EVE General Discussion

Also the fact that CCP:

- killed the ship view and replaced it with a static low-res ugly wallpaper for everyone

- some users couldn't run the CQ or at least not without considerable strain on their GPU, which wouldn't have been so much of a problem if the alternative wasn't an ugly wallpaper.

- the way CCP communicated with their players:

-- huge hype
The Fanfast presentations / prototypes showed much more than we ever got.

-- almost nothing to show for (1 very badly lit Minmatar CQ) after 18 months and iirc one dropped expansion out of the usual 6 month expansions

-- marketing going overboard
Remember how project ambulation was renamed Incarna and how CCP celebrated the release of Incarna ... and then see the point above, where "Incarna" is one CQ (or wallpaper) and a closed door ... then go back to the demoed prototypes ... and back to what the Incarna expansion actually looked like ...

Sad but true :) 2/3rds of their customers fund the toys for the one third. i love private games companies but their management can sometimes be a little wack. can hear the cries of "EvE is a PvP game and we wont change" as their ideoillogical ship starts sinking soon

the irony of course is its always been primarily PvE funded

Wow ... even worse than I remembered. Thanks for correcting me.

What i remember is Ball Grid Array technology not up to peoples expectations and failing connections from many cycles of overheating cards. I have one of those, but it works to this day thanks to.... magic. It was resurected.

The stats came from CCP if I recall. While ago but they released data showing % of people engaging in activities, entering null etc. Irrespective of whether PvErs also sometimes engage in PvP if the vast majority primarily engage in PvE then its an illogical and incompetent business decision to ignore PvE development.

The issues is that we know (have known for years) that PvE is the only actiivity for a majority of players whereas players engaging in PvP at all are in a minority. We even have data from CCP on that respect.

See, my experience with what does people do ingame comes from a lucky coincidence. I am a native Spanish speaker, and Spanish chat channel was the place where Spanish speaking players gathered. Each one with his own trade and endeavor in EVE. So by looking at who did what in Spanish cannel, that was a good cross section of who does what in EVE at all.

Even now, when the channel is smaller since CCP killed the non-supported official channels, PvPrs pun at how "all guys in channel are carebears". Of course we are. PvPrs have always been a noisy but small minority. You see their killmails, their quarrels, their discussions... but as soon as you mention anything relevant to PvE, other voices start speaking. And they outnumber PvPrs.

See, EVE does not have a "general discussion" chat channel spanning all the sever. That would be unbearable. So language channels are a good test ground for the actual composition of the population. And the fact is that most people don't pay CCP for the PvP.

The "complete subscribers" who do everything in the game are 30%. Then there's an 8% who do lots of PvP and little more. The rest do little to no PvP; with fleet and assist being the top PvP actions (probably through specialyzed alts, not mains), and not doing any PvP at all is what 25+12% of subscribers do.

Now, these data are posterior to the inception of the Rubicon Plan. So the Rubicon Plan was built based on what CCP figured about players without actually looking at what they did ingame.

This is very important to understand. CCP Seagull's footprint in EVE will be to conceive the Rubicon Plan based on Customer oriented design and the tools to measure what do subscribers do exactly when they play the game. And both things happened simultaneously.

So there is a very real chance that the Rubiocn plan was aimed at the subscribers as CCP imagined them in 2014, plus a dose of "vision", whereas the real susbcribers as CCP is knowing them in 2016 are a different demographic. One that does a lot less PvP than PvP loud mouths could make believe, and a crowd that does a lot more PvE than "EVE is a PvP game and PvE is just a grind for the PvP" fantasies say.

Incarna aimed at every player. Everybody could, potentially, engage in avatar activities, much as 92% of the subscribers do PvE one way or another, even as a minor activity.

Whereas Rubicon is aimed at PvP, and PvP is a minoritary acitvity no matter how you measure it.

When Incarna busted, the minority of PvPrs asked more PvP. CCP obliged and 5 years later EVE is going to get more PvP than ever. And yet most subscribers neither do PvP nor care for PvP, and very certainly don't give money to CCP for the PvP. It's like when Coca Cola made it a sweeter drink to please some customers, and found to their horror that most people would rather go to buy Coke in Canada than drink the new formulation. The "New Coke" fiasco is a paradygm in marketing failures based on wrong information.

