Yeah, the video is a decent summary, but it fails to capture the rage caused by years work ruined by a business decision in iceland. i hope the hungarians have their heads on straighter.

I was watching gamebreaker.tv last night, and they also mentioned that players were upset that everything in the MT store was over-priced. I guess everything was $10 and up, and that if they had some .99 cent items so everyone could participate that at least the monocle issue wouldn't have been so bad; of course the lack of denial about ships in the MT store kept that fueled.

Then again, I read an article last year as I was researching Eve, about some rich russian that bought 100's of plex and used the ISK to build an empire. Maybe an Eve vet can explain it to me, but what exactly is the difference to in game balance, if you buy a capital ship directly from Eve for $1000 or sell plex for ISK and buy one in game? I do see how it 'cuts' the player out of the loop, and reduces the ability to convert ISK to game time and capital ships to ISK, but it doesn't acutally effect game balance any differently. Player X can afford to use RMT to buy power in game, CCP is just now taking that money in directly.

I'm not saying this is right, just asking an Eve vet how getting attacked by a PLEX bought Capital ship is different then being attacked by a MT Capital ship?

Destroying the industry part I can understand, although I suspect it would more tie to your second line there, in that the Ship they offered in the MT wouldn't be available via in game production.

Building off that, if the MT-Capital ship had the same stats as a in-game-Capital, but just looked different, that wouldn't be a pay-2-win, as you don't get any game advantage.

So, the issue fully comes down to, Currently the player base benefits from the Plex system, if they implement an MT (without pay2win) then Eve directly gets all the income plus the previous player base will have less Plex on the market resulting in more of those players needing to purchase subscriptions directly again.

A double win for CCP, they get more cash from the rich people and more from the player base that gets pushed out of the plex market by higher pricing.

Yep, I can see that causing bitterness. Thanks Mathias.

When a PLEX is traded, two players benefit. One gets ISK, the other doesn't have to pay for his game time. CCP gets the same amount that it would get if both players paid for a subscription (but may benefit indirectly due to better player retention). When you buy an item from CCP then one player gets an item and CCP gets money.

While I think that's a fairly significant difference, it's not the single big issue that caused the forum rage. There's a lot of accumulated rage from other things CCP have done, many broken promises (including "no microtransactions" just about a year ago, or player-made clothing from earlier Incarna announcements), many years old unfixed bugs, completely broken balance in some areas of the game, the certainty that most of the money you pay them doesn't actually get those bugs fixed in EVE but helps finance two completely different games (they actually told us that, which caused a bit of rage back then), and in fact now we have an "expansion" that lets players walk around in one closet in return for drastically higher system reqs and that introduced gamebreaking bugs like attribute bonuses from skills not being applied to ships...

I think reducing the outrage to microtransactions is missing the point, if players were mostly content with EVE and with CCP's behaviour then they'd gladly buy virtual clothes to support their favourite game. They just chose to introduce microtransactions at a point in time where they've literally already screwed up everything else they possibly could have screwed up and did so in the most arrogant way possible.

Thanks guys for posting the links... now I'm getting a clear idea of the sheer rage involved. :-)