EVE General Discussion

If it is trendign up, its a pretty feeble trend/

Alliance tournament and new Delve war probably got a few people to log in again and have a look, but they arent long term drawcards.

Its a brave call to say its turning around, i would give it another month before making any claims.

If it was that simple eve would be a very boring game. Doing missions/incursions is not a separate part of the game. It still affects the other players. It generates isk, modules and lp store items. On the other hand generates very little ship/clone losses. So having too many people doing nothing but missions will create an oversaturation of those items. And this will be infinitely worse if mission runners (or even miners) become immune to ganking.
There's a very fine balance between item creation and destruction. Ideally every item should be created through manufacturing and the sole pve activity should be limited to npc bounties and base material harvesting.

It is that simple though. UO was released in 97 and since that time the vast majority of MMO's have had much higher PVE populations than PURE PVP populations.

What most of those games include is a PVP area for people to go to that like to participate in that style of play when they are in the mood.

EVE is just about the only MMO I know of that's PVP all the time. Add those thoughts together and you should reach the conclusion that EVE would have a lot higher population base if it spent just a small portion of it's focus on providing a PVE area.


Now, lets get back to your theory that mission runners are bad for the economy. Incursions generate lots of ship losses, I rarely flew for a few hours without seeing some kind of wreck. I realize missions don't generate nearly as many losses but they do generate ISK spent on ships. How many mission runners have just one BS and nothing else? Most of the time you buy upgrades and expand your collection of ships as you try different techniques or just have a hankering for something new. Whether or not the previous ship was lost or stored in a hangar doesn't change the fact that a new ship was purchased.

Don't forget though the earlier statement about PVE players looking for PVP on their own terms. That takes ships too, ships most PVE'ers are more than happy to lose because they are looking for some different excitement. Then once they lose the ships and have their fun they go back to running missions so they can do it all over again.

Finally, there's pretty much no such thing as over saturation in EVE since you can reclaim modules into minerals. Once the price gets low enough the minerals have more value and the modules disappear until the price climbs. People making the T2 modules aren't out of a job and most mission runners use T2 fits or better. In the end having a PVE exclusive area won't hurt EVE in any way, it will just make the gankers have to take on some risk and find a target that actually is ready for a fight.

P.S.- I honestly wouldn't mind of missions were pure ISK, faction, and LP rewards with no salvage. Just bump up the bounties to compensate for the lost income and it's all good. I think the pending changes to mining ships will go a long way to helping people feel more at home in hi-sec as well. I've got no problem with everything being manufactured, to include only BPC's from LP stores, but that doesn't mean PVE has to be excluded.

Probably my last reply for a bit, but I do enjoy this topic of conversation.

The assumption that PVE = bigger population isn't an assumption. Go take a look at the population numbers for MMO's with safe PVE areas versus the numbers for MMO's that are PVP all the time. PVE = higher population is a fact. Heck if you look at the last population density released for EVE you'll see that the PVE area has higher population. Again a fact.


What is competitive about running missions? Fighting for the salvage afterward? The noctis has pretty much eliminated the need to fight over salvage. Not to mention the nerf to salvage itself was a nerf to the competition aspect of missions.

I know it's tough to believe, but not everything in a game has to be a competition. Sometimes people just want to sit quietly, chat with friends and make a little progress on their goals. There is absolutely no need to force those people to cater to someone else's playstyle especially considering just how big of a chunk of the EVE universe is devoted to allowing and encouraging PVP to happen.

Its amazing isn't it, ccp remove insurance for suicide attacks, buff concord, remove multi-attack suiciding, make war deccing more expensive, make defensive war deccing essentially free, limit baiting in starter systems, announce a major tanking buff to mining ships, add mechanics to counter neutral rr, render contracts (and thus most scams) far less important and yet somehow they are turning eve into greifer online.

They even completely broke the ui just to make can flipping harder

Compare that chart to this one and the numbers don't add up.

How can you have a steady subscription curve but the online numbers have steadily been dropping for a year?

You seem to have a correlation =/= causation issue. There are many reasons those MMOs are more popular, PvE content is a very small one.

And even if they have been dropping, that could be explained by people playing less hours at a time or being spread more across the world. Also the banning of bots running all day would have an effect on that as well.

It's not just the bots who are banned that are making the numbers go down. The botters who are not getting caught are now running their bots for significantly fewer hours (8-10 vs. 20-23 1/2) than before CCP Sreegs started going after them last year. The numbers are actually shrinking further as the latest push that began at the end of February is even more effective. Some botters are actually only running their bots 5 days now instead of 7 to try to avoid the banhammer.

Ah but I'm not a Geordie, I'm a Southerner by birth, only been here for a few months.