EVE General Discussion

I really like how you put yourself above others just because you have illusions about your gameplay being superior to theirs.

When I was a newbie I got really annoyed by vets telling me how I was supposed to do things. I also had superiority complex due to a fact that my ships were shooting with guns instead of mining lazorz but after a while I realized something shocking: people shooting rocks are paying same subs as I do and they should be allowed to use their play time however they want.

Maybe if "vets" would stop being condescending pricks for a moment newbies wouldn't mind stepping outside of "pimp my golem" route.

I suppose I'll let the cat out of the bag on this one.

"Pubbie" is a troll. You're only a pubbie if you get mad at being called one.

Much like the old "If you don't know what a Philistine is, you are one" joke.

Oh no you dont. I want this game reserve to last, I still miss the IRC kitchen fleets.

I care more about money & tears than somewhere people can go for fights against robe-wearing roleplayers.

I have no knowledge of how Crius is affecting new players, if at all, but I can confim that the industrialists in my own alliance are enthusiastic about moving their operations to null.

noone appears to be happy yet here we all are

hisec carebears complain about being "bullied", want to left alone and cry that null sec keeps getting better/ more profitable/ easier etc. If it is so easy/ profitable/ better- why not move there? If you are being bullied, there are ways to avoid/ minimize it- use them

null sec complain about it being boring these days and not much is going on and sov is broken. To me, the biggest problem is that the meta is broken. Its like that movie A Beautiful Mind- the massive coalitions seem happy with their lot and noone really moves any more. Providence gets picked on because they won't fight each other. Screw the coalitions, go back to smaller alliances and fight everyone. Stop blueing everyone and turn them all red and go shoot them. Don't attack systems to take sov. attack systems to watch them burn- take down the ridiculous rental alliances that want safe, protected areas to mine and rat, burn their systems and ask them to fight if they want the benefits of null life. they spend billions on rent each month- spend it on covering ship losses from fighting.

there are parts of the game i like and parts i don't, so i try to do as much of the bits i do like and try avoid the bits i dont

Exactly who said anything about 'waves of people'? Everyone i see talking about this aren't talking about waves of people, but rather having null sec industrialists unshackled from that open air industy prison called high sec.

So far the signs look good. Some of you might see that were it not for the rampant (and logic bending) prejudice of null sec you seem to have.

I'd say that an index analysis would say quite a lot if properly correlated to player activity numbers, but ugh. :effort:

You could probably infer it reasonably well by looking at market volumes for stuff like moon goo and components (eg. is less being brought to jita because it's processed and built “at home”?) and things like minerals, including common compression goods, as compared to the new compressed ores.

…but again, :effort: even if it's less than sampling daily data from 7500 systems for a month or two.

Eve has done something most long term mmo's have never done.

Matter after a year.

Eve is a political game. What keeps it going is that players have direct control over what other players do. Its more than a PVP sandbox, its a game on politics. DAOC had it for a little while with the RVR zone and its control over the central dungeon.

But if you were to deal with retention, you have to make the mindless necessities easier for people.

• The default overview is terrible. This needs to be redone without people taking a 1 hour course in how to set it themselves via eve university. The new system of click update overview will be good, but the default needs to be completely redone (so people day 1 can understand it)
• The newbie missions should accomplish a few items to teach people how to fly manually. Yes there should be an obstacle course, a short race course, and a brief discussion about transversal (sig tanking). These should be advanced missions whose rewards are ships for players. (this is a whole redo tutorial complaint though).
• Ingame links to popular Eve websites.
• Ingame paper/billboard to fights (so people can get relevant news)
• populated bookmarks to popular sites. There are a few relevant sites that should autopopulate bookmarks in the eve browser. Allow these sites to bid isk to be auto added to peoples bookmarks (this does not effect veteran players, but this does go miles for the brand new guy who clicks the eve browser. This should matter more with the SSO setup.
• Corporation public calenders. I believe they exist, I just don't see them very much.

Eve's overwhelming. The beginning has to be simplified. Yes maybe a bit cartoonish, yes maybe a bit babyish, but in the beginning people are exactly that.

In addition, I would probably address the issue of scams just a little bit. People come into this game not knowing that this is even possible. Many leave after being scammed. Don't ban scamming (that'd be stupid), but find a better way of informing the "Newbie public" that this is possible.

The good news is that new players stand a very good chance of growing without being blown to smithereens. Ganking isn't all that common these days, after all, and ganking of newbies is particularly uncommon since there's no point in doing so — they don't own anything worth taking, and you might even have the GMs come after you.

So by that logic, EVE should have no problems retaining new players.

Then again, maybe the real problem is the same old one that we've known about for many many years: that new players aren't really taught how the play the game; that the newbie corps are a particularly bad environment since they have a tendency to anti-teach people about how the game works; and that social connections — by far the biggest stickiness factor — are difficult to create mechanistically.