EVE General Discussion

Perhaps not, but it is supposed to be profitable, and the fact is Eve has a few hundred thousand accounts (300K???) in a 6 billion dollar market. CCP is a business. It is competing with other businesses. It is wise to read the tea leaves of the market and adjust your strategy accordingly. Whatever Eve is supposed to be, whatever you or I or CCP wants it to be, is completely irrelevant to what the market wants. The market is what pays for Eve - or doesn't pay for Eve, as the case may be.

So the question is: will more people pay for Eve it is is more fair and more friendly? I think so and I definitely do not think you have to turn it into My Little Pony in order to do so.

This is taken from a paper published by Dept of Computer Science & Enggeering at the University of Minnesota. They recieved funding for the project from the NSF and the Army Research Institute:



Churn is the biggest problem facing established MMORPGs. If CCP wants to reduce its churn rate, I assert they need to take a good look at what their competitors are doing and see if they can replicate some of their success by adjusting their products, marketing, goals and corporate culture. According to researchers in the aforementioned study driving your customers away has the secondary adverse consequence of creating a bad name for yourself. I do not see that taken into account in their corporate culture or game design. If CCP wants to realize its true potential - which would result in solidifying the financial futures of its employees and allowing capital to be directed towards future projects - they need to make major changes in order to reduce churn. The first of which being making Eve a place people want to play in despite the fact they do not share the current customer base's proclivities. Eve has some thousands of systems, and I see no reason the entirety of Eve has to be directed at only one type of player. If miners want a section, there should be a place for miners. If traders want a section there should be a place for traders. It makes business sense and I cannot understand why CCP hasn't realized that.

I don't expect most of the people reading this forum to agree. By definition you are non-churners. It is not you CCP needs to worry about retaining, it is the people walking away because they don't like being griefed or the game is too hard or expensive. If CCP is happy limping along, and apparently to many that is either acceptable or they believe its the best they can do, they should continue to do what they have been doing.

Bottom line: I believe that if they want better results they need to change more than game mechanics or improve the technology,they need to change their entire attitude towards their customer base. I could be wrong, but I'm probably not.

EvE was making profit when it had 2k players on prime time.
EvE is making profit with 20k-50k players online 23/7.

If EvE cnages to be WoW in space, it will loose a big chunk of its players, WoW players wont move from their community, The games designed for more casual "fair" play will be by default better designedthen EvE for it, making competition into that market a bad idea.

EvE is not competing for the whole MMO player base, neither is WoW.
EvE is competing for the playerbase looking for a ruthless sandbox game, i think they pretty much got 95% of that playerbase covered and still baptising more every month (except the incarna expansion, witch was kinda WoW:ish compared).

Incarna (witch introduced avatars, and is supposed to be made mostely for the barbie-game, PvE, social aspects witch im personally think its awesome) was pretty much the only expansion that didnt grow number of players for the game since 2003?
Sandbox expensions with more broken and unfair changes that gets fixxed 1-5(lookin at you FW) years later have brought more players in.

So now tell me again how ignoring the playerbase EvE pretty much got monopoly on (sandbox) in this age and trying to change it to compete with the market that no other publisher has succeded in since WoW is a good idea?

Tell me again how history has shown us that EvE needs more Fair game to succeed...

-_-

Regards, a EvE player who has played on and of and always comes back since 2003 - Because EvE is unfair, up to the player to make sure he/shes on the good side of the unfair line.

Problem is some people are to dumb to understand a hint. You gotta come right out and tell them...

…and CCP has chosen to approach that problem by not doing what their competitors is doing and instead build a game with pretty remarkable stickiness. The game never runs out of content because it has no real built-in content to begin with.

What their competitors are doing is exactly the reason why those competitors have burned out in very short order.

They have. That's why the built a game where both of those are quite important. What they haven't done is build a game where each is done in complete isolation, because that would not be very viable in the long run.

CCP is not happily limping along — it's on a pleasant stroll. “Limping along” is what those competitors are doing after they stumbled and broke their ankles one month after release as they tried to do what everyone else was doing (and failing) and thinking that doing the same would suddenly yield different results. Well… some of them are limping along. The rest are already face-down in the mud.

Find a region like Solitude with a very low population. Move your medical clone to one of the stations there (ie Octanneve). I was never approached while mining there. Minerals don't sell as fast, but there is plenty of market to keep you busy.

Mor on what?

You need to brush up on some of the meta game, learn about some of the boundless tools for Eve that are outside of the game. You will never 100% get away, since you are content being sold to others, but you can mitigate you risk somewhat.

Posting in the longest on-going troll thread in the history of the forums.

As it stands this game isn't for morons, but it looks like that's CCP Soundwave's vision for highsec.

No one has asked the obvious question. Can I have your stuff?