EVE General Discussion

I am the lazy carebear filthy casual made manifest. I am the Avatar of non-commitment. I and the spirit of entitlement.

Bow before your new God.

You can not stop me.

And how many of those 450k subscriptions actually provide any money to CCP? Have you thought about that. Hard to estimate, how big chunk of those subscriptions are paid via ISK.

The problem for CCP as a profit making company is, that the player base has to be big enough for them to make profit.
Most of the young whining players don't understand that. They need new players increase income which will eventually provide as new feautures (and improvements) via employing CCP developers. Unless CCP directors get greedy again and only think about short term profits.

You answered your own question: 450K subs = 450K paid accounts.

And they are invasive like cockroaches, you don't see me in Hello Kitti online screaming "This game needs non-consensual pvp" lol.

It's always "casuals" going into hardcore games begging for more attention to casual players (rather than just sticking to casual friendly games, I always ask our EVE casuals why in hell they aren't playing Star Trek Online, a game i play and that is much friendlier to the things they say they want).

No, going to games built for their type of gaming personality is not enough, EVERY GAME must conform, which is why you see posts on EVE and Darkfall forums of casuals "scoffing" at that "psycho neckbeards" who are actually playing games intended for "psycho neckbeards".

Between always-on passive skill training, being able to purchase isk for RL currency, and the nature of ships being about different roles rather than bigger/more expensive = better than, Eve is already massively friendly to casual gameplay. Somewhere along the line, though, "casual" got conflated with "easy", and because of that we see great amounts of whining by so-called "casual" players who really just want everything handed to them with little-to-no thought or effort.

While I agree with you in general (even vanilla WoW did not have 100% safe zones, you could still be killed even in your faction's capital city surrounded by guards if you weren't careful), the numbers are relative.

EVE is "growing" with 450k subs and that is a "success". Well, WoW is "dying" because it went from 13 mil peak and now is probably below 10 mil subs. But guess what? On a bad day, Blizzard makes 22x more than CCP from their game. Which is just a year younger, and significantly graphically inferior. Guess why? They don't treat casuals as crap.

Well, MMO after MMO "fails".

And, apparently you can spin the data.

"“We divide our player base on a game into four categories: Non-repeats, players who come into a game once and bail; repeats who play a game between 2 and 9 times; regulars who play between 10 and 49 times, and the committed players who play 50 or more times. For the top ten games, the 7 percent who are committed are 87 percent of the revenue.”

They're talking about things like the Nex store; people who spend money on in-game items and perks. It's cashflow that's being discussed, not longevity or subscriber base.

Essentially it means that a smaller group of dedicated players are willing to spend more on specific games. Surprise surprise. If monocles are your idea of a successful game (as opposed to a sign of an obviously better class of person), then yeah games that don't sell many are failures.

And EVE, as always, is dying.

Eve treats casual players thousands of times better than WoW. WoW has significantly more players because Eve's high-risk* style of gameplay is far more niche than WoW's far broader appeal. You cannot look to WoW for any lessons unless you're advocating changing what kind of game Eve even is, in which case you'd be asking Eve and CCP to compete directly with WoW and its ilk, which means you'd be a really dumb bad.

* by high-risk I mean guaranteed losses. Your ship blows up? It's gone. No respawns, or "you died you lose 10% durability", it's just gone. Get a new one.

Errr, yes and no.

EVE is complex, and a new player is immediately sentenced to running tutorials for 2-3 hrs. Someone at CCP recently said that EVE has good complexity and bad complexity. Well, shoving a 3 hr tutorial on a new player is pretty bad. Remember how people complained about the instanced tutorial portion of Age of Conan that only took 7-10 mins? Yeah, well, in WoW you got tossed into the same world with other players, and the world was shaped into a tutorial. It was still a tutorial, but one seamlessly integrated into the game world, and you'd be surrounded by other players doing the same thing, instead of sitting in station reading pages of text.

