Jita Park Speakers Corner

No, you're posting zero content trolls. Pretty obvious ones at that.

If you have nothing relevant to say, maybe you should keep it to yourself.

You're also derailing the conversation -- probably deliberately.

What is and is not brought up is absolutely evidence of priorities. Who in particular brings what up and when is evidence of the relative priorities of the individual.

A trivial answer: the default state for a 10 year old MMO is "shut down, maybe a few unofficial private servers running somewhere". Compared to that, stagnating at around half a million subscriptions and and average of 33k characters logged in at any one time on TQ (plus an unknown number on Serenity, probably in the 5-7.5k range) looks pretty good.

We could question whether it is necessary for EVE to grow much larger. Instinctively of course we want our chosen hobby to be successful and popular, but do we need it? What do we, the players, get from it exactly? That's a harder question to answer.

With respect to Ripard's excellent article a number of thoughts occurred to me in response. The main one is this: EVE is qualitatively different to other MMOs in that there are a very large number of people who are interested in what happens within the game (as Ripard mentions). In comparison, when was the last time that you say an unironic article about something that happened in SW:TOR or Runequest or WoW. I'm going to go with "never". No one who doesn't play those games gives the tiniest of dambs that someone completed a raid 30 seconds faster than the previous record or whatever.

In comparison, EVE has a large audience of people who are fascinated with what happens in game, and I'm pretty sure that this audience is larger than the number of people who are making those things happen. No one cares about what Empire Mission Runner #46,184 does unless he appears as the victim in an unusually spectacular gank, because he's not doing anything different that can be done in dozens of other MMOs. They care about what the big coalitions do, the space-politics, the wars, the treachery and alliances and the metagame; they care about the truly ingenious scammers and corp thieves, the social engineers and so forth. They care about the unique and dramatic player interactions that are only found in EVE.

The thing is that being one of these happeners, these movers and shakers, takes a lot of talent (for want of a better word), and also the time and the willingness to actually commit to do so. And that's a pretty small subset. It may be that pretty much all the people who are (1) interested in EVE and (2) have that talent/motivation are playing it already. Obviously there's some turnover as players "retire" and fresh young talent joins, but I think it's quite likely that the available players are pretty much fully employed.

In that case, there is an obvious opportunity for CCP to increase the size of the EVE business. And that is to focus not on increasing the number of "happening" players, but on developing and monetising EVE as consumable media - comics, fiction, anime, mini-series, figures, streaming big battles, interviewing perpatrators of spectacular crimes, etc. In short, to start mining that halo of "rather read about it than play it" for money directly, rather than trying to square the circle of getting sub money out of people who don't actually want to play EVE.

Of course, as you will immediately realise that also has some pretty dramatic implications for what direction EVE the game will take.

And that's the conclusion I'm leading up to. In my opinion EVE is stagnating because for the last half decade for so, CCP has been trying to have their cake and eat it. Rather than commiting to a direction for EVE and developing towards it, they've been trying to tell one story to Empire Mission Runner #46,184 and another story to the pirates who want to gank his officer-fitted Golem. They've been trying to develop the narrative of the dark, deadly, dramatic, player driven universe while at the same time they've been unable to resist trying to get some of that "but don't want to play it" money into their wallets by making it more and more possible to play EVE without actually playing it. (ie: by playing WoW in space).

So it's quite possible that CCP would be better off with a smaller, better focused player base that generates lots of exciting, monetisable media content and doesn't care a fig for expensive-to-develop PvE content. Or it may be that the commercial future lies in converting those millions of departing WoW players into WoW-in-space players. But just as it's rather difficult to get parents to bring their kids to a themepark that's advertised as having lots of pedophiles and pickpockets, it's also going to be difficult for CCP to grow EVE by trying to do both.

Wondering where you got this from. Was it because I was responding to a troll who just repeatedly says "baseless" with no other content, while I write paragraphs describing exactly how I draw my conclusions and the logic behind them?

It would take again, concrete examples of CSM's advocating for a change that would be:

1) Detrimental to their own individual power group/alliance/coalition/whatever
2) Positive for the game as a whole

secondly the fact that a csm may advocate mostly or solely for changes that benefit their own alliance is not indication of corruption

You've been most helpful in relieving me of that burden.

You tried really hard.

unless shown otherwise, yes, just a coincidence

and yet, no support