The cascade continues

Ed. note: this post is a follow-up to "The Space Barbie Failure Cascade," published on this blog on June 25.

Not three months ago, the looming specter of "pay-to-win" mechanics provoked a player riot in Eve Online. The Council of Stellar Management (CSM) flew to CCP's headquarters in Iceland, ultimately receiving assurances from the developer that so-called "gold ammo" would never find its way into the MMO. The most visible result of the conference was this video, which CCP apparently hoped would bring an end to the Incarna scandal.

Of course, it didn't. Eve's player base continues to shrink, and it seems Incarna has the dubious distinction of being the first Eve expansion to fail to increase the game's "Peak Concurrent Users" even temporarily.

Now begins the anti-CCP public relations blitz over the developer's neglect of its flagship game. It started in earnest with a long diatribe* by Alexander Gianturco (a.k.a. "The Mittani") on Kugutsumen.com, and continues with this Eurogamer interview with the same. Gianturco is the Chairman of the CSM, and a leader of Goonswarm, arguably the most powerful alliance in Eve. Love him or hate him, the man has real influence.

* Readers interested only in the subject matter of this post may want to skip to the section entitled "The CSM, PCUs and FiS Neglect" (FiS = Flying in Space).

A couple of choice quotes from the diatribe:

In other areas, particularly upper management, the company seems hell-bent on running Eve Online into the ground to try to make a reality out of the foolish business decisions they made during the Icelandic banking bubble. In 2006 they acquired White Wolf and promised to develop a World of Darkness MMO; similarly, they committed to developing a FPS that will somehow link to EVE out of Shanghai. Then the bubble popped, and everyone began to ask tough questions about the notorious overconfidence of Icelandic males. One of these projects at a time seems reasonable; developing both of them simultaneously is 'Fearless' and 'Innovative' using Hilmar's favorite buzzwords. Elsewhere we call it groupthink-fueled folly [...] 

What we see here is the impact of the neglect of what CCP now calls "Flying in Space", what you and I call "Eve Online". Usually after an expansion there is a surge of players who join the game; these create peaks and valleys in PCU (Peak Concurrent User) numbers as people kick the tires on the new content and then either stick around or leave. Incarna, which has taken a tremendous amount of development and marketing resources from FiS, essentially had no impact.  

Read that again. No impact. Millions of dollars and months of development, into a toilet. Meanwhile we suffer a backhanded Sanctum nerf and have had no new FiS content besides Incursions since the introduction of Wormholes.

In the Eurogamer interview, Gianturco says his views are "100 per cent representative of the Council members."

Incarna still isn't finished, and the CSM thinks that and the general absence of new content in Eve is due to declining resource allocation in favor of Dust and World of Darkness. That's a tough pill to swallow when you're a player forking over a monthly subscription fee.

Eve Online's idiosyncrasies don't end at its emergent gameplay and unitary economy. It has given birth to an omnipresent and somewhat peculiar politics as well. CCP has never been able to control the latter, and I'm betting that their "media strategy" is going to be humbled before that of the CSM.

It will be fun to watch.