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Every year, there are less users playing, why??

First post
Author
Joia Crenca
Science and Trade Institute
Caldari State
#21 - 2016-07-16 05:45:59 UTC
Shae Tadaruwa wrote:
About 70-80% of my recreational computer use is done via mobile devices now.

Not saying that's the reason. It's way too complex an issue to assign a single reason. For me anyway, it is a contributor to less overall time in game. I still play daily, but not the same amount of time I used to.




Hmmm... so if CCP came out with an EVE-tie-in that was a little like Pokemon Go, where we'd hunt each other based on coordinates given on our smart phones? Wait, Never Mind! Real life ganking doesn't allow for waking up in a clone bay! Don't do it, CCP!!!
Tipa Riot
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#22 - 2016-07-16 07:24:41 UTC
The war is over, goons are dead, it's summer ... and, the event sucks, there is no reason to fight over nullsec anymore and citadels in their half-finished state are not much more than a gimmick right now.

I'm my own NPC alt.

Tao Dolcino
Garoun Investment Bank
Gallente Federation
#23 - 2016-07-16 07:41:46 UTC
Since 2-3 years, CCP is using a great amount of energy to waste our gameplay. It has been the new map, the new scanning interface, the new icons, the new UI, the new camera, etc etc... each time forcing it on us despite a huge negative feedback during the tests.
Each time we've had to fight hard here to make these incompetent changes optionals.
That's the reason why i have left for one year.
Now, with the last station camera, we've had to fight again to have it optional, but at least it did not take them long to react and give us the choice, which. after all, is the best way to keep everyone happy.
When i leave EVE, it's always because of CCP's stupid choices. I'm not going to describe them again here, but trust me, the list is long...
Adoris Nolen
Sama Guild
#24 - 2016-07-16 09:14:28 UTC
MidnightWyvern wrote:

People seem to keep discounting that one. A lot of the original 2003 crowd are growing up, settling down, or just moving on with their lives.


This. I'm in the latter part of a decade on EVE. In my freaking 30's. Priorities change.
Sustrai Aditua
Intandofisa
#25 - 2016-07-16 10:01:35 UTC  |  Edited by: Sustrai Aditua
Emiko P'eng wrote:
... the USA financing the Fracking of oil with loans they are having trouble paying back!
OMG this is hilarious. Whoever dreamed this up should write for stand-up comics...fracking loans....hooboy.

If we get chased by zombies, I'm tripping you.

Caleb Seremshur
Commando Guri
Guristas Pirates
#26 - 2016-07-17 04:49:37 UTC
Doc Fury wrote:
There are lots of other games to play, and CCP's latest developments seem to revolve around the further fleecing monetization of existing players, and attracting short-attention-span pay2win types of new players who don't stick around very long and are distracted easily.


"Why whales sing - how big spenders drive retention and virality" by CCP
Caleb Seremshur
Commando Guri
Guristas Pirates
#27 - 2016-07-17 04:50:31 UTC
Sustrai Aditua wrote:
Emiko P'eng wrote:
... the USA financing the Fracking of oil with loans they are having trouble paying back!
OMG this is hilarious. Whoever dreamed this up should write for stand-up comics...fracking loans....hooboy.


Super powers don't owe debts. All they do when they want to write off loans is declare them void.
Tzuke
State War Academy
Caldari State
#28 - 2016-07-17 06:35:37 UTC
Many reasons...game has hardly changed in 13 years, greater competition than 3 years ago, rise of ftp mmo models, complexity of gameplay with the minimal tutorial explaining things

It's no different to any other mmo atm. Check out any mmo forums and you'll see the same posts there. I think I only play eve now due to playing mmos for over 15 years and it's out of habit rather than enjoying the game... As I'm burnt out on all the rest
Cedille Mureau
Institute of Archaeology
#29 - 2016-07-17 10:26:25 UTC
Denavit wrote:
Im asking in a good way, i've never said this game sucked, i love this game and thas why i am asking, because i see it, and i want more ppl to play. Im just trying to figure out why ppl stoped playing.


It's an acquired taste and is not for everyone. It can be hard to get started, less so now than when I first played, but the learning curve is something that needs a lot of work to master.

Again, the atmosphere is not to everyone's taste, it can be pretty cold and hostile, which is something that CCP deliberately went for. So people can be hurt and think, "That's not for me."

Having said that EVE can get under your skin, I can't seem to get to grips with all the back-stabbing, griefing and so on that are part of the game, but I have just come back from a lay-off of about 18 months. There's something about the game that draws me back again and again.
Max Fubarticus
Raging Main
Bullets Bombs and Blondes
#30 - 2016-07-17 13:01:22 UTC
Denavit wrote:
Is is because PLEX prices, i remember buying them at 550mill, 500mill, now is almost 1bill, or is it because the changes are making oldSchoolers quit?


The answer is yes. After the "Big Bang", space time as we know it began to stretch. As a result...

...In conclusion, we are doomed.

Everyone logs in on a different game when you log in to Eve. Every time we have an "Eve is dying troll thread", untold gazillions of neutrinos die, having never met the gluon of their dreams. You should be ashamed of the callous destruction you have causedEvil

Have a nice day

Max

Civil discourse is uniquely human. After all, when is the last time a pride of lions and a herd of water buffalo negotiated SOV over a watering hole? Never. Someone either gets their ass kicked or eaten. At the end of the day someone holds SOV.

Denavit
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#31 - 2016-07-17 15:08:53 UTC
Max Fubarticus wrote:
Denavit wrote:
Is is because PLEX prices, i remember buying them at 550mill, 500mill, now is almost 1bill, or is it because the changes are making oldSchoolers quit?


The answer is yes. After the "Big Bang", space time as we know it began to stretch. As a result...

...In conclusion, we are doomed.

