EVE General Discussion

Hardly ignoring that "distinction", it's rather central to my point.

If a character is anywhere, a player put them there. The location of active characters is a direct reflection of the volition of players.

And a quick glance at the map any time will show you where that is.

CCP took data from active characters, character is obviously not classed as "active" if you don't log in as him/her on your account. It would be STUPID to count characters that are currently not logged on.

You can have all the characters you want, anywhere you want, but they are not active unless they are online in game.

I have this guy and an ugly forum troll character on this only account, by your logic if im logged in as Kiteo in Jita then im also logged in as the ugly troll character. Its only a +1 in local not +2.

What ccp did was took the numbers of all locals and converted them into %.

End of the day, the character IS logged in AND he/she is placed in THAT certain region FOR a reason.
That REASON can be different for everyone, but it doesn't change the fact that there are MORE "population" in highsec.

No. CCP's method for counting population distribution is to take a snapshot of characters on active accounts. Whether the characters as “active” (logged in) or not isn't a factor (and would, in fact, be a bad way of measuring things since this would systematically but unpredictably bias the results against people who log few on-line hours, so no, it's not stupid to do this — you get a more accurate number, but one that doesn't measure what you want it to measure).

…and that is what the in-game map shows. It's not what the population distribution percentages measure — they show location of characters on active accounts.

Learn to read. Try again.

No, they're not, for the simple reason that you can place your characters all over the place and still only really play in one location, and the numbers will not reflect this.

Character distribution is character distribution. Player distribution is where the players spend their time playing. The two are separate things. Translating one to the other is indeed quite complex and cannot be done automatically — it requires the player's input to designate what space is “theirs”; it requires complete knowledge about which characters belong to which accounts, and which accounts belong to which players; and it results in a mapping that can turn any character distribution into a vastly different player distribution mapping (again, see the example above, where 66% highsec characters → 100% nullsec players).

…then you might be in null, or you might be in empire, or you might be in both. The numbers can't tell the difference. All the numbers can show is where there are characters. They do not show what the players are doing with those characters. They do not show which character is the main character. They do not show where the players “live”.

Moreover, the numbers do not tell that it's you who are behind those three characters. All they show is that there are three of them. So even your first case isn't as clear-cut as you want to make it: if there are three characters in null, then it tells us absolutely squat about where the player(s) are or even how many of them there are.

Finally, the kind of overlapping you describe is exactly why the whole “the majority of players live in highsec” is nonsense: because it assumes a) there is such a thing as a highsec player and b) that the numbers are counting them. Even if a) was true, b) certainly isn't.

Here:
Identical Twins go out into town. One goes into ice cream shop that has a few people there already, the other goes into toy shop that has less people.
More identical twins arrive, one to ice cream, one to toy shop.


People see that the ice cream shop has more people, they assume that more people like ice cream and that less people want to buy toys.

Forum is broken for me, won't let me post my original reply if i copy it, but Malphilos is conveying my ideas just fine :)

I've been playing for many years and this argument (the one about Null vs High not what Tippia and co are arguing about which I gave up on about 4 pages ago) has been cropping up all the time. If I had an isk for every time I've read a thread like this I'd have almost... well about 30isk really.

Thing is I don't believe that even the most concerted effort by Null sec players will have a significant impact on the preffered playstyle of those that stick only to Highsec. Burn Jita was mightily impressive but CCP could do more to change player habits with a few lines of code and a downtime hotfix then anything we as players could do. I mission and do industry on this character to fund the shiney PvP ships on my other ones. If CCP turned most of Highsec into Lowsec I'd just shrug my shoulders and live in lowsec.

So an active character doesn't count as playing.

It's this kind of nonsense that obfuscates.

If I have one character in high sec and one in null, it doesn't make the least bit of difference where I want to say I am. The reality is reflected in what I actually do. Characters don't log themselves in ( I assume you're not appealing to bots here), don't choose when and where they do, players do. It makes not the least difference what the player may think they're doing.

Not that anyone could show that to begin with.



Uh, if if I have a character in Null and a character in Empire, I have a character in Null and a character in Empire. Since the characters aren't there without my will, I'm in Null and Empire. A is A and all that. Pretty basic.

What's main is immaterial, where I want to say I live is immaterial. What is, that's all that's measurable.



It doesn't matter who's behind the character. That, as you've been so kind to point out, is unknowable. It also doesn't matter how many players are behind how many particular characters. Another unknowable.

The only thing that's measurable is the will of the players which is reflected in the play of the characters. The characters are where the players want them to be.

And that's available to anyone with a glance at the map.

The rest of it's touchy-feely hippie crap. I can say I live in Nirvana and just happen to sleep every single night in the dumpster behind the Chinese restaurant. The reality is I smell like rice noodles.

And no amount of make-believe will change that.

So by your argument, a player who's "forced" - sorry, strongly incentivised - to have a character in hi-sec obviously wants to play in hi-sec.

OK, let's reduce all rat bounty and mission payouts in hi-sec by 95%, and all ore spawns by 95%, and increase trading tax and station fees in high sec by 2000%, and then when hi-sec hollows out and everyone that's still playing is strongly incentivised to do so in lo-sec and null that will be OK because that's where everyone wants to play.

A cyno character is active; no-one is really playing it. A market-watch character is active; no-one is really playing it. A fleet booster at a POS is active; no-one is playing that one either. Ye olde AFK cloaker is active; no-one is playing that one.

Meanwhile, the player is out in null on a roam; in lowsec camping gates; in w-space sneaking up on unsuspecting gas miners.

So no, an active character does not necessarily mean that anyone is playing it and they definitely do not consider themselves “highsec players” because all of their playing is done in null, low, or w-space.

…but that character count tells us nothing of where you are, what you're doing, and where're you're playing the game. Which one is your main is quite important because it decides whether you are a highsec, lowsec, nullsec, or w-space player. If you want to remove those distinctions by saying that you are where your characters are, then congratulations, you've just wiped out pretty much every complaint self-proclaimed highsec players have ever made: highsec players are getting the full attention of CCP; highsec has massive representation on the CSM (including at least the old chairman);

If we're counting players, it most certainly does. As luck would have it, counting players is exactly what people are trying to do, using data that does not count players. You've just explained why the claim that “the majority of players live in highsec” is bunk.

Exactly. All we know is where the characters are. This tells us absolutely nothing about the player population because we don't know who those characters belong to and what the players are doing with them.