EVE General Discussion

Again, though, if your statistics were true, why would CCP be saying that they're having trouble retaining players by having them join corps and leave hisec. Both of these are current issues on their agenda they're trying to rectify, and neither would have been mentionable if all these hisec accounts were just sitting in stations. I mean, what you're saying might be true (we don't have any other direct evidence) but CCP certainly doesn't seem to share in your belief that everything's fine. They seem to believe that they have a problem getting people to engage with our player-made content.

If that is true and you're simultaneously correct, that's a terrifying proposition. That means people aren't even in hisec, they're just leaving period. However, I don't think that's the case. CCP have stated that they get much lower overall playtimes out of their introductory crowds, but they do manage to keep them for a nominal length of time (about a year and a half on average, I think they said). So they have a higher turnover due to their apparent lack of things to do, but it still seems to keep them occupied for a non-trivial length of time.

Again, we don't have the raw numbers, but the people who do didn't say that we had a problem of too many people enjoying the player-made content and nobody being in hisec.

Because there's no conflict between the two.

This is just a bunch of baloney assumptions and straw men on your part. Who said anything about them just sitting in stations? Who said anything about everything being fine? How does the distribution of accounts, and the inferences that can be drawn from it, in any way contradict or go counter to the established player retention patterns? What does any of it have to do with the fairly clear picture that highsec isn't the majority it likes to claim?

No, that doesn't really follow from both positions, nor is it particularly terrifying. It's how it has always worked (and indeed should work) when people figure out that a game is not for them. Catering to people who don't actually like the game is a losing proposition, and trying to string them along or keep them around for longer is a disservice to everyone involved.

It's nine months — about the time it takes to be proficient in one thing and realise that, no, waiting for “all-V” does not suddenly change how the game is played.

It's an artefact of how in most MMO:s, the game only opens up or starts proper once you've reached some arbitrary high (often max) level. Combine this with the griefing that goes on in newbie- and NPC corp chat (the “don't try X until you have Y”-type suggestions, which should almost be a bannable offence) that reinforce this false notion, and you have a lot of players who just keep biding their time, levelling their Raven as the saying goes. They keep waiting until they have skills X,Y,Z and ships N, M and O before they try some given activity, rather than just go out and try it with what they already have. They then discover that having all that changes nothing. It's still the same activity, and they were unsure about it (or had grown tired of it) from the beginning. This levelling-to-nowhere process just so happens to be somewhere in the 7–10 months range.

It's a basic themepark-consumerist behaviour: sitting around and waiting for fun things to appear out of nowhere with minimal effort, rather than explore and seek them out on your own. It's not that the content in question is captivating for that long and then stops being so; it's that it takes that long to realise that the content will never be captivating, and will never cater to their consumerist desires, no matter how high that Raven is levelled.

This is why corp membership has proven so crucial: it yanks people out of that behaviour and into one of partaking in player-made content, at times of the most trivial form. Even if they keep doing almost the exact same thing, game-activity wise, they now start to enjoy the interactions with the other corp members, and begin to tag along on the curious adventures they come up with… A game can be immensely fun without being even remotely good, just because of the social arena it creates, and the content of such a game goes way beyond what's in the actual box.

(Incidentally, this is why any game in any medium or form that is being described as “it's just fun” should be approached with great care — chances are that the game itself utterly horrible, but the reviewer has fun friends to play with.)

the same can be said about null-seccers: if you have alt in 0.0 sec alliance it does not make it MAIN by default.

Yeah, i don't see how would anyone make any believable statistics here....

It's more likely that the hardcore corp scammers and shady backstabber types that are dominant through their own choice will eventually strangle themselves back to hi-sec, or have so much commitment that they stay alone in null-sec and scam people in hi-sec only.

It's like the old fashioned pinball machines with a ramp, several pins and several points columns, eventually all the balls are in their points column and the game has to be restarted (in this case a constant stream of new players, which will be the hard work that CCP has to spend time on).

There is a lot of longwinded pvp content, and several 1-2month ops paying for an account with someone else's pve wealth + the extravagant officer mod sacrifices / asset nullification richbros.

FozzieSov will be eliminating the longwinded pvp content.

The PvE content will be the constant, defining career path that sets the stakes, but this is only the case if the null-sec assets in ore and stock are diminshed somehow. As this is not the case (less supercap projection, less loss, and smaller ships in the hands of multitudes of pilots (less cost) now easily replaced by the low skill requirement to fly frigs/cruisers/tech3 (newbro friendly)) those with the previous battlefield victory of asset acquisition will essentially determine how dead EVE is.

At this point the game's reputation has the ability to both stifle character development and open up new options for head-honcho types, that will eventually become meme driven into corporate asset loss or will become the old-style dominants.

Will it die? no.

