EVE General Discussion

Disturbing to see how all "negative" posts are removed while not breaking any rules. Apparently Incarna IS being repeated. Acknowledging the problem is the first step CCP. Hiding the problems by silencing the messengers will not solve them.

Go shoot the statue in Jita with the thousands of other disgruntled pilots then.

I put the marker a month early. That was pretty stupid of me, but you've got to give me credit for attempting to do it in 5 minutes before work. That said, I am still not agreeing with you. Let me show you why, and first remind you why we are arguing about this in the first place.


This is why we were arguing and you went on to say how Incursion was the start yada yada yada. Now, before I go onto my main point I just wanted to say that subs are more important than active members. If not to us, then to CCP certainly.

http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-2.png

I draw your attention back to this one again (which you have been wilfully trying to ignore). Now, You can argue all you like but no one is going to see an overall downward trend between Incrusion and Incarna on that chart. Please tell me how there is an obvious downward trend in population there, make annotations if you think it will help. Back to active players charts.

http://eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility

Go to the Incursion release on the All Time chart, and take a look at it as you have described. Now imagine what that curve might look like if it were exaggerated, sharper rise with a quicker and deaper fall etc. Now move your eyes over to June 4th 2013 (the release of Odyssey) and tell me what you see. The exaggerated curve you were just thinking of. So at the end of the day the answer to your question


If your talking about active players (because subs weren't going down yet), then the answer is yes. A worse downward trend than before Incarna. Obviously we will have to wait and see if it continues, but this thread is here for speculation after all. I don't even think it will continue, not at the moment. But if we get too many expansions like this, I think it will eventually.

No, I haven't. The posts have just been removed in the clumsy cleaning efforts.

That chart doesn't tell any different story. It shows a downturn from early '11 and onwards. The sources for his numbers are most certainly Fanfest '11 which happened in mid-spring and the numbers were thus collected by CCP somewhere during the early year (say around January or so).

…and I'm being generous here. The data is unsourced, devoid of granularity, and without any clear indication of time. Now, I know where the numbers are from because I was around at the time to hear them, but the end result is that the data is ambiguous and unreliable. Especially compared to the data we do have in abundance — numbers that have historically correlated extremely well with the population numbers
Ok.
2011-01-06: 36,430
2011-01-27: 35,128 ← as close to the Incursion expansion release as possible
2011-02-24: 34,278
2011-03-24: 32,378
2011-04-21: 31,634
2011-05-12: 30,479
2011-06-02: 30,637
2011-06-23: 31,884 ← Incarna is released
2011-06-30: 29,849 ← Jita riots
…
2011-11-24: 24,881 ← Crucible is releaseed

A clear downward trend that started with the release of Incursion, not Incarna. There was a slight upswing of pre-patch hype before the riots set in and the numbers kept crashing.

I see something that has absolutely no relevance to my point: that Incarna was not the simplistic causal chain of events it is often presented as. The trouble with Incarna started one year earlier and was pretty much invisible then. In fact, a big trend that is often ascribed to Incarna in the general narrative of the summer of rage turns out to be largely incorrectly attributed to that expansion.

So to notion that the new 5-year vision is a harbinger of a new Incarna — when the actual Incarna débâcle is so much bigger than just a lacklustre delivery of old promises and when Incarna itself couldn't be spotted when the trouble actually started, much less five years earlier — in nothing short of silly. The OP's suggestion that we can tie together the community trouble and the future vision ignores how the summer of rage was caused and what its actual effects were.

If we were headed for a new Incarna based on the future vision, we wouldn't know yet and the recent upsets would be pretty much irrelevant to the outcome. Conversely, if we were to get a new summer (winter?) of rage from the elements described in the OP, it would be almost completely unlike how Incarna happened.

…and that would be a completely new situation that bears no resemblance to Incarna.

Nope. Eve is spaceships.

Personally I think the main problem with Seagulls vision is that it's very focused on high level alliance game play, and it's difficult to see where the smaller corps and solo players (which make up the majority of the player base) fit in.

The exploration prototype is a more appropriate use of avatars if you ask me. Sounds more fun and dangerous and in the spirit of EVE.

Plus I have a list of people I want to jettison out of an airlock.

Well, personal depots would be useful for solo gameplay if they weren't beacon-like loot piñatas, ready to spoil any safe spot they're deployed into.

CCP never gets it; a solo player needs stealthiness, a gank needs stupid assholes who thought nobody could find their depots and ambush them.

Obviously the gankers got their loot piñatas. Your depot was reinforced? Well boy, it's as good as lost -and your safe spot was wasted too. Go there, you'll be ambushed by a superior force. Bring a superior force... oh wait: you're solo playing, right? If you had a superior force, you would be ambushing solo assholes in their shiny I AM HERE, COME KILL ME!!! beacons...

So it all boils down to how long will take until the players supposedly benefiting from depots learn to not use them.

As for POCOs... they're PvP tools. They serve nothing to people doing PI (even worst than nothing, as they're just disrupting their gameplay). So, hisec gameplay my ass.

This is basically what I have posted earlier and can't be repeated enough.

I was here to see the last real good expansions like i.e. Trinity. Excluding Apocrypha, the next expansions have ALL been either lackluster, incomplete, insignificant or just bad. This certainly can't help the player base grow!

Even more worrysome, considering Apocrypha is the only "recent" very good expansion, is the CCP statement claiming they are not going to do Apocrypha-like "Jesus" expansions any more.

That is: "hey guys you know what? We officially tell you to forget ever seeing stuff like the only good expansion in the last 4 years again!"

See, I greatly miss a POSes redesign, I greatly miss a markets charts UI remake, I greatly miss a T2 invention streamline to not get crazy with 180 clicks a minute.

But


... do we need this with top priority or would we need new great gameplay expansions like we got with Apochrypha?

I mean, it's OK to have regular maintenance and even to get a "100 papercuts little things" expansion every now and then, but what about getting TRUE expansions done again?

By true I mean, with sensible new gameplay we can enjoy for years to come, exactly like we have got with Tryinity and Apochrypha.

You mean, like the prototypes presented, where players hop down off their ships and go explore relic structures and abandoned ships?