Player Features and Ideas Discussion

That doesn't mean more subs, though. It might or it might not. What I was saying is that players who wanted to AWOX only need 1 free slot on their accounts to do it. Biomassing characters that become notorious for AWOXing or corp thefts, and creating new ones to carry on with the activity. So with the existing player base AWOXing would become cheaper and therefore more prevalent. Extending that logic to more subs is a dubious claim and not based on logic, but speculation.

You didn't see it, as expected. But that's OK, we understand that.

Trying to undermine a whole idea that's evidenced in the trend of promoting creativity instead of preventing it, promoting motivation instead of eroding it, supplementing mastery and learning instead of limiting the very features that would be advertised and played.. with a point about a playstyle that a tiny minority even applies.. Something seems dubious.

I told you, watch minute 18:00-19:00. Rise has a very good graphics on the screen during that time. What the opportunity progression path in this part of the video is are skills to the game at large. Pains me that I have to spell it out for someone so apt in the topic.

I am equating this particular aspect of the opportunities to the game design as a whole. The graphs clearly show that people have no idea what to do with too many choices, stumble around, leave or are at risk to leave because there is no visible path, no progression. It certainly has to do with lowest common denominator and motivation. The skills you have at the start allow you a broad range of activities. The other skills allow you to expand the range of activities even further after an initial orientation phase, or dig deeper into specializing into certain aspects that you found interesting. What this presentation also showed is not that skills are hindering people from doing things or that there are too few activities available to them, rather it showed that people do not know what to do and do not see everything they can do. The problem, as said before, are not skills but lack of information about the activities they want to pursue.

No, I mean the people trying PI, trying to shoot billboards, trying to get to systems when they are too daft to move a window that obstructs system info, the people zooming around in system not knowing how to access missions.

Your original answer on topic holds little to no value to the discussion. There could be 900 billion new people per year using the internet. As long as there is only 1 million people interested in this kind of game and setting and 800 Billion people interested in settings like Angry Bird, WOW or other non-consequential, non-RL-influencing and restricting games, you will not get beyond 1M actual people in the game. Easy as that. You, on the other hand, try to picture and make a game that every one of the 900M people using the internet should play, regardless of their preferences and limitations. That is not how things work.

If I remember your point correctly, skills are blockades for people to pursue activities at the beginning of the game. So, what is it now? The presentation shows that there are lots of options available, but people do not know how to use them, how to access them properly or learn about intricate details of activities. Skills have little to do with this important aspect of the starting trend.

Niche? What niche? I am talking about a broad range of activities for any player to pursue, from PVP to PVE to PI, mining, missions, exploration, socializing, helping people, hurting people to market manipulation. These things are all available to new players right from the start. What you are mostly concentrating on are capital engagements. If anything, this is the biggest niche in the game.

Your application of these research papers and scientific findings holds little value. The science you refer to is done under circumstances that do not match to the particular case of EVE. They also do not dispel any of the benefits of skill learning. Take your Forbes link as example:
"Video games, the authors argue, help kids to develop an incremental theory of intelligence. “Immediate and concrete feedback in video games (e.g., through points, coins, dead ends in puzzles) serves to reward continual effort,” keeping players in a “motivational ‘sweet spot’” that “balances optimal levels of challenge and frustration with sufficient experiences of success and accomplishment.”"
This describes skill very neatly in my opinion.
Or the selfdetermination theory:
Conditions supporting the individual’s experience of autonomy, competence, and relatedness are argued to foster the most volitional and high quality forms of motivation and engagement for activities, including enhanced performance, persistence, and creativity. (among other things on that site)
In combination with the Forbes quote, skills offer autonomy beyond a certain degree, but also require competence in determining what you can do and how to do it, leading to a better understanding of what is going on, how to enhance your performance and in the process require creativity and, again, autonomy to overcome or compensate hurdles.
Furthermore, this reddit link of your's shows that not the game itself is to blame, but the players' inability and refusal to change to new play styles and give up on activities/ways to do things that they do not like (#soulcrushinglag, #soulcrushingtidi, yet people want to keep doing things that give just that.)
You also dismiss running missions by comparing that with "taking out trash". It is certainly true that missions are repetitive, but so are carrier drops, so are carrier losses, so is anything in the game and PVP is the worst at that. Instead of removing skill which has 0 effect on repetitiveness of missions, for instance, it should be argued for more, more varied and better missions and mission systems.
Again, people expect B-R, but they are not entitled to get it. B-R, and any of these events for the matter, require immense preparation that is not just done in the blink of an eye. That is what the advertisement omits in the videos and stories about these events. People come into the game with wrong expectations nurtured by CCP and players, who then complain about new players leaving once they find out about the true nature of things. For this reason, the Butterfly Effects trailer is by far a better reflection of what is actually going on in EVE and what you can do right away and this kind of things should be more advertised. Adjusting the game because of wrong and misleading advertisement to meat wrong and mislead expectations is not the way forward.

