To say the launch of Incarna has been controversial is an understatement. We at CCP appreciate the passion that many of you have for the game and are always listening to feedback. Let me address some of the big issues that you are having below.
1. Video Card Heat: Our engineering teams are looking at this one closely. For now I suggest setting the card to interval 1 as that may reduce the heat without affecting game-play. Expect more on this later.
2. NeX Store Prices: In many ways we are finding the uproar over the high prices amusing. The issue here is clearly poor communication from us and we take all of the blame. What happened here is that when this was first developed a lot of the functionality you see in the character creator was going to be restricted to the NEX store. Piercings, tattoos, jewels on the forehead, etc were all going to cost small amounts of Aurum. Instead, after feedback from the Incursion character creator, we decided to make most of these items 'free' leaving only the most expensive ones in the store. We did not fully realize that this would make our store look a little unbalanced in the eyes of the players. Rather than nickle-and-dimeing (plexing and Auruming maybe) the players for low cost items, we only placed the premium items in the store and leaving items that we deem to have a lower cost to be free. In the future expect to see more less expensive, and more expensive, items appear.
3. The Hanger View: As many of you noticed the static view of the door when the station environment has been turned off is far from ideal. We are aware of this and are working to improve functionality for users whose computers are unable to take full advantage of CQ. Rest assured we at CCP are committed to giving the best possible gaming experience to as many possible hardware configurations as possible.
4. Fearless: This internal newsletter contained a great discussion about micro-transactions though a point-counterpoint series of articles. CCP Soundwave was assigned the task playing the parody of an 'Evil' game designer trying to push microtransactions to a ridiculous level. He even went so far as to pull material out of a 2008 April Fool's joke devblog about gold ammo. We are stunned that anyone would take his statements in the newsletter as actual policy. Rest assured that we at CCP understand the market based principles that make EVE special. If anything we suffer from an overabundance of caution at disrupting this. I can not go into details here as to microtransaction plans, however were not going to kill our golden goose to make a quick buck. Since many of you found the newsletter to be interesting reading, we are going to release portions of several other back-issues that players may find entertaining. But please don't take what is said in there as company gospel because it is very definitely not.
Instead CCP decided to blame us players for their problems. It may be too much to ask for definitive declarations of CCP policy while they are doing damage control. But they really need to work on diffusing situations, not feeding the fires.
