EVE General Discussion

You need to go back further than 2011 to get a clearer picture, or take into account how 2011 might be throwing the numbers out. The Eve forums were transferred across and gobbled everyones posts for months, causing people to either flounce off in disgust or post multiple threads complaining. It was also the height of Incarna with a ton of riot threads on GD. OOPE was split off from GD, and since then a couple of new subforums have been created (personally, I think there are too many). I think (?) Scrapheap died around April 2011 as well so a lot of people migrated back to Eve-O or across to Kugu when Failheap was reinstated and was quiet for the first few months.

There was a complaint made about this a few weeks ago in relation to CAOD and the mods pointed out they rarely moderate that forum because there are hardly any topics posted. The drop in acttivity there started when alt posting was banned, which afaik predates the current community team. ISDs did also agree to use the rules applied to C&P (minimal moderation) to try boost activity in there. When you consider how many player run sites have matured since then, I'm not sure CAOD being quiet is really of concern. All of the player sites are moderated - the only difference between them and here is that they permaban people who post contentless drivel a lot faster.

Maybe rather than moaning about ISDs it's worth considering implementing a downvote system like reddit to knock topics up and down. Surely it won't be abused in any way.

Btw according to that minerbumping article loyalon was given an official warning for posting OOC on the IGS forums after his RPing Merry Christmas thread was moved - which is absolutely hilarious. Well done Ezwal ♥

Anyway,

Ok so here's what I can throw your way - http://eve-files.com/chribba/forumdata2014.html

That's threads and posts for all subforums (bc I was lazy and didn't want to start sorting) from 2003 until right now.

Note that my numbers will not be same as CCP's numbers for a few different reasons.

1. I may have missed both threads and posts from being indexed
2. I may have accidently indexed threads twice or even three times making duplicates, it happens, posts should be way less duplicates due to me actually checking for those
3. CCP moves threads to different subforums, I still treat them in the forum they were first indexed in - resulting in that CCP's number will have it in both forums, one for the thread and one for the "this thread was moved-post"
4. I have both threads and posts indexed that CCP has removed
5. Anything else that could render my numbers invalid lol

Beyond that the numbers should be fairly close and similar to CCP's and fairly accurate representation I believe - but there will be odd stuff showing for sure.

/c

EVE General Discussion

Year / threads / posts
2003 10404 152671
2004 20602 294654
2005 16167 288824
2006 24949 474280
2007 25528 512397
2008 20554 444657
2009 14792 299454
2010 11846 239542
2011 27780 511625
2012 33262 520918
2013 13280 426078
2014 7206 335329

Now you see, the number of threads may be down, but the number of posts per thread is as high or higher than ever!

Well, have some last minute Xmas shopping to do, so no time to really parse the information Chribba dropped here....

Thanks for that, BTW Chribba. Quite interesting.

Snap assessement, seems to agree that there has been a massive forum contraction.

Yes, posts per thread is up, threads are down - but overall posts are significantly down.

A few things jumped out at me

Features/Ideas subforum is up in the last two years - likely due to the recent practice of ship balancing DEV stickies going there.

But generally, it seems quite bleak, across nearly all subforums.
S&M has collapsed.
Market is way down.
CAOD, also imploded, though that may have been a good thing.
OOPE, one of my former favorites, has also collapsed

GD had a dip during 2009/2010, but overall posting numbers are down significantly.

Will have to look over that table a bit more when I'm not being hurried out the door....

One thing I could add. The Live Events of 2010 might have spiked overall game interest. They pretty much came to an end in 2011 and Incursions became "canned" content. But 2010 was a very lively year with epic incidents.

The Live Events were unplanned, never announced, and you never knew what was going to happen. CCP Dropbear is gone though, and he took his notes with him and the tools he used are too outdated for the present system as well. Those epic days are behind us.


From the perspective of IGS (yes the nerd of nerd RPers) there was SYNE, FC0RD and A'J centered on the Sansha threat and incursions generally but since 2011 they have tapered off. The return if Hilen however has some resurgence in A'J since that was his project. Hilen Tukoss was a "NPC" run by an actor, but all of that came to an abrupt end one day. along with all that was the "Dropbear Era" of live events. Again, the staff and tools for that are also of a bygone age.


I think the live events have more to do with "all around" interest in the game than any expansions or content. That would mean more involvement in the forums - for interaction with other players involved and the sharing of clues. Dealing with the Sansha live events was approached almost in the same manner of a military think tank. Losing ships and "not making ISK" because of live event? NOBODY who cared was bothered by that. Anybody who did care was like the stuffed shirt in the room talking about hangovers before the first round of drinks were served.

People loved the live events, and without them, it's just min-maxers and someone else's idea of "emergent" or the term used as cover for some other agenda. Much of the game has fallen to mechanics that enable people whose idea of "playing the game" is to prevent others from playing it. For that most people will shrug and move on.

One could almost wonder if Market is down and Ships & skills are down due to the size of coalitions & cartels growing dramatically and doctrinal fleets becoming vastly more wide spread, removing the need for individuals to try and figure it out for themselves or ask because their leadership has told them what to fly and what to train. And the markets are all controlled.


After all, WH forum is growing in use, which indicates an area which isn't cartel controlled flourishing.

So... what you're saying is... because of Falcon?

I like these forums and Erotica wants us to be nice to the CCPs and the ISDs.

Happy players play the game, unhappy ones play the forums.

Another speculation - after the Summer of Rage and CCP was apologetic with offers of listening to the player base from there on out, perhaps many players that used to post realized that all the times beforehand they were posting was probably for naught since CCP did their own thing anyway. Even today, there are threads where CCP states they are going to add this, alter that, or remove these and those while the players state ideas and reason why CCP should not. Yet CCP still goes ahead as planned...