EVE General Discussion

Drop in numbers is a non issue. CCP just needs to reduce skill training time and throw up more adds. Ta da... A bunch of new people with higher retention rate.

In my opinion, bitter vets need to get off the high horse and realize that your training time isn't proportional with retaining higher quality players. It just annoys the hell out of new subs because they have to pay 15 a month for 2 years to not suck in this game.

Now, some of you read that last sentence and already shut down my argument in their head. Before you furiously refute that statement and then suffer a panic attack, wipe the foam from your mouth and understand that every EvE player and their mother knows that you can be effective within a few months and be competitive. BUT NEW PLAYERS DO NOT SEE IT THAT WAY. There's a reason why flash games congratulate you every 5 seconds when you do something mundane. There's a reason why casinos have bells and whistles every time you pull a slot machine handle. There's a reason why CCP added the holding-a-newbs-hand Opportunities notification system. If the psychology behind the carrot on the stick needs to be broken down to you, carry on with your flaming of my post.

We need to stop dissuading players from keeping their subs active because we tell them with excruciating detail the exact length of time they need to train in order to have a fully effective character.

I have experienced this phenomenon of new players quitting time and time again. Only one of my 4 friends that I convinced to make trial accounts actually subbed. He then stopped playing because "there's no point." That in a nutshell explains why EvE has terrible retention rate. There really is no point in playing EvE if you full-heartedly believe that you need to train for endless months in order to be able to do something 100% perfect. You are not going to change this consumer behavior and EvE needs to change in order to adopt a compatible game model.

Bottom line, what I propose is simple. Manipulate the dumb behavior of consumers who enjoy bells and whistles(in this case that means faster training times) to have them believe they are not wasting time and money. Then throw up some adds and let the sandbox free to accommodate the new players.

As a closing note I just want to say this: We have an awesome sandbox, which at a time used to treat everyone fairly. However, now our sandbox punishes you the longer you wait to subscribe and start training. This is a disastrous way to treat consumers. Some people entertain the notion of pulling us all back down to 0 SP and restarting the game. There's no need for something so chaotic. Just help the new players reach the higher tiers of gameplay faster so they feel included in our shenanigans.

What did they take from you via changes to standings?

Back in the day when the average SP difference wasn't so pronounced.

It infuriates me that people are so thick headed that they don't realize a game with character progression based on real time becomes disproportionately more and more unfair to new players as it ages over a decade old.

The length of training has to scale with the age of the game.

Other MMO's have already addressed this by gearing all of their content to the end game and speeding up character progression to meet up with the existing player base. We don't even need a million+ players, doubling our current numbers will be enough to revitalize the game.

How do you decide how much to speed up training time? Training time has already been sped up you know, when learning skills were removed and baked into our default attributes. The SP required to be decent at probing was also drastically cut. And I think it is now faster to get into mining barges as well? I know for sure that the Orca was made much easier to get into. We also only have to train a ship class to lvl 3 to be able to train the next size up. Didn't the requirement used to be 4? Etc.

CCP has mentioned they may consider starting players out with 1-2mil SP as well. But this will still not appease new players who think that capital ships are an endgame to aspire to. And the people who think they have to "catch up" to vets just don't get it, and never will. Personally I'd be fine letting everyone fly all the ships right off the bat. Fly whatever you can afford to lose, from day 1. But that would probably cause the decline to enter into... Critical Stage TURBO RAPID X!!!1... since people wouldn't be strung along by carrot and stick of the training queue as much.

Yeah, like I mentioned in my post, a bunch of stuff unrelated to being a PvEr and running missions. Players uninterested in running missions were being forced to do so by CCP, in order to access things useful to PVP and industry. So players created a handful of specialty corps to circumvent these requirements and render them irrelevant. Being nonsensical and now irrelevant, CCP removed the requirements. The average PvEer/missioner has lost absolutely nothing. It is not a nerf to PvE.

That's nonsense. Other games you are talking about have vertical progression. EVE is a horizontal skill system. Anyone that thinks there is a never ending "catch up", describing it like that, is out of touch with this game. Or they are industrialists that feel it unfair they have no high-end BPO's.

Back in the day when the average SP difference wasn't so pronounced.

It infuriates me that people are so thick headed that they don't realize a game with character progression based on real time becomes disproportionately more and more unfair to new players as it ages over a decade old.

They have preconceived notions of "maxing out" skills in order to be good. I am saying that it's this incorrect way of thinking that makes new players leave because they do not balance their skill training well enough.

However, I also believe that the skill training necessary to be effective in the game in all things needs to be reduced in order to accommodate for the game's age.

Joe had a toy. It had costed him effort to get it.
Jack wanted the toy, but couldn't be arsed to *effort* for it so figured ways of gaming the system to use the toy without earning it.
Then Mommy decided that since Jack's fraud was prevalent, it made no sense to ask *effort* and thus gave the toy for free.

Joe then lost nothing else than feeling stupid to have put effort to earn the toy, but that didn't mattered since Mommy always had loved Jack better...

So really, it's the new players that infuriate you since they're the only ones who suffer from that misapprehension about how the game works?

EVE's skill system is (accidentally?) ingeniously designed to completely remove exactly that problem: not only is catching up very easy — it is unavoidable, to the point where it almost becomes an inapplicable concept. Instead, the exact opposite happens: it becomes disproportionately more fair to new gamers as the old ones age. The old ones have long since passed the threshold where their additional provide any tangible advantage, in part due to the exponential cost for increasingly marginal benefits that the skill system is built around, and in part due to how there's a hard cap on how much SP can actually be used at any given time.

This is already the case. The only problem is that those new players need to be taught the skill system. It is a knowledge problem, not a game-mechanical one. It is easier to be effective with less training than it has ever been before. Reducing it further will not actually do anything other than reducing it for the sake of reducing it, and that's not a good or sensible reason. The knowledge problem will still remain and the threshold for what the player see as “agreeable levels” (or, more accurately, disagreeable times) will just increase to match the new times.