EVE General Discussion

What if CCP is building a game that isn't what people want to play? I keep playing because there are parts of the game I like, even though I don't like most of it. After reading the CSM7 Meeting Minutes, it appears that CCP is responsible for a lot of the things I don't like.

Originally, I blamed the problem on the players, but, after the CSM7 meeting, I think I'm starting to see where the real problem lies.

As developers of the game, they can take it in any direction they want as long as people are still willing to pay for it. But are they even headed in the direction that will make them the most money?

They mention, periodically, that they have 100s of thousands of players, but the information on paying subscribers seems to be hard to find. What are the chances that they are counting the thousands of trial accounts that have expired as 'players', or the three accounts I have that I shut down? Figuring out how many paying subscribers they have should be trivial, but I've never seen it mentioned anywhere.

Sorry for getting side-tracked there. The real issue is, are they ignoring the options that would make this game more accessible and more desirable to more people, and to us, the active players?

Do they still have the Incarna mindset? That what the players want doesn't matter?

Do you have any examples or ideas?

To paraphrase you've just written "I'm not sure about the direction CCP are heading in, I have no analysis of what that is or how it should change, what qualities do you guys think this undefined object has".

This makes it kind of hard to respond.

Are you talking about HighSec or Lowsec, about the shift to themes, about the danger of themeparkism, about Goonswarm the HBC or the Russians? Are you talking about expansions or lack of them?

They're definitely not going to do another Incarna, they're terrified of the players now.

you can't be serious with this. Of course not. This would drive it against the wall.

Slim to none, since they can easily differentiate between a trial, an active, and an inactive account.

That's because it's not trivial. There is almost no metric that can be used to reliably tie an account to a specific player — every last indicator will be full of exceptions that mean that it doesn't actually indicate that two accounts do or do no not in fact belong to the same person. The best they can do is use surveys and hope to get a representative sample (which they most likely won't) and then hope that they can extrapolate from there.

What options would that be? Seeing as how we've already seen what happens when they deliver something players don't want (the “just keep playing” hypothesis has been proven wrong too many times to be sensible), it doesn't particularly seem like they're not giving people what they want already.

For the game economy to work properly and to counter the ability to hide corp-related activities in NPC corps.

lets see:

worried about company income? check

worried about sub numbers? check


i smell an ex-wow player... anyone else?

Posting in a stealth "I want space-barbies" thread.

Lock this thread due to lack of content please.

We would have known about it 10 years ago.

I'm suggesting that no rule that could be suggested as a metric — not even in combination with other such rules — would be “clean” enough to provide a good answer, given all the ways accounts can be created and used in this game and given the rather mixed demographic that would employ those accounts.

All you'd end up with is a semi-uncertain estimate, and there are far easier ways to get one of those than trying to account for all the variables required for any kind of automated counting method.