WoW provides a certain amount of guidance early on. Until the player learns the ropes, develops his own playstyle, and then gives the player a choice of what he wishes to do. In EVE, guidance is minimal/nonexistent. Certificates were a step in the right direction, but like so many features left totally unfinished. These things fall under new player experience only though.

The rest of the game though was also very casual-friendly. Think about it. With just 10 mins to play, what can you do in EVE? Not much, right? Anything on any significance? Some PvP? Not bloody likely, right? Well, in WoW in 10 mins you could do a quest or play a PvP match. See? That's casual-friendly. You have little time to play (casual!) or you have a decent amount of time but with frequent interruptions (60 min play session, split into 4 chunks). In EVE, this will severely reduce the number of things you can do, and where you can do them. In WoW, you would still have fun and be largely unhampered by any of it. That's the difference between casual-friendly and not so much.

Am I advocating changing the game EVE is? I guess in a way I am. Don't get me wrong, I don't want WoW with spaceships, but EVE could be better for casuals. There's too many really old game mechanics dating back to 2003. There were reasons for those decisions and mechanics, many of them hardware-related. But now, especially with TiDi working, most of those are largely outdated.

And besides, CCP is a business. EVE is a product. What would be so bad in changing the game and doubling or tripling the game's population? Is it a risk? Yes, but considering that EVE has 4 distinct areas (hisec, lowsec, null and WH), they can use one area as a guinea pig without destroying the game. Certainly beats what they're doing now - the game is stagnating. Yes, it's growing a tiny bit (in my opinion due to growing alt usage) but really, it's stalled.

But you're right in that non-consensual PvP and player looting are a huge minus for many players. It immediately axes off a huge percentage of potential players. And Sci-Fi itself is a niche after all, compared to fantasy/action.



What's the difference?

What's the difference between losing a T1 frig, and suffering 10% durability loss on all your armor and weapons? NONE, that's what! lol

Did you happen to play vanilla WoW back in 2004-2005? I did. As a main tank for a Molten Core raid, I often walked away from it with totally broken armor and weapons. And that's from PvE! When was the last time you suffered severe, debilitating losses in EVE's PvE? But I digress. What did that mean, broken armor and weapon? Well, considering those were epic quality, the repair bill was between 20-25g. To put things in perspective, that's a week or two of heavy farming, for an average player. The entire guild had to chip in to keep the tanks repaired, so we could raid more than once every few weeks. Soooo, how is that any different from losing a ship in EVE?

Every game has losses. In EVE it is portrayed one way, in another game it's another way. Doesn't make it better or worse, or harder and easier. Though there's something to be said for convenience. Good example is Pirates of the Burning Sea. Ship destruction was same as EVE - ship got destroyed, it was gone. But it was just so damn inconvenient to go look for another ship when you lost yours. So what they did, they allowed you to bind "ship deeds" (basically a paper representation of a finished ship, easily portable and redeemable anywhere, but a bit more expensive than ship itself) to your existing ship. So you could have a frigate with 5 deeds linked to it. It had "5 lives", and could be sunk 5 times in a row before you had to go looking for a new ship. Made re-shipping and getting back into the fight much more convenient after ship loss.

P.S. Oh, almost forgot. EVE IS competing directly with WoW and "its ilk". Realize that the world has X gamers on it. Those gamers have N hours every night to play. Those gamers have a choice - play WoW, or play EVE. Since they won't be playing both, and certainly not at the same time. Because unlike in "hardcore EVE", you can't AFK-anything in "easy mode WoW". As such, like it or not, the games ARE competing. They are competing for the players' time. If game A gives more bang for your buck than game B, for your specific amount of play time, style preference and mechanics, then that's what you play. WoW is extremely casual friendly, and caters to an extreme range - from total carebears to insane hardcore gladiators. Hence, 10 mil subs to EVE's 450k.

Contrary to popular opinion, not all game formats are good for F2P/Freemium and monetization.

-Liang