Leither Yiltron
KILL-EM-QUICK
RISE of LEGION
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Posted - 2012.08.15 16:49:00 -
[1] - Quote
tl;dr CCP is targeting the wrong group of players and should make UVT's an item that you install into the chat channels themselves to allow voice chat within the channel rather than making them a per-player item.
We're well on our way to our first, real Dust threadnaught. Not one of those silly ones about mouse and keyboard support that was obviously coming. The thing about the UVT threadnaught is that the conversation actually doesn't match the issues at hand. Here are the problems, and a solution that should satisfy all parties.
There are two parties that have problems with the voice chat service: CCP and the players.
CCP's Problems:
(1) We cannot provide quality voice service to everyone in the game with projected usage if cross-game voice chat is an unrestricted service.
(2) We will provide quality voice service to players who are in-game with each other, which represents a monetary investment in infrastructure for such and we will provide this to all customers- including those who never give us any money.
Players' Problems:
(1) We want to be able to participate in the metagame at any time through voice chat, most especially when we are not playing a battle scenario.
(2) Our player organizations want easy-to-handle ways to voice chat with all of our members outside of game so that everyone can feel involved in the social experience of Dust.
CCP's Current Solution: The UVT which applies only to players.
There's a very obvious reason why this isn't the solution to CCP's problems. It's not that a pay gate is a ridiculous idea. In fact, it makes perfect sense so that CCP can continue to maintain a quality voice service out of game. The implementation of this pay gate in its current form is unwieldy, and there's a very simple reason why that is.
In a free to play game, there are two types of players: Players who are willing to spend money, and those who are reluctant or unwilling. I don't have any backing psychological study to back this one, but I feel pretty safe saying it. Those who are very willing to spend money are a lot of the people already playing the beta religiously: they are dedicated players. The thing is, the most dedicated players already have no problem using TeamSpeak3, Ventrilo, Skype, or any of a huge number of existing VoIP options. In terms of voice services, they are already paying or if they're not paying they're at least satisfied with the current option set.
The class of players who aren't already using VoIP on their computers is the class of players who are already reluctant to monetize Dust 514. This is the problem. As a corporate manager, I have zero desire and less than zero right to go every single one of my corp mates and say: "Hey dude, I don't know how often you play, but you need to pay about $54/year just so that we can organize things out of battle." It just won't happen. The price point is absurd, and the entire concept is rotten. There is a huge group of players who are more casual than the class of players who will willingly fork over money. They only play a few times a week, or else they only get to play for a short time each day. They will not pay no matter what the price. Additionally, that class of players typically doesn't want to download TeamSpeak.
Here's the decision-making for a corporation's dedicated player base:
(a) We can all pay for UVT's at a huge price per year and per person and have only the dedicated player base available for chat because of the monetization scheme.
(b) We can all chip in for TS3 at a much much cheaper price per person and only the dedicated player base will be available for chat.
Which one would you choose?
All the current UVT scheme is doing is removing more casual players from open communications and forcing the dedicated players onto TS. That's all it will ever do. Do you think Eve players mind logging onto TS instead of Eve Voice? They'd probably prefer TS in the first place. Nobody will ever buy the UVT, and a large number of players will simply never get to chat with their mates except in-game or in-squad.
There's an easy, obvious solution. If I can think of it within 24 hours of having seen the original concept, this has to be obvious to CCP.
SOLUTION
The UVT should be an item which can be installed into a chat channel to make it voice-enabled. Anyone with access to the channel can use voice in a UVT-enabled channel.
There are a few technical things to consider. CCP would want to require a maximum number of simultaneous voice chatters per channel for everything except corporate and alliance chats. They would also want to allow the "owner" of a chat channel to remove participants from the chat. The pricing of the UVT still needs to come down. TS provides a much better price point for a 24/7 server with lots of clients than does a cost of $54/year for a single channel.
What does this change do? It shifts the cost from the casual players to the people who are willing to monetize. Those are dedicated corp leaders and players who want to open up the metagame for everyone. It also involves new players in the conversation directly from their PS3's, and in that way it's worth a lot more to Dust players than TS is. It gives option:
(c) Pay for a UVT channel so that everyone can always chat out of game.
It still puts a pay gate on the chat, so that people don't use Dust as the F2P chat service. It also puts CCP's price point more in-line with reality. Nobody is going to pay $540 for 100 people to be able to constantly chat for a year. In short...it actually works. |
Leither Yiltron
KILL-EM-QUICK
RISE of LEGION
417
|
Posted - 2012.08.15 20:27:00 -
[2] - Quote
The issue, Sam, is that I'll never be able to attend a corp meeting where all the members who want to attend can attend unless they pay AUR. I don't care if it's 1AUR. Some people won't be willing to pay. That means I'll never have the full group of people available to engage in the social aspect of Eve and Dust. Noobies will never feel nearly as involved because they won't aant to pay either. TS is great, but it's ridiculous for me to ask people to get on TS when they applied for a console gaming organization.
All the current UVT system does is guarantee that nobody will EVER pay for Dust comms and that the community will be more fractured than otherwise. It's a lose for CCP, it's a lose for the players, and it's a lose for Dust. |