EVE General Discussion

This depends entirely on how we choose to lie with statistics. I assume you're also looking at Chribba's site. However, as the time frame becomes shorter, it's more difficult to simply eyeball it. The timeframes I used were from mid-2009 and end-2009 to now. It could very well be that EVE has grown, in both subs and player count, in the past year; I'm not arguing against that at all. I am arguing that as far as the past three years are concerned, there's been a decline. Also, simply comparing numbers one year ago and today will present a very incomplete, convoluted picture. If we turn the clock back just three months, you will see that the player count this year is short somewhere in the vicinity of 2,500 players compared to the last.

The important thing to know about recoveries is that you don't know they happened until quite a bit of time after the fact. It's true here, it's true on Wall Street, and it's true when you suddenly find yourself no longer buying the dry ramen, and going for the brand name pork-and-beans instead. Just because you got a pay check this week, doesn't mean that your finances are suddenly secure.

The EVE "depression" could have ended late 2011, but we won't know for a few more months/years. If I had to bet my money on it as a trader, though, I would bet against it. I have my reasons, but it's not for my lack of love of the game. I've been feeding CCP's children for over eight years now.

PS: I think we derailed the OP's terrible thread.

If the OP is really done with Eve, they should biomass all their characters.

Not really. It depends on what question we're trying to answer. His claim was that there has been a recovery since 2011; you tried to dispute this by saying that the average over the last three years is flat or going down… except that the average over the last three years tells us nothing about how this year compares to the last.

That's why I'm not eyeballing it. I'm using daily collected PCU stats.

Then maybe you should go fix your post because it's pretty much exactly what you're doing. He's claiming “Population wise EVE is just as healthy as in 2011. Average population is around 40- 45k on a night which is a good recovery pace.” to which you respond “Negative.” and then quote a completely different range of data to support this objection.

…and we're now a long time after the fact. The recovery after Incarna started the first week in October last year, curiously (as in “not curiously at all”) coinciding with the first news about Crucible and the turn-around in focus it represented. In the weeks before that, the catastrophic population bleed had been stopped by the mea-culpa letter from CCP. And right now, numbers are oscillating around 1,500 more than last year…

Now that's something entirely different, isn't it?

I'm not doubting the number, just your mistaken citation.

You obviously know nothing

-∞/10

I bet OP plays Pandas.

His claim was that subs are more important as a metric than the player count, which I disputed.


And like I said, if we move the clock back just a quarter of a year and take into account the last 15 months, the picture becomes much more bleak. I'd still like to get raw data for this so I can properly analyze it, but I don't know where I can get it.


He claimed that the average population is around 40-45 thousand; which was met with my disagreement. I then provided a three-year running outlook to assert that the player count has been on plateau/in decline over the past few years, which when compared to the increase in total subscriptions, supported my earlier claim that people are either getting more alts or becoming less interested in the game, both of which are contrary to the very concept of recovery. But at no point did I rule out the possibility of recovery in the short term, or a long-term recovery which began only recently. I did say that I would personally bet against it, but that was just that; a personal opinion. As much as I love locking wits with you, you're attacking an argument I simply never made.


This would go against everything that I've been taught about economics. I could have been taught wrongly, or the recovery theories might be wrong, but once again, if I had to bet my own money, I would go against counting at most a year of positive data as proof of recovery. Statistically, the higher your sample count, the more objective of an answer you can give. If we stick with the one-year comparison you insist on, and let's say by December the numbers will be oscillating around 2,500 less than last year, then your argument breaks apart, even if I turn out to also be wrong, if for example 2014 rolls around and we see that the game's population had a decent double-digit percentage increase compared to Apocrypha's release.

I have to go now, but we can argue some more if this thread is still alive in a few hours.

Ok, fair enough, I read it as “average PCU” because… well… that's what the average PCU is, and you interpreted it as meaning the daily average.

Again, since the question is recovery since last year and the horrendous collapse that happened after Incursion and Incarna, it's what we have and what we can count. So far, things are recovering compared to the combined low-point after those two dips.

@ OP

My signature was directed specifically at people like you.

I can't agree more, im fixing to do the same, eve is full of doodoo children and people afraid of losing solo pvp fights so blob warfare is the way to go....anyway troll monkeys infest forums, but its like this, when something gets built for people to enjoy its nice when not everyone knows about it, then as it grows and more content becomes available more fun to be had, but that also attracts others, soon more join in, as is inevitable the basket becomes infested with rejects, spoiling the rest of the lot, happens every time and i think eve has crossed that critical line of no return.
and no i am gonna blow everything up and delete everything else.