On a related note, I haven't properly played EVE Online in almost a year now, except to put new skills into the training queue (they level even when you're not logged into the game), or to restart the week long cycles on my planetary interaction installation (kinda like farmville, and a way to make money in the game with very little effort, again without even logging in much). Even though that's all I'm doing, I resubbed for another year.
Why? Because as far as I'm concerned, as game developers go, CCP have set the standard, and they deserve my money, even if I'm not playing it right now, just for the amount of effort they're currently putting into improving the game, and how they've really changed to listen to their players.
Summer of 2011 their new expansion was called Incarna. It's focus was a completely new feature, being able to walk your pilots around inside space stations, and dress them up (because previously you were your ship, or at least the escape capsule you lived in). The only working parts of this feature were your captain's quarters, which connected to the docking bay with your ship. The rest of the station wasn't available yet. There was also the 'Noble Exchange' the shop for wearable items.
Players had 2 major complaints about all this.
1. They didn't care about walking in stations, had a huge list of things they'd wanted to be fixed for years that had been ignored for another expansion, and they thought this one was a complete waste of time.
2. The Noble Exchange items were overpriced* (as in, cost more than a real world equivalent), and there were also rumours being leaked that 'pay to win' items might also become part of the microtransaction model CCP were working on, after they'd promised not to go near that.
The result was basically threads full of complaints on the forums, hundreds of thousands of cancelled subscriptions, and protests in game (people orbitting and firing on the monument outside the game's biggest trade station, in numbers big enough to crash the server it runs on. The WoW equivalent would be everyone piling into Varian's throne room, and spamming every spell they can to crash the server).
CCP's response? They downsized the company, cancelling other projects outside of EVE Online to focus on the main project, they posted official apologies to the players on their website and in game, and their devblogs started to show that they were now going to be working on an expansion that would focus almost entirely on fixing the backlog of problems that the players had been asking to be fixed. To top it all off, the CEO of the company made a very heartfelt apology on stage at EVE fanfest, personally accepting a lot of the responsibility for what had happened before Crucible, and promising that things would drastically change in future.
The expansion, Crucible, was released, it was a huge success, and they got back all the players they'd lost with the previous expansion. And it hasn't stopped there. The last next expansion, Inferno, was also positively received, and has focused on fixing things the players have asked for, and adding features that interest them. The big winter expansion, Retribution, is going to focus on a complete rebalancing of all the low level 'tech 1' ships, that's the frigates, destroyers (with 4 new ships in that class too) and cruisers that a player can expect to be flying in their first couple of months of playing. The idea is to ensure that all of the low end ships are viable, balanced between the 4 factions, and still usable in a game where older players fly battlecruisers, battleships and capital ships, as well as 'tech 2' versions of all the ships that have been added to the game more recently, that while they are supposed to be more capable than tech 1 ships, were sometimes a little too capable.
One very important thing I want to mention about EVE is the 'Council of Stellar Management' or CSM. This is a player elected council, made up of players from the game, who routinely go out to Iceland (where CCP is based), to discuss with the developers the direction that the players would like the game's development to take. They give feedback on existing content, and are also given access to information on unreleased content that is still in development, under an NDA, so they can say whether or not something is a good or bad idea, before it gets so far along that it's inclusion into the game is inevitable. Pre Crucible the CSM's concerns being ignored by the devs was a major part of the reason why so many cancelled their subs. Since then however, players have been able to see a lot more involvement between the developers and the CSM, not least because the CSM's posts on the forums have been a lot more positive, but because the minutes from all the meetings are made available to the players (at least the bits not covered by an NDA), so everyone can see how the developers are responding in the meetings.
So what does all this have to do with GW2 and WoW?
It shows that there is a better way to run a game, and explains just why my criticism of WoW is not only scathing and contemptuous, but utterly justified. If more people who played WoW took a look outside of that game, they wouldn't have such a high opinion of it. EVE is actually older than WoW, it has roughly the same subscription price, and it has a lot less players. With far less resources than Blizzard have to work with, CCP have managed to develop a game for practically all their players (PvP or PvE, then split again into multiple subgroups), and on top of that, the developers have the time to show just what they're doing, and how much work they're putting in. There is no 'you must play the game this way', or keeping things hidden from players almost up to the point of release. CCP develop around how the players play the game. I'm just really happy to see that ANet is a lot closer to CCP in their style of development, than they are to Blizzard.
* EVE solved the whole gold selling problem by just letting the players buy gold straight from CCP, or at least game time cards, that could be traded on the market in game for in game currency. It's a genious move, because casual players can get currency without having to grind for it, and hardcore players can basically play for free, if they can make enough money in game. The system works because basically all the play time is being payed for by someone, and no gold is being created out of thin air. Those who aren't paying for the game also do a lot to support the in game economy, because they're essentially working in the game. CCP have also really cracked down on botters and real money traders in the game, none of Blizzards pointless banwaves that give gold sellers plenty of time to make a profit. CCP ban accounts as they find them botting, and also confiscate resources from player organisations where they are shown to have profitted from the botting of members (like taking items from the guild bank, if they were put there by a botter).
