EVE General Discussion

When has Jenn ever said that?

Your entire hypothesis focuses on 1% of the rookie population?





I agree, it would be interesting to know what these 15-day old rookies were doing with their time in EVE to begin with.





The PVP = retention correlation is supported by more than one data study by CCP. The ganks themselves are noise in the FF2015 data, due to how few there are, but the retention data for those who were ganked do not conflict with the data for people involved in consensual PVP.

If the gank data was an anomaly, or pure coincidence as you seem to be implying, we would see a PVP = players leaving EVE data point somewhere.. and we haven't.

It's not a bad conclusion and kind of matches what Rise said last year a little bit in the NPE vision presentation at Fanfest:

https://youtu.be/sbHqFgn4SOw?t=993

After noting that CCP could really see that the current NPE pushes people towards solo/mission play, which is a good fit for some people, he continued with:

"...we have this other small group of 5-10% that do move into a really wide range of experiences. They are trading with other players a lot, they are in corps much more often, they're talking in fleet chats more often, they're on pvp kills more often; and these people tend to stick with us. These people are all of you guys most likely [referring to the audience] and, you know, they love the game and they stay with the game for a long time.

To us that says that the more we can do to get people having the kind of experiences that this group is having, the better off we will be, because obviously for them it's really rich and meaningful and it sticks with them for a long time..."

It's kind of related to what you said, because whether the player is more engaged through their own motivation, or whether the game moves people into rich experiences, CCP clearly see advantages in changing the focus of the NPE to expose new players to the possibility of a richer experience.

That's where the stats from this year are related to that. If it's true, as people in the community often claim, that ganking drives new players away from the game, than that's important for CCP to understand, because that would be far from the type of rich experience they are trying to develop in the NPE. This years stats showed that if anything, the non-consensual pvp is part of that rich experience. Not the whole thing, just part of what helps make eve rich, non-linear and unpredictable.

Far from being something that drives new players (in the trial period) away from the game, ganking appears to be part of what helps make the gaming experience richer; as the players in that 1% group of ganked have a higher rate of retention and fit into that broader 5-10% of players that stick with the game long term.

Friend! You carebears told us for a long time that ganking was a big deal for player retention. You where absolutely convinced that ganking drives new players away. You spew this nonsense on the forums in every thread...

Now it seams to be the case that CCP had the same view for some time, but they where in the position to actually check because they have all the data of what happens and the survey answers if people quit.

They tried to verify YOUR idea about whats happening and why people quit. The result was something completely different. The data shows that not only is ganking an insignificant factor for new player retention, it also shows that new player who actually get ganked are more likely to stay. This is directly from the talk, there is no need to interpret anything into this data. This are just simple facts.

The facts say, and again this is directly shown by the data, that the carebears where wrong when they stated that ganking is bad for new player retention. The theory of the carebears was falsified with data which showed the opposite of what they expected. This is how science works. You make a hypothesis, then you try to falsify it with data. This happend and it shattered the carebear theory that ganking is bad for the game.

Now if we are honest, we can never say that some data "proves" anything, in science nothing is set in stone. But it certainly favors the view that ganking gets people out of their isolation and drags them into the sandbox where the interesting stuff in eve is happening.

Exactly. CCP is trying to understand why players who show enough interest in the game to download the client and start the trial choose to not subscribe. They decided to test the hypothesis believed by so many players on these forums, and in general, that non-consensual PvP was driving these potential new customers away. They found no correlation between retention and ship loss and, if anything, found data to support an alternative hypothesis: that richness and engagement that non-consenual PvP offers makes attracts the type of player that started the trial more likely to stay with the game.

Now these correlations don't necessarily prove the effect (although the gankers-are-bad-for-new-player-retention hypothesis is looking very, very weak) but give strong support for CCP to experiment with putting more PvP into the new Opportunities NPE. Using the focus groups and the two-group comparison, CCP can determine whether exposure to PvP keeps players in the game longer or influences their engagement with it.

I think part of the problem, and why we need these scientific, data-driven approaches is that everyone has different experiences and expectations for the game. It is true that a non-zero number of players have left Eve because they were wardecced or suicide ganked. But it is also true that many players would not ever, or be still playing the game if these activities were not allowed at all. Studies like this can give some insight, but it is really difficult to conclusively tell what an effect of a change will be on player retention, let alone potential player retention, as player motivations are so diverse. You can't even ask them as most players will say they want things that are good for their particular playstyle even if it is bad for the game overall.

For the NPE it is simpler as there is a very narrow experience that CCP can play around with the structure of it to see the effect on a very specific metric - conversion of trials to paid accounts. And on that metric data is clear: new players are not negatively affected by gankers. And further, this interesting finding that players seem to engage more with the game after PvP merits exploration by CCP.

Sheeesh .... what a day.

Liked Scipios, Pedros and even Wreckyou's posts.

I so hope this pointless, over half a decade old bullshit finally comes to an end.

No it won't. How silly can you be to say a thing like that on these here eveo forums.

Unless you were being sarcastic.

It is so good being the OP because I can link to the sane posts in a long thread from the very first post, ones such as these.

The problem is: Most mmo players are addictive personalities. They want to get hooked and get rewarded every couple minutes. The average mmo player does not want to PLAY A GAME. He wants to get rewarded for doing irrelevant tasks and QUICK. Eve per default punishes you rather than reward you. Eve is a game that is only addictive for a very special breed of people. (probably sociopaths with a evil tendency:=)

If you want to run a successful mmo in the year 2015 you have to hook the player and shower him with gifts and epic loots. The timeframe to achieve this in the year 2015 is probably 5 minutes. If you dont have epic loot within those 5 minutes, and in eve chances are that instead of getting any loot you end up in a pod, people will leave and not look back.

If you want eve to have mass appeal you can forget it with the current game design!

we have always been at war with eastasia