EVE General Discussion

Yet these numbers are still meaningless.

All it counts it's the amount of plex sold and how many active accounts are paying their sub with real cash, everything else is just plain crap numbers and graphics to please special nerds.

Only numbers talking to me are those from the accountability reports, even then I might look like this

According to forum analytics, from the launch of the game, eve has been loosing between 50.000 and 100.000 players each years.

The current number of active subscribers are i rapidly growing and very large negative number, luckily CCP are using an singed integer. Once the counter reaches the minimum value and overflows into maximum value, CCP is going to announce they have 2.147.483.647 active accounts and sell the company.

Yet we are pushing ever upwards towards the record PCU every weekend and pvp hasn't been this healthy or widspread for years.

I already suggest at the first post that PCU per subscriber could be very high, as in less subscribers who play more. That would be coherent with another pet guess of mine, on how returning players are beefing up EVE's demographics as iteration doesn't attracts new players.

The double trouble is when iteration dismisses solo/casual players, who are a large demographic that's been abandoned both for innovation and iteration and *apparently* just entered CCP's radar along with all the "cool kids" (inducers/enablers, etc).

So we have a scenario where there is no new gameplay to attract new players, no new gameplay to keep the "not cool" players, no iteration to keep the "not so cool" players, and on top of it a cloud of uncertainty, missing development plans, abandoned features and delayed iteration of critical "cool kids" features like POSes or nullsec.

I guess we (or at least, me) won't be able to judge what's going on until Fanfest, as judging from silence and inaction is dangerous.

But then if TQ managed to lose 50,000 subscribers compared to the golden times before Incarna (or just as recently as one year ago), those are bad news in itself.

The sandbox nature of the game means figure it out yourself, sorry if you can't, and sorry if ccp won't serve a plate of medium rare "solo casual" content and have the devs cut it up in bite sized bits and spoon feed it to you.

I tend to agree with this, once you have a good amount of SP it's easier to do more things in Eve because of it's players reactions nature (paranoia/sp requirements and usual yada ya crap).
The noob watching his BS skill plan and telling himself "what the heck??- above one year to fly this thing because it's what I want to fly in this game?"

One of Eve motos is "don't let anyone tell you what your goals are or how to play" -adding even more base skills on a regular basis like these past months is not helping at all, and most new players care less about plex, scaming, market trading sitting in the station just to buy some toon in toons bazaar. It's supposed to be a game and fun to play, not a second job as many bittervets and paws want it to be.

Don't know the figures, but I can tell you this.

This is my public face for the last 2 years, but behind it I am a vet. In six days I am out for good.

Why ? Because eve is not a sandbox anymore it is a school yard where the bullies winning. People can say HTFU as much as you like but people like me and my friends were the core of EVE. The ones that always payed and played.

We are the ones that watched and learned and enjoyed the content that players generated. Now all that is created are kill mails. Until that changes Eve is simply unplayable for me. I want to enjoy the game that it once was. Where imagination was key and you could do something in highsec without low brains causing annoyances. I do not want to log on to be told where to go and what to do. I want to be the small scale friendly player. That is no longer possible in EVE.

I have not found a game to replace EVE so I simple am not playing any MMO. I expect a flame, as that is all the players do these day. Just had to say my piece and this seemed the best place.

Good bye Eve... it was good while it lasted.

Boffles
aka DJ Boffles

And that's why WW2OL has a million subscribers and WoW is dying?

Today's Lesson: Learn the difference between what is true and what you only wish was true.

You are trying very hard to "spin" the numbers so it looks like EVE Online is still losing subscriptions.

However, it is clear that EVE is gaining in subscriptions from a significant loss that it experienced after / because of Incarna.

The reasons for the loss of subscriptions due to Incarna can be debated (I, personally, feel that it was the Nexus Store that upset people so much that they actually pulled the trigger on unsubscribing) but I don't think one can debate, argue, or try in any way shape or form to suggest that today EVE is still suffering.

Looking at the data, EVE's subscription levels are on the rise from that low. That means EVE is very healthy and doing very well. The game population is -growing- and continues to do so.

You can have your opinion about "fresh" players but the statistics don't back it at all.

What is interesting to me is that I've encountered more than a few players who found out about EVE from playing DUST 514. Who knew that Dust Bunnies would subscribe to EVE to find out what is going on in space above them?

The ones I've met had been playing for a couple of weeks and remained extremely positive and excited about the game. That's a good sign.

Can you please post a link to the dataset you used for this analysis?

-Liang