To whom it may concern,

This message is in regards to one of your investees, CCP Games, and the current crisis involing their premier gaming title Eve Online.

As you are probably aware Eve Online is an MMORPG unlike any other; it offers a persistent, single-instanced multiplayer universe unlike any other, breaking all molds of "industry standard" game design and providing its players a unique, challenging and most importantly, rewarding experience where history isn't fluff and backstory written by hired writers, but constantly generated by a large base of users who are constantly rewriting the story.

But over the past year, many players have become worried that CCP, as a studio, is beginning to change, abandoning some of the principles that made Eve Online such a unique experience and embracing ideas that have shocked and appalled much of its loyal player base. Microtransactions and selling Virtual Goods, and the beginnings of a "Pay-To-Win" system, abandoning their subscription fee-only model have combined with recently exposed instances of contradicting statements and cleverly misworded statements that have resulted in widespread protest throughout the game's community, on twitter, in blogs, and on their own forums as well as in-game.

Two things in particular have set the powderkeg alight in ways that Eve, throughout its 8 year history, have never seen. First was their launch of their Virtual Goods store, the Noble Exchange (NeX), in which items such as virtual shirts, pants, boots and eyewear are available for purchase for anywhere from $15 to $78 (USD), a figure which is unanimously believed to be totolly out of proportion and almost an insult to players -- in a twist of irony, one of the t-shirts available for players' avatars in the NeX Store is worth over $20; shirts purchasable for real-life in the EveOnline.com website are selling for $19.

The second "blow" came with the leaking of an internal CCP employee publication appropriately called "Fearless: Greed is Good?" in which it was revealed CCP is in frank an open dialogue about their plans for microtransactions and possible future implementation of new items and services through it. Among these ideas are schemes to remove long-standing features from Eve Online and "resell" them back to the player for increased profit. If that weren't enough, this sentiment flies in stark contrast to the *public* statements CCP has been making over the past year, including repeated assertions that microtransactions would never be implemented and, once they reneged on that statement, that microtransactions would be for "vanity items" only. In short, over the past year CCP has made and then contradicted two critically important statements to its players, and people are not happy.

What has occured over the past 2 days in nothing short of unprecedented for Eve Online and perhaps gaming history. One thread on the EveOnline.com forums created late last night has exploded and will soon reach 600,000 views and over 6,300 player responses -- all in less than 24 hours. In-game, thousands of individual players have staged "mass protests" in several areas of the game, severely taxing Eve Online's game servers to the point of experiencing erratic connection problems and mass timeouts. These are players from different groups, organizations, corporations (Eve Online's guilds/clans), alliances, and political blocs, all of whom have gathered together for a single purpose -- to let CCP know that they are not happy with the way things are going. These in-game protests started hours ago and as of this writing are still going strong.

The reason I am passing this message on to you is that, as an investor it is hoped that your participation and "influence" on CCP will help save the game we have invested so much of our time and money into for the past 8 years. Eve's playerbase may be small -- it can only boast 400,000 player accounts compared to World of Warcraft's millions -- but it is a unique and exciting game and community unlike any other, particular in its loyalty and dedication to the philosophies that drove the development of Eve Online up to this point. On your website you make the claim that General Catalyst has "a bias for bold ideas against a backdrop of large markets." If this is the case, then I hope the players of Eve Online can count on your support as we struggle to defend the ideals which has made it such a bold and uncompromising experience for the past 8 years in a market of rampant "microtransactionism" and profit-hawking which threaten to forever change and, we fear, destroy the universe of Eve Online.

Sincerely,
The Capsuleers of Eve Online