EVE General Discussion

It's just a guy that says it's a myth, when Google is full of results that say otherwise.

I could compile a list with all the discussions about quitting EVE and griefers, if they would post some data from the survey given to the player when he quits.

That change was not made to reduce "griefing" of new players. It was made to encourage established players to take new players into their corp by reducing the risk to these established players with assets to awoxers. You can tell this as the switch was made optional meaning I can still set up a corp with the flag off, recruit a bunch of new players, and then blow them up for my entertainment. That wasn't nerfed at all.

CCP is trying their best to get players out of NPC corps and into player corps. The Friendly Fire change was essentially just a bribe to older players to try to get them to interact more with newer players.

Besides, awoxers were never a threat to new players. No one is going to go to the trouble of infiltrating a corp just to blow up a new player in a Venture. Awoxers were only a threat to established players in carebear corps with juicy assets. Probably still are in fact.


CCP Rise, one of the lead game designers at CCP is "just a guy"? He has access to this survey data you want, and he is saying quite clearly that there is no correlation between "griefing" and player retention. What more do you want?

so... what was this thread about again? I got confused after reading like 10 pages

Here's a recent thread written by a quitting newbie that might be interesting to discuss in context of this discussion since it touches on joining a player corp:

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=412796

Do you think his experience trying to join a player corp is typical or atypical?
If it's atypical, we can ignore the situation. But if this sort of thing is common, do you think it's a problem? And if so, what do you think can be done to fix it?

No, that wasn't the reason. From page 78 of the summer summit:

CCP Masterplan - We're looking at changing three things before the end of the year. First is the intracorp
aggression rules - At the moment all members can now freely aggress each other. We are looking
to change this so that being in the same member corp does not give you the right to legally kill your corp
mates. The main goal of this is to make recruitment safer for the recruiter and the recruitee. And it will
remove the fact that you current cannot mitigate the risk of recruiting someone which makes people
not recruit.

Not about griefing (which is not allowed in the game) driving away players, but about removing perceived barriers to player corp recruitment for both the Corp and players that join them. The friendly fire switch was what motivated this thread in the first place.

Interesting thread. Not surprising to me that it might not be NPC corps, it might not be the NPE, it might just be because a lot of the people that play this game are not at all welcoming of new players. Fortunately that has not been my experience with CAS. I was lucky enough to find the right corp for me and I didn't even have an annoying application process.

NPC corps have a large number of people paying attention to a single chat channel, and no rules in that channel. Seems like a great place for content to me!

You look at all the reason trial accounts leave and the NPE stands out like a huge sore thumb. Even the new Opportunities based NPE is causing many potential customers to throw up their hands in frustration. Right now the NPE is a bloody revolving door - client downloaded, play for an hour - NOPE! Outta here! Frankly, I don't even see how CCP retains as many as they do. The NPC (non-)problem is the least of their worries.

I have removed some off-topic posts. Please stay on topic and be respectful, along with our other wonderful rules.

The switch was a bugfix, which removed the old hack, which allowed handful of people do duels when there were no dueling, and web freighters when there were no duels. Once duels arrived, the hack were not needed anymore and the right course of action were to remove it completely.
However, complaints were made. CCP went extra length, and delayed removal of the hack for YEARS until they came up with a solution which allow people who want it to optionally apply that hack to themselves, so all the slobs who wanted their freighter webbing bots to go unmodified, got that opportunity. I mean, even some hardcore pvp corps I know have switched to ff illegal; when you have it as legal, there must be a reason, and most of the rational reasons I can come up with have that exploity odor.

Now to new players retention, the reason switch improves it were not new players being shot at. It's removing reluctance of player corps to recruit people in fear of potential 10 hours heroes, who spam apps and go for a safari just to teach people that they should not accept newbs. This is a very good change, even my corp made a few recruits it would've denied otherwise, and it weren't even actually recruiting. It makes perfect sense from retention side, but as I said before, it was just a hack removal and initially had nothing to do with retention.

Corp lites you are proposing is actually a combination of a fleet and a contact list, and you already have both. Maybe teach new people how to use those instead? Fleet interface is very hard to understand initially, and eve could really benefit from "add a friend" achievement other mmos have to make people understand the contact list.

And NPC corps need to have some kind of intro. I still remember just starting and my first and unanswered-to-date question was "where the hell do I stand?". I mean, there are people with green stars and people without them, what the hell does it means? I seriously thought for at least two weeks that green star is a rookie sign (being "green" kinda made that sense). There is not nearly enough explanation who the hell are those people around you, where is your position in this social ecosystem. Making people more aware of their status is what makes them wonder if it can be improved.

Then, if we can fix the grief decs, eve can be a game I can recommend to people who are not masochistic.
And yes, I have an older character I were griefed out on. Coming back just happened on an impulse a year after that. Grief decs did it.