EVE General Discussion

Thread has graphs, must be legit.

If you hover over the graphs then you get the dates in a pop-up. It reads from right to left and indicate that EVE is trending UPWARD.

fail

Summer is irrelevant? Are you sure you haven't taken a heavy blow to the head at some point? How many national holidays take place around that period of time every year worldwide? Should also be noted that according to an IPP report from 2011, the most popular time period for working men and women to take a summer holiday was in the last week of May through to the first week of July.

Being a 33 year old man with no kids, I can tell you that I and many people I know of my age, prefer to take our holidays slightly before or slightly after, peak season. This way we can avoid the real "Summer Season" when everyone takes their screaming children away for a week of sunburn and tantrums. But of course, I guess I and my friends are the only thirty somethings in the entire western world that do this......Summer is far from irrelevant, except to those who wish to believe the sky is falling no matter how much contradictory evidence there is.

I'm talking about the annual slump that takes place in May leading in to June. Looking at the PCU records dating back to 2007, seem to indicate a drop in numbers during THIS period, which is what people like the OP are using as ammunition to fuel their "OHMERGERD TEH SKY IS FALLIN" machine. The middle to the end of June is when numbers seem to rise, but that's not the time frame that people like the OP are focussing on, so why are you?

I love how Jester predicts 1 thing right(which everyone but the carebears already had figured out, that Incarna was killing EVE) and suddenly everything he posts on his blog is absolute undeniable fact.

He's an insightful dude, I'll give you that, but him posting it in his blog is far from making it a fact.

Players logged in has little to do with actual subscribers.

It means the same when we're talking about the mythical summer slump — the one that doesn't happen during the part of the year called summer (ok, fair enough, it's winter on the southern hemisphere, but norherncentrism is the norm around here anyway ). May is not part of that part of that season.

You're just arguing the reason why the summer slump doesn't happen and saying that some of those reasons might not apply fully, but that doesn't change the fact that the summer slump is a myth.

…except that what you're talking about isn't the summer slump — the one people expect to happen during the actual summer. That's why the summer slump is a myth: because during the summer, the numbers don't go down as expected, but have historically gone up instead.

You are not arguing what the summer is — you're arguing the reasons why the slump doesn't happen (and, funnily enough, you're using the reasons that are traditionally used to explain why it should happen, even though it doesn't). You're offering a rebuttal to one of the presumptions or guesses why the summer slump doesn't happen: that people are on vacation and have more free time. Whether that's true or not doesn't change the fact that the summer slump doesn't happen. Just because you decide to take your summer vacation early doesn't change when the summer season happens, and during that season, the slump people are expecting doesn't actually materialise. Your vacation planning preferences are of zero relevance to whether or not the summer slump is a myth or not.

The summer slump myth was used liberally last summer (after June 21st) when people tried to explain the post-incarna loss of players by it being “the summer slump”. In other words, they were talking about some supposed slump that was meant to be the norm somewhere around midsummer, but which actually is a myth, since that slump has historically been something a bump instead.

Sitting looking at those graphs, I see a similar slump to the one we have now happening every year, like clockwork and to almost the same degree irrespective of bad expansions to the game. As for me arguing why the slump doesn't happen, I've been pretty clear on what I am arguing. That "Summer" is a flexible term these days, and that a slump does indeed occur on a regular basis at the same time every year. For example, in large parts of Europe and in the UK most people who fit the EVE demographic take their summer holidays, as defined in their employment contracts, during the last week of May in to the first week or two of June. To them and to their employers, this is part of "Summer".

At the opposite end of the scale we have the minority of the EVE demographic, people with children, whose "Summer" historically starts at the end of July and runs all the way through until the beginning of September. For some reason people can only accept that THIS is summer, and that we must strictly follow that set of dates, despite the fact that quite frankly most people do not ever see September as being anything remotely approaching summery.

The end result is that the "Sky is falling crowd" are using flawed information and out of date concepts to back up their "EVE IS DYING OHMERGERD" attitude.