Well it seems that CCP Games – Eve MMORPG Publisher – has a golden hand for finding the right situation to press the Red-Button with white letters “Now F**k all Customers” on it. After having a larger Period with technical Issues, then a radical changing of their sales model (against users interesets) they now changed a very global and default feature of the game, “the skilling” resulting in even more costs.
This did not only result in the largest forum post in the game-forums ever [and this one], i have no doubt it will do exactly like the red-button is labeled. CCP misses the chance to clearly talk about their motivation. They kick their users asses by declaring an ingame Feature as a Bug. The Feature was there since the beginning and documented as a Feature in all game related documents as well. Then they try to create the impression that if they won’t change it, it will have an heavy impact on their infrastructure. From the technical side this is just not the case. Taking this way of communicating into account as well, this is really an absolute no-go. And that is why even dumb little online-game players will quit this game – next to the fact that it simply costs too much money now.
And the answer to the question on a very real impact just stays open: How does the global and local financial crisis touches CCP? The company is based in Iceland which is well known these days for eating the pain financially. They were one of the first countries that needed to stop the money-flow before fully touching ground. Even though CCP is not tired to proclaim that they are a commercial company and that they do love capitalism, they say with no words what kind of impact this very unlovely capitalistic reality has for their company.
In such a situation a company should ask theirself how they can raise the level of faith and trust on the users side that their users still can believe that their pre-paid money for game-time was worth to be paid.
