EVE General Discussion

Do you mean like James315 dropping when corp when war-decced in the early days of CODE? His excuse at the time was "I am using carebears own methods against them". Pause the narration. So carebears declare war? I thought that a preferred objective? Being more engaged.

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If there were decent tools for locating a corp. I still have not found a corp for mid-life crisis, shift working, Zen-Buddhists. But I am hopeful.

Half a dozen times or so, I suppose. But statistically, I think that is referred to as an "outlier".



Your standards are too high.

I like this wardec npc corps idea... unfortunately people who are far more voracious than I would put it to task.
It doesn't matter what the price is, as raising it will not discourage larger entities from paying the fee. A larger fee would only keep smaller entities, who ironically the NPC corps would have a much easier time dealing with, from being able to declare.
Meanwhile large groups who specialize in war will have their own little space orgy of violence because they CAN afford it.
So, ISK argument in this situation is actually a bad one.

I was suggesting that each NPC corporation could have it's own militia who can be at war

There are various different aspects to EVE that I see being talked about in this thread, and from my perspective they all require different approaches:

- New player retention. "New player" being a person new to EVE for 30 days or less. These are the people who were mentioned by CCP Rise during Fanfest. They are all almost exclusively in NPC corps.

- Veteran player retention. I haven't seen any data on this subject presented by anybody. Some are in player corps, some in NPC corps, some still in their starter corp after 10 or more years.

- Highsec PvP combat opportunities. This revolves around the mechanics of suicide ganking, wardecs, and crimewatch; wardecs are impacted by NPC corp membership and player corp size.

My thoughts on each topic:

- In-game social groups, as discussed in a different thread, are extremely important here. IMO social engagement is what draws people into Eve, and unless a new player already has contacts within the game, it is unreasonable to expect a new player to generate significant social ties on their own, in the current player-corp environment, in such a short time, while also trying to figure out the game mechanics. Existing starter corps (except CAS of course) are not set up to generate such ties. A concerted effort by the rest of the player base, though in-game advocating of social groups, which require no commitment and are therefore easy for new players to investigate, discard if it doesn't meet their needs, try another, and ultimately can be a gateway to the rest of Eve's opportunities for interaction if they like it.

- These people have been playing for a long time already. No changes are needed to corp structure, for either player or NPC corp players, to ensure their continued play. They know the game, they play the way they play, and trying to get them to play differently likely will, I think, actually hurt retention of this group.

- Wardecs... Wardecs, wardecs, wardecs... There's a gazillion ideas on what to do about highsec in general, including wardecs, and I won't re-list them all here.

If you are having trouble keeping your own story straight, just imagine how confused I must be about what it is you are trying to say. In one post you're claiming player corps are better and that's why CCP needs to push players into them. In the next, you're denying having said that. You are telling us about supposed data that says NPC corp players quit more, then you are back tracking and pointing to a 90% attrition rate for new players as if that somehow has to do with NPC corp membership. I can't figure it out, either. But, I am not going on a wild goose chase looking for phantom data that makes your case for you. Find it yourself and provide a link to it or STFU about it.

It's really a case of casualism and/or min/max.
Many of the people that test Eve, likely have come from another MMO.
Their experience, prior to Eve, revolved around games with zones that are dedicated to non-PVP without consent.
They are also familiar with level grinding, which in many games, can get you from newb to end game content in a month.
As we are all aware, this is not the case in Eve.
There is no end game content and there is no option for pure safety.

That said,'I am NOT suggesting a change for the formula in order to support this.
The market would fall apart as most players, including those with alts in high, would gravitate their characters towards this area.

However, I do not support the alternative of taking away safety, as it is. This would not only deter new players, but would likely cause the dropping of many so to say "carebears" as well as cause alt accounts to drop, due to lack of safer gameplay.

As far as retention of players, both new and old, I think this is an issue of two cases.
1) community - There's got to be social interaction. This is not an issue of corps(player or NPC), but instead the fault of the players.
We have essentially built a barrier inhibiting player interaction. Remember the Eve Moto of "Trust no one"? Well, this has the alternate effect of inhibiting the social interaction with new players. Not very many people want to help a new bro, as you can't trust them.

2) Content - we're all aware that it takes a bit of time to become efficient at combat. This leaves mining as the most effective activity a newbro can involve themselves in for at least the first two weeks. Even after that, their combat efficiency is extremely limit. However, once you've developed efficient combat skills, you still likely have developed funding, so PVP involvement is extremely limited, unless you manage to get into an alliance with a ship hand out program.
If you do manage to get interest from an alliance, there's about a 50-50 chance that you're being baited.

Content can be corrected by providing more low level and high level content in all security areas.

As far as community, well... Eve players are a$$holes...

Mining is not the most efficient ISK generation method for a newbie it's just the most obvious.

You are correct that the burden falls largely on existing players. You can't slaughter/scam people relentlessly and then come to the forums spouting off about the retention problem. It's all well and good to say "it's their responsibility to learn the game" but frankly that is a shortsighted and stupid mindset that will result eventually in nothing left of EVE but a few thousand bittervets chasing each other's alts around.

And with all the talk about how many people leave in the first month I'm surprised no one has stated the obvious -

This is a very complex game with a famously vicious learning curve and the skill training system is quite daunting for a day one player. I was there, not terribly long ago. I remind mousing over various ships and modules and then looking at the training time under "requirements" and just being crushed. And then I realized I would need a legion of support skills even once those requirements were met. So it's fair to say you are going to have a significant percentage of the people that try this game promptly fleeing for their lives and sanity. With this thought in mind, 90% doesn't sound nearly as unreasonable.

Beyond that, if you want new players, act like it. You guys with a dozen alts could consider rolling another one and leaving him in a rookie corp to actually do something about the problem. There's a thought.

You solve a player created problem with other players. Specifically, those gankers and wardeccers you so despise.

Bad corps should die on the vine, but in the ridiculous safety that is highsec, that's far too difficult to do. Incentivize conflict, make it more accessible and more widespread, and watch these bad corps die.

If your best argument involves publicly demonstrating that you have zero clue how the economy works, you should have just stayed out of the discussion.