EVE Is Real – Huh?
So, CCP finally released their website for their latest promotional campaign, EVE is real. What started with a brand new trailer (“I Was There”) – the first EVE Online trailer featuring a real actor – now turned out to be a more or less massive approach to get people into talking about the game in social media. They call it a “virtual museum of the EVE experience”. Obviously the Tweet Fleet wasn’t enough for them. But who’d blame them? It’s all about Facebook, Twitter and Google+ these days.
The museum – or more specific: the campaign – is more than this. It’s also a first approach to seed some amount of Aurum to the player base. It’s meant to be given to all players once several milestones are achieved. So far there are 4 milestones visible, each unlocking a said to be small amount of Aurum: 1,000 Aurum, 1,000 Aurum, 1,500 Aurum and 2,000 Aurum. Doing some easy math this sums up to a total of 5,500 Aurum for every active account of EVE Online? Just as a reminder: 1 PLEX converts to 3,500 Aurum, so they’re essentially giving away items worth about 24 bucks to everyone playing EVE? In addition there’s some contest to win real Hardware by posting images or videos, but I don’t think I’ve got a real chance there, so that part isn’t that interesting for me.
But what’s it all about anyway? Where is this going? For CCP it’s some free advertising on social media sites – what else? Okay, it’s not really free as they’re giving away stuff they could have made some money off, but after all it’s most likely meant to be an incentive for people to try the NeX store, get used to it and possibly buy some more items. It’s basically a nice idea – both from a player as well as a company standpoint – but what will be the real results? Will there be a flood of clothing on the market? Will people buy stuff for themselves only? Will they ignore the Aurum? This might turn out to be rather interesting, also considering people with several accounts who’ll most likely receive 11,000 Aurum or more. Due to missing trading options, they won’t be able to buy monocles off it or simply sell it, but it could still be used to buy several outfits – which doesn’t have to be a bad thing after all.
Two days ago they had a 2 digits long number of shares – I think something like 40 or so – and the bar was filled by something like 10 %. This appeared to be rather fast, too fast for my expectations. Yesterday afternoon the numbers appeared a bit more realistic to me: just a bit above 1,000 shares showing a progress of 50 %. So 2,000 shares for the first batch of Aurum? Good! Really? Well, no… Today we’ve got almost 5,000 shares and the bar’s progress can be seen on the image above. The progress seems to be similar to last night (about 2,200 shares). So what’s this? Is it a logarithmic scale progress bar? This is a bit confusing to me as well as disappointing. I know how logarithmic scaling works, that’s no issue here. However It’s something I’ve never seen used on a progress bar.
Well, over all progress bars are meant to show a measure of how much time has passed or how much work has been done and how much is still waiting for us, aren’t they? That’s definitely not true for these. It might be some weird way of caching or some bug, but it’s still something that shouldn’t happen on a “production site”.
Anyway, what do you think about the whole approach? To me it’s still a nice idea, but there are also some letdowns. The weird progress bar, the quite wonky navigation (“Oh no, my cursor went down too far and now the images are gone again!”), impossible to click entries hidden behind other preview images,… It feels like one or two weeks could have been a good investment before it went live or became real. It feels a bit rushed – just like some parts of Incarna’s first release – but that seems to be common these days.
Update: Ah, okay. Seems like CCP Hekatonkheires (ugh, how do you remember such nickname?) confirmed the “progress bar vs. counter” stuff to be broken:
Share tracking for unlocks: You'll notice the share counter and progress bill don't fill at the same rate. Unfortunately we've had some bogus/spam share farming. We thought we had a good solution in place to mediate it; turns out 375,000 people are more clever than the 8 of us working on this. The progress bar is the truth, it doesn't count share spamming or incomplete shares. We chose to spend time making videos bigger than fixing the numerical share button today. <- True fact. When the contest voting round arrives, you will be limited to one vote per category (video/image) per day.
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