Hardcover

I would make a "I throw my money at the screen but nothing happens" comment, but I don't have the money to throw at the screen.

Maybe when the inevitable F2P conversion happens. You know, like in every other Funcom game.

Out of curiosity, when did you try the game? Ground combat got a major revamp about a year ago, which improved it by leaps and bounds.

As far as space combat goes, yeah, it's not full 3D like, say, Bridge Commander, but they weren't trying to make a Bridge Commander MMO - they were trying to replicate what we saw on screen. And, in my opinion, they did a good job of it.

I'm probably not going to get much agreement on this, but I'm going to go with Star Trek Online.

Yes, it has it's issues. What game doesn't? A rocky and bare-bones start, varying levels of quality on missions, uninspired PVP, the Great Content Draught of 2011, a controversial move to an almost Asian-style F2P model... but I enjoy it still.

First, when the game gets it right, it gets it *right*. There are several missions - many from the Foundry UGC toolset, but a couple from the devs themselves as well - that feel like they escaped from the hard drive of a Star Trek writer. Ship-to-ship combat is a hell of a lot of fun. And the staff, I think, get bashed a lot for what the game doesn't have, and nowhere near the credit they deserve for making the game what it is with, as of the beginning of the year, just a 25-man team. That is MINISCULE in the MMO world, but it seems that Cryptic's hiring team manages to find multiple real-world versions of Montgomery Scott himself.

Again, it's not a perfect game. No MMO is, and the dev team that isn't working to improve something or create something new is the one that's getting laid off. But I think Star Trek Online doesn't get near the credit it's due, especially given how many people I've seen in the game that have said that they never played an MMO before - they play because it's Star Trek.

Never going to happen. EVE players like their "high" barrier to entry. It matches well with the cliff of a learning curve.

But seriously, I don't think it would come about. Remember the riots in market hubs last summer? That would happen again if EVE went F2P, I guarantee, and CCP would have no way to stop them besides deploying their own, CONCORD-proof fleet or simply shutting down those nodes. Those riots happened because players were concerned about a pay-to-win model that was discussed in an internal newsletter. Enough people already equate "free-to-play" with "pay-to-win" that there would be no chance in hell of convincing many of them otherwise.

And if CCP did plow ahead with free-to-play plans, against all player resistance, they would alienate enough of their current playerbase that no free-to-play audience who, I would argue, would predominantly be too casual to replace the flocks of EVE subscribers who would leave for, say, Perpetuum.

Finally, why would CCP even consider taking their flagship product free-to-play? While it can't boast subscriber numbers like WoW, by just about every other standard EVE is a very successful MMO, and CCP's main source of income. Whatever they may do with DUST 514 (which faces a whole other set of problems) or any other game they put together, they are going to be conservative with their golden goose. And especially a golden goose that has bit them in the ass before.

The more I read about Crucible, the more excited and pleased I am. (New T3 battlecruiser, that actually fits the definition of battlecruiser? DO WANT.) Really makes me wish I could afford to restart my EVE subscription.

P.S. Jita riots? I was there.

@alimantando Maybe in the first couple of Succession Wars, but I know in pretty much everything after the Fourth Succession War, if you wanted to make a serious bid for a world, you were looking at sending at least a couple of regiments of BattleMechs. Granted, a lot of the Periphery and House backwater systems didn't need that kind of firepower, but still. And then if you tossed the Clans into the mix, well... now you're talking armies.

That being said, I don't think grouping would really be a problem. My idea had been sort of like a combination of MechWarrior Living Legends, crossed with the Mech Assault 2 conquest mode. Declare for a House, select a specialization (BattleMech, Aerospace, vehicle, or infantry), and as you level you get access to heavier machines and more powerful and advanced equipment. Combine that with assignments against NPCs in your house space, PVP along your house's border zones, and having the ability for player-created units (read: guilds) to elect to go merc.

I have a bare-bones idea for a MechWarrior MMO. It'll never happen, and I'll be honest, the longer time goes on without hearing anything about the franchise reboot that was planned the more I'm thinking that universe is pretty well dead as far as video games go. But I think that it could be done, and done well.

@(Unverified) The thing is, CCP has said one thing, and then done another in the past. Hell, they said before "no, we're not adding micro-transactions of any sort." Now we have the Noble Exchange.

CCP said they wouldn't add non-vanity micro-transactions. Then a leaked internal document talks about adding everything from spaceships to faction standings into the store. Add in an ominous silence when there's a 200+ page thread on the forums demanding, begging, pleading, and I believe even offering bribes for clarification on what was going through CCP's minds, and you can see why things started to explode.

@alphaman00 I didn't mean Amazon gift card for items in EVE (though I suppose if CCP sold time cards via Amazon...) but for items in reality. I suppose it could have been clearer, and like all analogies, it's not perfect, but I still maintain that selling PLEX for ISK is not at all "pay-to-win."

Wow. Good job on missing the point entirely.

It's not, and has never been, about the price of things in the store. Granted, there was a lot of surprise that things were as expensive as they were, and CCP has said that they intend to add things at several pricing tiers, specifically including lower tiers that are much closer to the traditional micro-transaction concept. Most of the players that I've talked to don't care how expensive stuff for their Space Barbie is, either because they have no interest in Space Barbies, or because they are waiting until they can actually go out of their Space Apartment and go see people at the Space Mall to show off their Space Clothes.

Now, PLEX vs. Aurum. Selling a PLEX (Pilot License Extension - in-game item converted from a game time code that can be used to add another month of play time to your account, valued at about 400,000,000 ISK) and then using that cash to buy stuff from the market still has you interacting with the market - there's a whole miner-manufacturer-hauler chain behind each starship hull, weapons system, or modification you buy. Items from the NEX (Noble Exchange, the cash shop in EVE) completely cuts out the market. Those items just magically appear when you redeem a PLEX for Aurum - CCP's version of Turbine Points.

Selling PLEX for ISK is the moral equivalent of someone handing you a gift card for Amazon. Hell, I've known people that have gotten game time codes for EVE as a gift.

Adding items with attributes superior to in-game, player-crafted items would not only make EVE a pay-to-win game, which any EVE player will tell you it is not, but would also severely harm the player-driven market. Some people with deep pockets would just head straight to the cash shop, ignoring the market goods entirely.

Finally, above and beyond all that, people were frustrated with CCP's communication on their concerns, or rather the lack thereof. NEX prices, the leak of an internal discussion document that started the whole thing, incidents of people's computers being actually damaged from trying to run the Incarna expansion, Incarna's impact on those running multiple clients... CCP simply clammed up and said nothing. It took over two days to even get a "we're working on a unified response" message, when most of us would have been satisfied with a dev taking two minutes with his smartphone on the toilet and saying "still no plans on non-vanity micro-transactions, more to follow in dev blogs."

That's what caused the uproar in the blogs, Twitter, and inspired multiple threadnaughts on the forums. That's why people were upset. That's why CCP called an emergency summit with the player-elected Council for Stellar Management.