I am not going to dig through all of your links let alone search for studies that prove my point as long as you continue providing me links that already do that. Thanks.

I am not projecting the game on a niche, it is a niche game in this regard, just like I described above. There is only a limited subset of players in the online-player crowd available who are capable of playing and surviving in EVE. With the current trends in society and the game development environment away from consequences towards casual, inconsequential gameplay, this subset it only going to shrink further. Inside the game itself, you project that everyone wants to play the capital niche, however. Without this projection, your argument would fall apart as most activities are accessible even to the newest player right from day 1 -- even more so now after the added SP and increased number of skills available from minute 1.

You have my example about how you can play the game. That you disagree with my example of competence on the sole basis that you want to see new players in capitals is something I cannot do much against. I know that it requires competence to overcome obstacles in my way when I play my game, be it skills, money, geographical features or something else. I also do not agree, and never will, that SP limit activity. They certainly limit which tools you can use at a given time, but never do you have 0 tools available to you so that you could not do something, and the sparse limitations due to skills or other constraints make people take creative strides in finding things to get activity, motivate them to think beyond what their current skills allow them to do and make them engage with other people to find inspiration. I do not care if your scope of competence or activity are too limited to understand this. If you let yourself limit by skills, or the lack of skills, in what you can do, this is your decision. I have given various examples that portrait the contrary and are taken from what EVE is like.
I would also be mindful what you call the studies and findings you used to support your claims. You linked them first and I only reused them to prove my points. You linked the opinion on reddit to support your claims and you vaguely sported theories about motivation, competence or activity that have no relation to EVE or the special requirements surrounding EVE.

Skills do not prevent the full experience of the sandbox. They rather give you directions about what to do in the sandbox so that you do not stumble around aimlessly. As described in the NPE presentation. You call it unsourced, I call it a clearly visible trend in the economy. MGS V, for instance, wants to introduce an insurance to their multiplayer so that people do not lose their assets during a raid. This is one example demonstrating that developers and people seem not interested a lot in consequences of actions and, while keeping action high, want to prevent the experience of loss in players. The amount of people joining CFC, as another, EVE related example, is another indicator that people are not interested a lot in losses. I do not necessarily need to cite unrelated scientific studies; I have empiric evidence from inside EVE to support my claims.

It is your focus, not mine. You base your argument on capitals, not I. Nearly everything else is accessible and usable from a very early stage in the game and thus the argument skill prevent or limit activities is moot. You can do nearly whatever you want, but if you want to become good in something, you follow this career path along and improve the tools and your personal skills in the process.

Why do you need T2 ammo? Faction ammo is superior in most scenarios as it has no additional downsides, such as reduced tracking or massively increased cap usage. If you limit your creativity by insisting on using certain things while other things offer same, better or different results. If they end their sub, they have no sandbox left to play. If they let themselves limit by advertisement induced expectations in what you can do in the sandbox, they have no creativity, motivation or engagement potential to begin with.

I beg your pardon, but my own experiences are not strawmen. If you dismiss actual ingame experience as that, there's not much more to discuss with you about.

Fallacy to extremes? Is it not you who constantly rumbles about how skills prohibit all activity, obstruct motivation or engagement? Is it not you, who constantly claims that skills put up absolute barriers to the creativity of the player? Please don't forget your own extremes when you complain about other people resorting to "extremes".
It is not activity, it is one kind of activity among a broad range of similar things to do. There is not one activity, activity is what you do in the sandbox. You cannot do one thing, then do the next thing achieving similar results with other tools.

From your own fantasy and creativity. If a fitting of a cruiser requires a T2 Reactor Control, but you cannot use T2 reactor control, you look for a faction RC. That is the kind of creativity that I employed a lot in my early days when I could not fit doctrine fittings properly. Or by the expectation of the person who put this particular fitting together, you need to see how you can meet the expectation and if you cannot, find ways to manage. It is a sandbox. You yourself need to think. You yourself need to be able to come up with solutions to your problems. You yourself need to engage with other people and inquire, for example, if a slight fitting alteration is acceptable or which hardwirings to use to make a fitting work. If you do do not have a Wii available, but only a mobile, the question solves itself for you. You also cannot play Wii Tennis at a station or during downtime at work. If you do not feel like throwing around a controller or your arms, you also play Tetris. If you do not get the hang of the Wii controls (personal experience, I do not like the Wii controller), you maybe try Tennis but stop playing and resort to Tetris because frustration is the last thing you need at the moment.