EVE General Discussion

Eve has been dying since 2003...

That said recently CCP seems to have been shifting the game towards a more casual audience with a lot of features being dumbed down for the masses, slipping in micro-transactions, and changing their business model more towards pay 2 win.

Eve has evolved since it was created. What it was and what it is and the difference between the two is not an easy question to answer really and its not a short answer. In general eve is more softcore than it was a decade ago. Its easier to get started. Easier to make isk, and less ruthless. The hardcore crowd has changed into a more casual player base. People either had to adapt or die and so does eve. You cannot sustain memberships on a hardcore crowd when you have to compete with p2w mobile games and people who generally spend less time on proper computers than they did a year ago. This recent post may be relevant to this question.

"Eve is dying" is really just trolls, or people who do not understand MMOS and how they work fearmongering and doomsaying.

There are a few ways to look at this: One, The total number of subs which has mostly increased on a year to year basis. Two, the number of active logins over a period of time( weeks months years) at a certain point in the day( Peak EU, Peak US, etc., 2 hours after DT). Three, the number of unique account holders which tells you how many actual people play eve.

The number of subs or other transactions is important for the health of CCP, at least their Eve dev team(s). The more money they bring in the more they can do with the game. CCP is one of the few game companies that actually reinvest a lot of their income back into their product. Most just make throw away games now. Milk it for a few years and toss it. I would say this number is up or stagnant from 8-9 years ago when i started.

The number of logins at a given point is important for the health of the player population. If logins are to low then their is less interaction and players feel like they are playing a grindy solo player game. If they are to high... they cant be to high. I would say the number is about the same as when i started. I remember the day we hit 26k people online peak US evening time everyone was talking about it. I have seen it hit 26k fairly recently during peak.

Unique account holders can also tell you the health of a game. If a lot of multiple accounts are the norm and you lose one holder it has a much bigger affect because they have a bigger slice of the pie. P2W games survive on very few players that spend a lot of money.

Revenue is the ultimate factor in determining if a game survives and how long it will survive. CCP has used a combination of additional revenue techniques with some lean processes to make things more efficient. Lean process would be getting rid of the in game browser as it requires a lot of manpower to keep up to date and out of game browsers work fine. That frees up devs and revenue to be spent on other things.

Overall Eve tends to weather downturns better than the game market it is part of. That tells you its pretty healthy.
Epic battles are not common, which is why they are epic. And the battles that take place depend on a variety of factors. For example World War Bee happened because a rich player wanted to relieve goonswarm of its space. Goonswarm has been a powerhouse so to speak for a decade? or more. Its circumstances like these that cause epic battles/events. Another epic battle happened in B-r5rb about 2.5 years ago. It was so epic it has its own wikipedia article. There are battles with over 100 total ships losses daily...usually multiple times a day. Several battles a week with more than 200 ship losses and a couple a week with more than 400. Though it really depends on whats going on in null. Null is like Earth. It may be relatively quite for a while and then all hell will break loose and then quite down for awhile. Generally pvp, at least in sov null, is pretty healthy.


then you are doing it wrong. excluding the fact that its usually cheaper to actually work more hours at a real job and buy plexes and sell them, there are many ways to make a ton of isks.

Eve is like the real world. You have your hourly wage jobs, AKA: The grind. Mining and various pve combat are the mainstays of this. These are just like working a 9-5. They provide a steady income of isk/hr, but you are not going to get rich off them. Experience, skills, and better tools can increase you income per hour but its still generally going to not make you rich. You are essentially a wage slave.

The real money comes to those who think outside the box. Who use game mechanics to their advantage but still stay within the scope of what is allowed. These are the people that often make CCP change game mechanics and nerf things. One of the most basic examples of this we will call treasure hunting. You could grind rats all day in missions and make a wage. Or you could hunt for specific high paying modules in sites and possibly make a payday. There are many ways to make a payday but its not steady and you need skills that you dont train. Real life skills, creativeness, the ability to understand game mechanics and people. Things like that.

And this is why no intelligent company takes the GD section of their forums seriously.

I love how in every single game I have played - without exception - the General Discussion section of that game's forums is always the place to find the most negativity about the game.

These answers make me laugh. Bitterly.
"EVE was hardcore before, now it's for the carebears" etc...
Well, sorry to break your dream, but EVE has always been pay to win. One player paying for multiple accounts, multiboxing, is pay to win. EVE is not less hardcore than before, because it has never been hardcore : EVE is all about real life money.
Yes it's getting worse and worse because CCP want to milk the concept as much as they can.
You'll see players boasting about the way they "solo PvP"... with three accounts, having their own little private fleet...
Or players buying PLEX for ISK, 100M SP characters, SP injectors, and who then come to show off here, explaining us how we are losers, how they win at EVE...
That's the reality of EVE.
Then there are the small ones, the poor ones (in real life), or the ones who take it as a game and don't want to invest hundreds in a game. The ones who pay one sub, nothing more, and have fun with what they have, and don't try to tell others how to play. These are the people i respect in EVE.

If your concerned about investing money and time in a game that might be dying, dont. CCP has committed to "Eve Forever" and continues to invest heavily into Eve. They recently just bought new servers for, i think, the second time since Eve went live. Eve will almost definitely be in here in 5 years and probably in 10 years.

The question is, really, will it be an Eve you enjoy playing? No one knows.

I was gonna reply to the OP,

But now i don't have to, this reply about sums it up...

The "dumbing down" of game mechanics has hardly changed my experience or behaviour in the game itself. Eve has always been a knowledge-based game and sometimes some obscure mechanic gets removed or altered. People made a huge fuss about not having to press ALT when probing anymore, but those things only affect succes chances slightly: you are still going to be able to prove down someone that doesn't know the tells of getting dropped on. In that sense, Eve is still pretty brutal. There are just a few more tells nowadays.

Actually the game has a lot going for it, and you have the right attitude for it, just treat the game as everyone wants to kill you to get a green killboard, or everyone wants to scam you for your ISK etc. and you will be fine, it is a great game to test yourself against in terms of a challenge, but once you get to work out the game and how to make yourself difficult to kill it becomes damn easy.

There are issues, certainly hunting has been made easier, the HTFU groups are always moaning about nerfs to their easy play style and hence from them you get most of the Eve is dying rubbish. People who are stupid carebears have left for other games, yeah, but it still has a core of players who play because they invested so much time into it, like me.

Some of us will get fed up and drop out for a while, but we come back, then after a bit do something else, to be honest I have gone totally passive income and spend most of my time chatting and am still having fun, every so often I decide to shoot a ganker, great stuff....

Uh...riiiiiiiiiiight

It has changed.

Some are for the better. There used to be lots of hidden flags, hidden timers, bugs, kinks, exploits and undocumented stuff. You would have to find some kind person to mentor you through it or have no hope. Most everyone agrees this is a good thing.

Other ways are obvious changes down to cater to the tears. Buffs to barges and freighters. Nerfs to ECM. Frigate based sov system. Basically anything that changes after a flood of tears, or causes tears after the change, you can bet it's been dumbed down.