EVE Online players weren't happy with the high prices of virtual goods in the NeX store, and two leaked documents made things worse. We attended a press conference to get more details from CCP and the CSM.

Why weren't the prices shown to the CSM in advance of Incarna hitting Tranquility? Will the CSM be included in that communication path in future as a formal mechanism?

Gylfason: The CSM is included up to a very specific point. The CSM is an excellent sounding board, but we can't really put this in a position where they start dictating business policy or strategy. When we came to the pricing itself, it was just a process that we took outside of normal development processes, and that's that. I'm not going to say it was right or wrong, that's just the way it went.

Gianturco: From the CSM statement, it should be obvious that the rollout of the Noble Exchange was a debacle from the players' perspective. I believe firmly that CCP should have explicitly stated their tiered strategy and explained that in a dev blog and showed the visual targets for the items. Had they done this, it would have been sorted out. Most of the controversy would have vanished in a puff of logic. We had some contact about the items that were going to go in, but we weren't consulted about the pricing strategy. It appears to me that the Noble Exchange was sort of rushed out the door without a proper stocking of items and proper communication of the strategy.

I don't feel terribly upset about the screw-ups of the Noble Exchange. I am irked that we weren't consulted about the strategy mainly from a perspective of the lack of communication resulting in an inflaming of the player base. At a fundamental level, most of the people on the CSM aren't particularly concerned about the sale of vanity items. CCP could charge $20,000 for a monocle and most of the CSM wouldn't give a crap. We care about keeping gold out of the sandbox.

The CCP statement mentioned that there are no plans to introduce "game breaking" items or enhancements in the NeX store. Is functionality or convenience that are not necessarily “game breaking” going to be sold? Is CCP aware that bypassing the player-run economy to provide anything that can be produced via normal in-game means is game-breaking?

Gylfason: That's actually a very interesting question. I want to take the example of PLEX. Taken out of context, PLEX is a way for you to basically buy ISK with money. People buy it with money, sell it on the market and get ISK out of it. If you were to put it up like that, I would imagine a lot of people, and most people unfamiliar with the subject, would say this is definitely game-breaking. However, it's important to note that there is this arbitrage through the player economy where this is done on a player market. There is no magical ISK spawn. You're not buying ISK directly off CCP. When you go through that process and see the level of public acceptance PLEX has today, I think there's a lot of those things to be mindful of.

You're absolutely right, we can't really go against the player-driven market of EVE, and that's important to keep in mind. What is game-breaking really? I don't think I can answer that in an hour-long interview, not to the extent it deserves. It's important for us to see the CSM for what it is, that we were able to have that conversation over a period of two days. What is acceptable, what isn't acceptable, what are the gray areas, what will we never do, what will we possibly sometime do. And for them to be able to say from an independent position, “hey, we actually agree with CCP, we see with they're going, we approve this plan.” That's my take on it.

Gianturco: I haven't really seen anything that would worry me from CCP yet. If it gets to the point where we discuss something I consider to be game-breaking, I have a long-standing history of going against CCP quite publicly, even before I took over as chairman of the CSM. We will continue to guard the players' interests. I don't get the feeling that CCP right now has any intention of breaking the game. If you got to Reykjavik and meet these people you understand that CCP's policy has been to recruit their employees from people who eat, sleep, live and breathe EVE Online. The reason why there are these leaks coming from within CCP is because of that. From a certain perspective, the employees of CCP would rather do what they think is necessary to defend EVE Online as a game than care about their own jobs. I haven't seen any plans for game-breaking micro-transactions, and I suspect that if any such plans were ever to come about all hell would break loose. But I don't see that in the near-term or as long as Arnar or Stoffer (CCP Soundwave) is around.

How much effort does it take on CCP's part to make an Incarna fashion item like the monocle?

Gylfason: The actual manufacturing of the asset itself is not really difficult. What's difficult is to get the artistic style, especially things like monocles that are very in your face the entire time. It's very hard to get them just right. While the asset production itself does not take terrible long, maybe a few days of modeling and texturing, the concept time can take a very long time. At the same time, you can have much more complex assets that take weeks to properly go through the pipeline of concept, texturing, modeling, outsourcing, all of that. And even with that time, a lot of this stuff can be easily patched through to outsourcing.

Gianturco: That was one of the things that the CSM was quite concerned with and we addressed it directly, and we were reassured. We don't want CCP's actual art department wasting all of their time creating clothes for space dolls. As Arnar just said, it's the sort of thing that ideal for outsourcing.

Given that DUST 514 is going to be driven by micro-transactions, how has this controversy impacted its development?

Gylfason: DUST is a different project being run out of a different office. From what I've seen and what I've talked to people about, it doesn't impact the DUST development schedule or mindset at all.

The Leaks and Controversy

From the standpoint of the CSM, what was it like to be called to the summit in such a short amount of time?

Gianturco: It was a tremendous pain in the ass. Basically the CSM's perspective on this is that all of this could have been avoided with better communication. I think we made it clear in our statement that this has always been CCP's tragic flaw. They're terrible at communicating with the player base and have a habit of creating controversies when if you actually have a decent discussion with proper context, you realize a controversy isn't there.

We were frustrated. We had been there in May, and that summit was great. Due to the leaks and miscommunication from CCP, by the time that we actually got there, we had grown quite worried that perhaps plans had changed regarding game-affecting micro-transactions. In May, there weren't any plans for that. We came to Reykjavik sort of angry and paranoid and we left still torqued off because the trip was a pain in the butt. It was not a fun wine and dine session, it was contentious. We threw an awful lot of punches.

The important thing from a long-term perspective is that we all love EVE online despite its various flaws. It would be a shame for the player base to quite the game in droves over a shadow of a controversy, something that is not actually there. If CCP implemented something like gold ammo and people quite over that, I wouldn't object. In this case, there were no plans for the things people were afraid of. I am glad that the CSM was able to come away from Reykjavik and reassure people that the specter of that level of micro-transactions is just an unfounded fear that was created by all of the leaks and foolishness.

What will happen to Hilmar Pétursson? Will the CSM ever call for him to step down?

Gianturco: I don't think that calling for Hilmar to step down would accomplish a thing. It would be the height of foolishness and a tremendous waste of political capital. I think that the situation with Hilmar's e-mail was kind of a funny thing. If it hadn't been leaked, we would have never seen it. I was enraged when I was on EVE Radio and it first leaked and I read it, and I still think that the community would like to see an apology from Hilmar in some capacity.

After every expansion, Hilmar sends out an e-mail as a pep talk to all of the employees. From what I saw when I was in Iceland, part of the reason why he was sending that kind of an e-mail is your average CCP grunt who has nothing to do with the foolishness behind the rollout of the Noble Exchange and the communications errors stemming from that are really feeling beaten down. The average people who I hang out in bars with at CCP, they're shell shocked. Hilmar's e-mail was clearly intended as a pep talk to try to make the best of an ugly situation.

That said, I think the player base took something very valuable from that e-mail. They demonstrated their ability for actions, not words. Not just with the riots in Jita, which were amusing but not particularly relevant, but more importantly with mashing their unsubscribe button. When players begin to react to a controversy at the level of unsubscribing from the game, CCP listens very quickly. I think that is quite useful going forward.

In the statements, the CSM mentioned the leaked e-mail, while CCP avoided it. Does CCP acknowledge how much damage it did and can we ever expect an excuse? Or is it "business as usual"?

Gylfason: CCP has always fostered very open, honest and blunt internal and external communication. I don't really think it would be right for us to excuse the way we do business as a company or excuse the dialogue of internal communication.

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