVE as well. Here I was experiencing greed based lay-offs during the day, litterally watching people's livelyhood get destroyed for the greed of others, and when I logged into EVE I just got more of that.

So I quit.

It was an impulse decision.

I had been considering scaling back my play for a while but seeing that door and seeing that level of greed and lying, plus some single-malt scotch, meant I typed up a frantic post on my blog and posted it.

I also was not alone. Several other blogs had also posted the 'I quit' message. This plus a total shit-storm in the forums makes me think that CCP could not help but hear the message.

I woke up this morning with a mild hangover and started wondering 'What had I done.' That is until tonight when I tried to log into EVE again to finish an article about the new player experience I started a week ago. I saw the 'Door'. Then I remembered why I quit.

What does CCP need to do now?
Roll back.
Roll back the hanger screen so we can see our ship again without blasting our graphics cards.
Roll back CQ and put it back on the test server and keep it there until it is much closer to being ready.
Roll back the Microtransaction store. Vow to NEVER EVER bring it back. CCP can not ever be trusted to do microtransactions in EVE for anything ever again.
Keep the new login screen for Incarna... that and maybe the turrets was the only good thing about this long delayed expansion.
And the hardest thing of all... rebuild their reputation in the EVE community. Incarna was bad. The newsletter revealing their lies, damned lies, and outright greed was inexcusable. They need to fix this. I don't know what they need to do but they need to do it now.

I am quite sure they will do none of those things so for me... EVE is going to stay dead. It was such a part of my life that I will probably try it again and again over the next month. I am sure I will continue to blog about my frustrations and stuff until all my readers have left me sick of my negativity. But as long as the door stays... I will never be logged in for more than a few seconds.

And then there is this...