EVE General Discussion

I forgot. Once you're a goon, you've already won the game once and forever.

So of course you don't care about your character's kill rep. Or how many ships you lose, or how much ISK you spend on stuff.... or really anything at all. You don't even need to log on anymore, except once in a blue moon.

You might as well let your subscription laps, come to think of it.

Naturally more characters per account would improve PCU since a character can only be used if it's logged in. Dwindling characters per account would be weird but uneffectual to PCU.

Personally, I have 5 characters on 3 accounts, and log in regularly 4 of them.

Yes, on supercapital alt accounts, this is a decent idea. The other slots were probably cyno alts which aren't needed anymore.

So true. And in the unlikely event you ever needed them again, you could always just resub for a month to get them back.


The ability to Super Cap people to death is all you need. The actual use of them will almost certainly never happen because everyone already knows how the fight would end.

.... which brings us to the main problem. If the fight is already a forgone conclusion, there is no point in bothering to actually have a fight. So what is there to keep people engaged?

Edit: I should add that, if we had more diplomacy options, such as intra-alliance war declaration, you might actually get to use your Super Cap Chars after all. Agains other Goon Super Cap players. Which would give you a reason to keep them, and perhaps allow you to enjoy them more.

So it had nothing to do with anything I wrote then, and was just some spurious nonsense you came up with because you had nothing better to contribute. Ok.

No, you're clearly not, since you are referring to some opinion that haven't been expressed by me.

No, when they did that, the numbers were already climbing, and the expansion gave them a nice extra boost that allowed them to keep climbing even during a period where we'd normally see a decrease.

With Incursion, on the other hand, we saw the same kind of pre-expansion climb, but once everything had been released, we saw something very new: a very sharp drop — much sharper than what we'd normally see after a patch, and for a much longer period. It was so sharp and so long, in fact, that by the time the next expansion came around and made a complete mess of things, the two combined created almost three quarters-long constant trend downward. Now granted, there was some pre-patch hype before Incarna, but it was already tarnished by the money-grubbing stuff CCP did before the whole MT débâcle hit, and the real peak at the time was due to a bunch of AT-related hype.

See, this is the part you're getting laughably wrong: they were not riding high; people were not playing more than ever. The numbers were in decline as early as January, half a year before the summer of rage started. By March, the temporary gain that Incursion had caused had been wiped out, and then the numbers kept going down. Incursion should have stopped this, but was obviously a spectacular failure in more ways than you can count, so the numbers kept going down, when they should have been going up (or at least stabilised).

That's why your failed attempt at sarcasm was so ignorant: you think I'm trying to shift blame from Incarna to Incursion. I'm not. I'm looking at what happened long before Incarna even hit. Incarna just failed to turn that trend around and instead managed to prolong the drop-off when it should have been over. It is its own failure, quite separate from the activity issues Incursion caused.

…and guess what happened? The numbers jumped up to new record levels in response to CCP refocusing on things that matter, and away from their failed pet project.

The only one claiming that Incursions started to drive people away from the game 3 years after the fact is you. Like your failed sarcasm, this is obviously a pretty idiotic idea, which is why you expressed it, not I. I am looking at how the release of Incursion during Dec 2010–Jan 2011 coincides with the drop in numbers that began in Jan 2011 and continued to early June. By mid-to-late June, the monetisation flubs started coming in hard and fast from CCP, leading to the summer of rage at the end of June and which ran on through to Oct/Nov '11.

So if you want to talk about how ideology makes you stupid, maybe you should look into the reasons behind this huge presumptive cockup you've managed to create for yourself. I think you'll find it has a lot to do with (incorrect) assumptions you made about my stance, which fuelled further (incorrect) assumptions about my arguments, further reinforced by (incorrect) assumptions about the state of the game at the time.

Despite small gang PvP being the "shining wonder child" of EVE in the sales hype, in terms of proportion of characters logged in no one much does it. (You cannot really count CODE as ganking AFK miners and autopiloted freighters is technically PvP but its as carebear as it gets)

Lets look at what sort of characters log in.

Characters rarely if ever get logged in for more than a few minutes:
- cyno alts
- lowsec and null PI alts
- char in Titans and Supers
- various characters that run stuff for corps and alliances
- characters being trained up for sale

Characters who are logged in semi-permanently:
- afk ISK earners like miners and haulers
- station traders and scammers

Characters who log in on weekends only:
- casual players
- players needing to assemble a fleet including some incursion runners and many casual small gang and gate camp PvPers

Characters who log in a lot:
- newer players
- small gang and gate campers that use alts
- mission runners
- explorers
- non afk miners

It's certainly not sitting in slow battleships with huge sigs. Thinking about how badly battleships need and deserve aggressive EHP buffs makes me sad.

It's a matter of perspective. Almost every patch contains some PvE content. It is not merged into "huge, one per six months expansion". You're right, most of player base are here for PvE oriented playstyle, making "some" content in six week patches ratio may discourage part of playerbase to renew subs.
I think there will be huge PvE expansion next year with introduction of player build gates and jove empire. CCP just need to finish sov and citadels first. So it'll be a year or more, hard to blame players they leave.

We get nice clothes now. Stop bringing up the expansion that shall not be named.

I don't. I simply get annoyed when people just scream “noooooo” and then start using strawmen, fabrications, misrepresentations, and other nonsense trying to “disprove” me. Any suggestion that the numbers didn't start to decline sharply pretty much the day the last bits of Incursion were released is exactly that: a complete fabrication.

That's just it: they really haven't. They've followed a regular pattern of hype and stabilisation, but Incursion was the first to actually be boom followed by immediate bust — a sharp increase, followed by a complete loss of what was gained, and then some. Even Incarna didn't manage this, but only because the population numbers were already in bust-mode after Incursion, and because of all the run-up issues that led to the summer of rage. Incarna managed to create pretty odd dynamic of bust-bustbust…

That's the whole point. Why is this so hard to understand? You see it for other MMOs; before Incursion, we didn't see it for EVE. The apparently shocking and subversive suggestion I'm offering is that, if you build and expansion like they're built for most MMOs, you get the behaviour we see in most MMOs. If you build a veeeery similar expansion in a way that actually fits into EVE, you don't get that. The fact that this can happen to a PvE expansion disproves the oft-suggested notion that adding some ill-defined “improved PvE” will solve everything. Incursion did exactly that, and the game suffered for it.