The makers of EVEOnline are reaching out to player
representatives after leaked internal documents regarding new,
microtransaction vanity items have led to vocal player denunciations and
in-game demonstrations against the company.

The controversy started last Tuesday, when EVE Online's new Noble
Exchange shop began offering cosmetic avatar items for prices ranging
from $12.50 to over $60, rivaling the price for major ships. These
prices would also represent significant play time in the game's economy,
which melds real world and in-game currency, which are largely
interchangeable in EVE.

But negative player reaction exploded last Wednesday, when EveNews24 posted an internal CCP newsletter titled 'Greed Is Good?',
seemingly detailing efforts to squeeze more money out of players and
plans for further, game-altering microtransactions in the future.

"We want to offer convenience for a price," CCP lead content creator
Scott Holden wrote in the newsletter, adding by way of analogy that "you
can develop a friendship by 'spending' your time, or you can pay to get
the same benefits that friendship would otherwise allow."

Many players responded to the leak by venting their outrage in massive
forum threads and even staging a type of denial-of-service attack on an
in-game trading hub by flooding it with attacking ships.

CCP officially addressed the growing controversy on Friday, when EVE Online senior producer Arnar Hrafn Gylfason wrote in a blog post that the internal newsletter merely represented employee opinions, and not company policy.

Gyalfson went on to compare the pricing for vanity items to fashionable,
$1,000 jeans in the real world and promised future vanity items at
lower price points in the future.

But in a supposedly leaked message to CCP employees posted on EveNews24
Saturday, CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Petursson purportedly called the player
reaction "very predictable" and promised the company would not flip
flop on item pricing in reaction to mere talk from players.

"I can tell you that this is one of the moments where we look at what
our players do and less of what they say," Petursson wrote in the
alleged message. "Innovation takes time to set in and the predictable
reaction is always to resist change."

By Sunday, producer Gylfason had posted another blog
apologizing for the tone of his original post. He also took the step of
inviting the CSM, the game's player-elected representatives to an
"extraordinary meeting" with CCP in Iceland to "help us define and
address the real underlying concerns, and to assist us in defining and
iterating on our virtual goods strategy." The CSM usually meets in
person only twice a year.