Will CCP have the developer competency to arise at some new status-quo whereby there is a detachment from paying subscriber and free-2-play profiteer? Yes.

Will they have the content and the ability to generate more content? Yes.

What could go wrong? Alienation. New players and returning players alike face the years old methodology of asking for too high a standard of personal information under the auspices of previous spies (the recruiters nowadays), using compromised third party communications platforms outside of game that are not subject to the EULA.

What would be the best move CCP could make in this climate? Facilitating player-to-player interaction using quality communications alternatives with security within the game client, EVE Voice was a step in this direction but I'm finding that no one uses it because there is not enough footfall to start a trend, and other birth-of-the-internet third party voice comms to stay cool.

CCP don't need to read or listen to my advice, but as an opinion the player-driven side of EVE is the same it was, and that is the boring part of it, easiest way to enjoy the game? hi-sec bear / null-sec explorer, easiest way to lead the game? lead the hi-sec bears and null-sec explorers with campaigns of gratuitous ship destruction.

One of those subtle observations; the risk is 'that high' and the reputation is 'that solid' with the level of earned trust 'so fortuitous' that it's a wonder anyone ever got into that circle in the first place.

^That is more content for you the player.

The game engine / mechanics (and their changes) and the rich history of Science Fiction's number one game on the internet is still worth paying for, avoiding stupid is something that comes with a low time-played-per-week gaming style and a seemingly low requirement for social exposure.

Bro. I cann tall you a litle off mine opinion.From 2007 to 2015. In mine oportuneties, you need to do somesing for miners.But yes your skins very good, but we lack of low-sec miner barges and roll. In ouer opinion youre orca not at all. In a fact to loose your mainig oudetore im questioning - Did you do somesing about creation of some sort of BS leveling miner ships. We want t3 barges! At all off
!

To answer your question - EVE is a sandbox, we are the content.

EVE has many systems, a major one of these is the Sovereignty mechanics, which should have been reiterated and changed around the year 2012.

Requiring entities to acquire supercapitals in order to take space, because their own Dreadnaught fleets are being volleyed off the field in less than a minute by existing & established supercap blobs - supercapitals, which can only be built within said Sov system, now that is a bad & faulty design.

Not catering to people who don't like the game is the losing proposition. You don't grow a business by ignoring people who are finding a reason to go elsewhere and listening only to the customers you already have. You can't alienate your current customers too much, but you do have to find a way to give potential customers what they want as well.

Even if CCP does something to make it easier for new players to play the game in a way you don't want them to, at least you still have more people playing your game. Adding more content for new/casual players doesn't hurt anyone who's been playing; it just adds more options to the sandbox.

…and not really relevant to the question at hand.

Again, the “highsec majority” argument is that ⅔ of the players (often misquoted as ⅘) would rather leave than see [change X] happen to highsec, and that the highsec players must be catered to — often at the expense of the non-highseccers. The counter-argument to this is that the ⅔ number wrong because it includes a lot of people, easily half, that have already proven that they can take it or leave it. They go where the opportunity exists. If the aforementioned [change X] happens, they will not leave, as the “highsec majority” wants them to, but will rather shift their focus.

…and that's fine. But it means that you are willing to live in null. You are able to adapt to a change to highsec rather than just quit outright. You prove the notion that “highseccers” will all leave if something changes in highsec wrong, by default.

That's the problem: a lot of making null viable hinges on making highsec worse, because there are limits to how much you can improve something without making it completely broken. High provides a universal benchmark that everything else has to be compared against — if the margins of improvement for other areas are too small, then the only way to resolve the issue is to increase those margins. That means making highsec worse.

And highsec has plenty of room for being made worse without hurting the game to any extent. That's where the other part of argument kicks in: even among the remaining ⅓ “true highseccers”, there is no monolithic idea that highsec must remain untouched, so the “highsec majority” argument doesn't even apply properly to this minority.

You grow a business by creating new products that suit a different customer base. You don't grow it by trying to alter your existing products to fit a that different customer, because all that will happen then is that you lose your old customers — the different ones still won't come, because it's still not made for them. There is no way to merge mutually exclusive design and gameplay aesthetics without making everyone dislike it.

So no. Catering to people who don't like the game is, was, and always has been a losing proposition. Gaming history in particular is littered by the wrecked corpses of IPs (and entire companies) that tried to make such a transition. You make a different product for each different set of customers instead.

I have only played one other MMO (SWTOR) but my experience was exactly the opposite of this. I had loads of fun from day one and loved progressing from level to level and adding to the performance of my character. They game only became stale to me once I reached nearly lvl 50 (then 55 after the Hutt expansion) when I joined a guild and started doing raids. I can't understand why people think running raids is fun. Hey let's watch the same movie 1000 times a week. YAY! Guess that is why I can't stand running missions and haven't looked at incursions.