EVE New Citizens Q&A

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

While we're down from January last year for concurrent connections, the current trend is upwards.

Not all changes to EVE are great sure, but to put it in perspective, EVE has been dying for what, 13 years now? Despite a whole heap of changes since birth. The new skill injectors are shaking things up in any case, many people are very happy about them, others extremely unhappy about it, some longtime posters have even deleted their characters over it (though I'd wager this is an extreme minority). The new Citadels are coming in a couple months, which is something people have been looking forward to for a very very long time (POS mechanics are dumb as ****). Capitals are also getting a massive rework to go along with citadels which should be interesting for a lot of vets as well.

From what I understand CCP seems to be doing okay financially, and EVE is their only real moneymaker so they have one hell of an incentive to keep it alive and kicking for a good while longer.

I think it very unlikely that EVE will just roll over and croak in the near future. I'm biased, but I say join up and enjoy.

What was so bad that created that huge spike in 2010?

And Steve......What is a CSM (excuse my ignorance)

CSM is the Council of Stellar Management; players go through elections (all active accounts vote) and form a Council which then gets special communication channels with CCP devs, and also visits to Reikjavik to discuss game development. We get a way to send our comments and wishes to CCP directly, they get some focused player feedback, and publicity.

The Incarna expansion was a huge disappointment and rage because of a number of reasons:

- CCP was only doing 2 major patches per year back then, rather than the monthly patches they have now.

- They chose to implement first person avatars, but instead of any functionality or gameplay they gave us 1 room that we couldn't exit and no functionality to the avatars other than walking around the room. And to do this, they had to increase the minimum system requirements. Behind the scenes, their HQ artists and devs took months to implement the 1 room, and then the graphics artists in their satellite office came in and added the other 3 races' rooms in a few hours, showing them up. The satellite office was later closed.

- There was also a leaked internal letter talking about their plans to introduce microtransactions and charge for everything; since it was an internal memo, it had unfiltered thoughts about charging us and revealed the company's greed (all businesses function on greed, but you don't let the customer see it).

- They released the NEX store, with overpriced clothing items ($1500 for a monocle on your avatar).

Eve is still trending up, but the old metric isn't as useful anymore. CCP used to brag about accounts and we used to watch active accounts on tranquility march up and up. But many accounts were really not extra players but alt accounts.

Then CCP introduced multi-account skilling. Since before you HAD to have multiple accounts if you wanted to train multiple characters, this reduced the need for many extra accounts. At that point active accounts began to decline. I've seen no indication that CCP has been suffering declining profits, and plex was well over double what it was before multi-account skilling came into effect.

This last major release has introduced skill extraction/injection. I expect another decline in active accounts, but people now have incentive to spend hundreds of dollars more on their accounts than ever before. So while there might be another decline in accounts as players start to use their alts as SP farms, EVE looks to have just become significantly more profitable per account.

So no, I really don't see eve dying. But I do forsee active accounts declining further, unless people decide that making new accounts for SP farms is a better option. So many characters are being cannibalized right now for SP it's not even funny.

2014 and 2015 were not good years for ccp with users seeming to be bleeding from the game. But Eve seems to have hit its floor. CCP appears to have finally got a handle on things with user numbers seeming to stabilize and actually trend upward. OFC CCP has a lot of up coming opportunities to screw things up. For instance, there appears to be some thought to making that horrible new camera mandatory. With CCP I just always assume the worst and when things turn out a little bit better then my expectations (e.g. i grew used to the new pac man icons), i'm happy.

Well I've got most of my accounts paid for the next two years or longer. I do not think the game is going anywere.

I never understood these kinds of posts. A game is either fun to play or it is not. I fail to see what other people are doing has to do with if the game is fun or not. I understand that it is an MMO and you need other players but as long as there are at least over a certain minimum I fail to see how that matters.

A couple things that you should know about Eve:

Eve is one of the oldest MMOs. I came out about 6 months before WoW did.

Eve's numbers were on a slow steady climb for years and years until they flubbed the walking in stations patch a few years back. However since that time the game has been coming back as far as I know.

Eve has never been a huge game like WoW with 18 million subs. However with everyone playing in the same universe you have far more people to interact with than any other game's individual "realms" or servers or whatever you want to call them.

As a personal note on my real world experiences as an Eve player:

When people that I meet in the real world find out that I play Eve I often get reactions from people that have heard about or read about the game. What they have heard and read are always way far off from what the game really plays like. Usually they tell me things about the game that are the exact opposite of what the game is really like.

About Eve in general:

Eve is very very different from other MMOs. You can not apply anything that you have experienced from other MMOs to Eve. I would be willing to go into more depth on this if you like but I'm not going to write a text wall on the topic unless requested.

However what is more important is that to understand this game you need to play it. If you play the game and give it an honest try and don't like it what have you lost? I would say that you've not really "lost" anything.

If you would like to try the game mail me either in game or through Eve gate ( which is the same mail system ). I would be willing to give you a refer a friend code. Then you would get a 21 day trial. If you add one month I would get a PLEX that I would be willing to give to you in game so that would be another month. So basically for $15 you'd get 81 days of game time.

Also if you would like to talk about the game and how it is and such either post questions in this thread or again Eve mail me and we can figure out a way to get a conversation going. I'll gladly offer you any advice I have in what ever medium we can work out, mail, text, voice or whatever.

Good one!

EVE Death-o-Meter

EVE has been dying since launch in 2003.

It will probably be dying for another decade or more.