Knowing your customers is the key part of "customer oriented design", but likely CCP didn't knew their customers as well as they thought when in 2014 they greenlighted the Rubicon Plan. Probably as better and better data on what do customers actually do has been learned, there's been a lot of finger crossing and spindoctoring going on at CCP to keep everybody focused in succesfully implementing New EVE and hoping that most customers will buy the PvP flavored expansions to come rather than grow bored of the stale PvE and quit.

I could be wrong. That's something I can afford. But CCP will be in serious trouble unless Citadel reverts the trend for server population and starts a second age of sustained growth. Because failing that, the only way up will be F2P and that's going to kill EVE even if CCP can pick their poison. Or, as Plan B, CCP may just let EVE decay and die in peace as other projects become cash cows.

TIL Spanish players lack cojones ... explains why I only ever met 1 Spaniard in my time in the MinMil aka Minmatar militia. ok, ok, I'm joking. I know that some people don't speak english well. We once had a guy translate FC commands in real time to his french mates ... on the same voice channel !!! Utter chaos.

But seriously, your argument doesn't stand. This fallacy is taking a small group as representative for the whole [Pars per toto]. In statistics you're taught to model the group you're observing after the whole population in order to limit skewed results. It's very simple though: you can destroy billions worth of isk in a matter of minutes, creating the same amount of isk will take much longer.

Also, while pvp'ing you have less time for idle chat. Compare that to the thrilling life of miners ...



I agree that CCP has a skewed view of their playerbase. It's in the nature of the beast.

1997-2003: CCP builds a sandbox game with a vision behind and releases it to the public
2003-20xx: Players turn everything upside down, find and exploit bugs, distort game mechanics ...

Also CCP hires from the playerbase, usually from people who had been active in larger alliances.
The CSM gets most of its members from larger alliance because of blockvoting.
Sometimes reddit users get a different treatment than this very forum ... and even here, what is the predominant opinion in GD may not reflect what people think in F&I, C&P, MD, OOPE .... Who should CCP listen to ?

And lastly: Who is CCP ? They themselves are a diverse group of people with different opinions, goals, powers ...
Reminds me of ex-employee (CCP) Soundwave "I don't get RP ... I thought everyone RPs all the time." ... lead game-designer, my behind too.


The appeasement period right after Incarnagate was horrible indeed. "You don't want avatars in EvE, we got the message. Here are 10 new ships, we good now ? Here 10 more ships and next year we'll add many more ships"

I think we have moved on since, but indeed some facet of EvE are not getting enough attention at this time. I think that industry and trading need some dev love too. But honestly: revamping the sov system and rebalancing the ships was badly needed. I just hope that after citadels and cap ships we can get CCP to focus on non-spaceship parts again.

Minority, majority doesn't really matter in all of this. A vision for the whole of EvE is what counts ... for the benefit of all of us even if specific expansions just target a small group. CCP Seagul seems to have that vision.

Yin and Yang ... we need both for perfect harmony ... life and death ... PvE and PvP ...

Oh, come on... Speaking Spanish doesn't favors certain ingame acitvities over others. Thus people who speak Spanish will roughly do the same as people who speak English -everything in the game. That's why the Spanish community (or any language comunity) is a good cross section of the game population.

There are different temperaments, tastes, preferences between groups from different countries, social backgrounds, education levels, genders ...

If Spanish speaking people were distributed equally around the globe from Canada to Japan and from Chile to Russia things would look differently than they do with the way Spanish people are actually distributed over the world map.

Just look at how different South Corea, Japan, China are from Europe or the USA. Look at how different the UK, USA, Canada and Australia are from each other despite the common language. If you still think that Spanish speaking people are the perfect representation of all the afformentioned people, I can't help you.

As a fellow EU citizen (yes I know there is no EU citizenship) you should know how diverse people can be.

Reminds me of this cartoon, when EU had 12 member states.

Now you're being utterly silly. We are talking about EVE players. If you think that being from a certain country changes what a EVE player does in EVE, you'd better bring some evidence. But be warned: CCP already stated that there are no meaningful player trends by nationality.

Language doesn't affects the ingame activities of a EVE player. Specially when there's 26 nationalities and 500 million people behind that language.