Lock-out Looming for Many EVE Players

With the end of February drawing near, many EVE players may be facing the inability to enter the game we all love so much...

Back in January, the Incursions expansion launched with the inclusion of the much anticipated new Character Creator, the forerunner of Incarna.  Love it or hate it, the Character Creator is on the leading edge of technology and has no equal in the gaming world.  Even though it launched with a limited amount of hair styles and colors, skin tones, accessories, and clothing for the characters, and its fair share of bugs, CCP has indicated that there will be more in the coming months and has worked on correcting many of the problems.  Players have even been given opportunities to redo their portraits if they weren't happy with the first attempts.  But there is one problem that CCP has been all but silent on...

Many players are completely unable to access the Character Creator.  When attempting to load the CC, the loading indicator advances to the end of the bar and freezes, and the Character Creator window remains black and empty.  Over the past weeks since the launch, many suggestions and workarounds have been posted in numerous threads in the forums and CCP Support has replied to petitions with possible solutions as well but for most of us (yep, I'm one of the unlucky cusses) none of these 'fixes' has worked.

CCP has quietly acknowledged the existence of the problem in one line of the Known Issues for Incursions 1.1.0 shortly after launch but has otherwise shown no indication that they are investigating the issue, much less working on a fix.  The fact that there is a wide spectrum of system configurations affected by this seems to indicate that the problem is not in the end-users' graphics abilities but rather something in the coding.  And unlike the SSE Issue which was explained and players were given a heads-up (albeit a short one), there has been no explanation nor a revised set of system requirements for EVE or the Character Creator.  It must therefore be assumed that since CCP has been so silent on this, that whatever the cause is, it cannot be changed and is in all probability necessary for the upcoming Incarna.

Which brings us back to the looming lock-out... The Character Creator launched with the caveat that players would have a month grace period in which to create their new avatars.  During that time, their portrait in-game, in the forums, and in EVE Gate, would be the blank 'mystery' avatar since the old portraits were removed with the launch.  At the end of that grace period, players who have not created their new avatar will not be able to log-in without going through the Character Creator.  They will be locked out!  The thirty days has already passed since launch but we must assume that the end of the grace period is drawing near and the announcement could come any day now.  This is going to affect a much larger portion of the EVE community than did the SSE requirement upgrade.

Even if you aren't affected by this or if you are one of those who can access the Character Creator but are still having issues within it, or even if you just don't want to use the CC on principal, I'm asking you to go to my post (posted under my other account's main character - Rhok Relztem) in the Assembly Hall forums - [Proposal] Character Creator option - use randomly generated portrait - and add your support.  The tl;dr version is a proposal to add an option for using a randomly generated portrait relevant to your character's race, bloodline, and gender without entering the Character Creator, and a warning that this option will expire with the launch of Incarna, but until that launch, the player will have one redo available to create their own full avatar.  Locking players out of the game for a feature that has no affect on game play currently is not fair to anyone, especially since there has been no set requirements for using that feature and it is the ONLY feature that these players cannot access.  In all cases, the game itself runs just fine on their systems.

We could really use your support.