CCP's Hilmar Veigar Pétursson

I understand it. It's not something that we refer to EVE or the player base as internally. It was in the newsletter to make a point. And that's all it is, it's not emblematic of internal dialogue. Obviously people at CCP who have been in the business of relating to EVE subscribers have developed a hard skin because the player base can be very quite aggressive. I have seen people buckle under the pressure of talking to them as a group. To clam up and not be as open as they were prior to that. And really that's the nature of the beast.

On the flip side I don't think I've ever, in the eight years I've been doing this, met an EVE player in person that wasn't fantastically enthusiastic about what we're doing. And it's been like a wonderful experience every single time. I've never met an EVE player who has been anything less than a stellar example of nice things, but when they come together they can be quite antagonistic. Which his fine, I'm in the job of having that thrown at me and that's perfectly fine. But when they are singling out individual employees of CCP that are doing their job, that's when it gets a little too much. There have been people that are being singled out by the player base as the root of all evil when in fact they are just debating a point. I would just recommend they turn their attention to the people who hold responsibility of answering to them, whether it's me or a senior producer.

Right now it's just not something we can comment on. We've made a commitment to discuss those things with the Council of Stellar Management so me speaking out of turn would not be honouring that. Really the platform to have that dialogue is with the CSM. It's a complicated matter to define what is vanity and what is not vanity. There is a lot of vanity in society that has an impact on wider matters.

I would say it's a process that is never fully done, it's an endless effort and it's going to change over time. Certainly now we have some data after the first week that we can have productive dialogue about. Out of that we will formulate the next step.

Yes, of course we have considered that, for sure.

It's like I said in the beginning, it's the evolution of the business of EVE like we've evolved the gameplay of EVE. Raising the subscription price would have been doing more of the same, it's not adding a new dimension to EVE when we see what other games have innovated on. It's not bringing the learning from the wider market place into EVE. It's our belief that to make the business relevant we need to change. Although some EVE subscribers would like to pay a higher subscription fee not all of them would. There are people that pay the subs fee and don't want to pay for in-game goods and that's perfectly fine. There's nothing wrong with that. Some want to buy the good because they are already doing it. Some want to use Plex as a means to engage more. It's really about offering these different options in a balanced way but the core foundation of the game is still strong. We're a company that knows the sandbox and emergent gameplay in EVE is what makes the experience. Whatever we add to it is not meant to compromise that in anyway.

Well, every time we've made a big change to EVE we see new players come in and other players leave. We've done a lot of changes and we see people quit, we see people come back, we see new sign-ups. It's really the state of affairs. EVE is a thing that is going to continue to evolve, we're quite clear on that. The fact that we change it every six months should be an example of that commitment. These are not always changes that everyone likes, it's not always a system that everyone is entirely happy with, but we look at the general state of affairs and trust those. In collaboration with the players, through the CSM and other feedback channels, we just take this in and refine the experience based on that.