Everyone logs in on a different game when you log in to Eve. Every time we have an "Eve is dying troll thread", untold gazillions of neutrinos die, having never met the gluon of their dreams. You should be ashamed of the callous destruction you have causedEvil

Have a nice day

Max



ooohh shiieeeitt!! =( , well i just want to play like always, but i want more ppl to play, i also left for a time, but i do thing NULL needs more incentive to be wanted, like a lot more!
Yun Kuai
Garoun Investment Bank
Gallente Federation
#32 - 2016-07-18 08:23:09 UTC
In my own personal opinion, I feel there are 4 main reaons why the player count is no longer at the 45k average and peaking in the 60k numbers about 5 years ago.

1) The biggest problem area is that in my almost 8 of years of playing, the game's core mechanics (read pve) are almost exactly the same as when I started. That means 8 years of grinding the same anoms, the same missions, the same mining, the same industry, the same incursions, etc.

2) The inflation factor has a big turn of for a lot of people; i.e. too much work for to little reward. I remember when PLEX were first introduced and sat around 300mil. At the time those were still considered quite expensive, especially when you could buy a dominix hull for 50mil. That meant I could rat in a haven for 30mins each day and have enough isk to lose a BS doing silly stuff or I could buy a hand full of BCs, dozens of cruisers, etc. I had a lot more fun because I had a lot of time to actually go pew pew.

3) Cookie cutter class changes also took a lot of fun out flying different ships. Almost all hulls now follow 1-2 standard fits as nothing else really fits anymore. All of the ships lost a lot of their faction's uniqueness during tiericde and it suddenly became pretty much similar ships using slightly different weapon systems.

4) Nullsec decay and blue donoughts lead to a large number of people quitting the game as CCP dragged their feet years too long to change the nullsec mechanics. The new sov at least gets people actively playing again, but there's still room for improvement even if it was too little too late.

5)* I won't classify this one as a major issue but I feel with all of the 3rd party sites that monitor everything I feel like the game, espeically nullsec is no longer wild and dangerous. Too many areas are mapped down to the most minute details and have lost the appeal since there's nothing left to discover. More emergent gameplay that can't be calculated down to an exact science; read random generator, would be good for the game as it would add some much needed "newess" for everyone.

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Gimme Sake
State War Academy
Caldari State
#33 - 2016-07-18 08:55:54 UTC
I find it ironic how people complain about plex prices while stashing it by the thousands.

"Never not blob!" ~ Plato

Remiel Pollard
Aliastra
Gallente Federation
#34 - 2016-07-18 08:58:56 UTC
Yun Kuai wrote:
the game's core mechanics (read pvp)


FTFY

“Some capsuleers claim that ECM is 'dishonorable' and 'unfair'. Jam those ones first, and kill them last.” - Jirai 'Fatal' Laitanen, Pithum Nullifier Training Manual c. YC104

Malharrion
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#35 - 2016-07-18 11:11:03 UTC
If CCP had implemented Walking in stations , Walking on planets. PLanetary vehicles and planeraty industry / farming etc. Then the game would be busting the 100k Subs online mark right now. The server infrastructure would need upgrading it would be so active.

When i go on Holiday to foreign places i want it to be an adventure. Not an exercise of futility. Let the people of earth enjoy their liberty; in their own homelands. And death to the Globalist pigs.

Musashi IV
Off-World Mining
#36 - 2016-07-18 11:13:47 UTC
Denavit wrote:
Is is because PLEX prices, i remember buying them at 550mill, 500mill, now is almost 1bill, or is it because the changes are making oldSchoolers quit?


The high price of PLEX is just one of the reasons EVE has fewer players. Changes to ICE mining is another reason. I had a 3 account ICE mining corporation. After the changes to ICE mining I could not mine enough ICE to buy PLEX for all 3 accounts so I closed 2 of them. Now rarely log into one of my accounts.
Roenok Baalnorn
Baalnorn Heavy Industries
#37 - 2016-07-18 12:59:03 UTC

Quote:
1) The biggest problem area is that in my almost 8 of years of playing, the game's core mechanics (read pve) are almost exactly the same as when I started.
The core of the game is pvp and to get people to fight. That core must be supported by a pve sector. I agree the PVE in this game is boring as hell. All the sites are the same across all factions. They basically used a template to reproduce the same site with a different faction of ships. I dont know how they do it, but when i do such things using dev tools to mod a game i can build a site as simple as an anom in about 10-15 minutes from scratch in other games. Sometime like a mission or plex would take me 15-45 minutes. And i just dabble in modding game. I didnt actually go to school for it.

Their answer for this: Lets add "god mode/ you will not survive" sites! Ghost sites some of which appear in high, you are just opening cans thinking finally they made sites worth doing, and then boom rats warp in and insta pop you with there IED cans. And you are like WTF this is a 0.8 system! Turns out you need a well tanked( read slow) ship to run them. And then we have the super dreads that just hotdrop you in anoms. Yes thats fun. Nothing like an Ewar toting, tacklenought, that does good dps and tanks like an entire wave of normal rats. None of this makes sites more fun. It makes it more of a pain in the ass and only enhances one displeasure of grinding. Pvers tend to want to do things that put their ships at grave risk when they have other options. That is why high sec is so overly populated and should be CCPs first big clue.

Mining is boring and always has been. I dont think there is anything you can do to making mining entertaining...well maybe if you seriously revamped the whole mining system. Any space game in which i had to mine in, it was the least enjoyable part of the game. The human mind is sort of built to enjoy rewards especially surprise high value rewards even if those rewards are few and far between. That is how P2Ws get people to spend their entire savings on a game. Mining, in any game, offers no reward. It is like cutting grass, washing dishes, or cleaning out your car. Its a necessary evil most people want to put off till the second tuesday of the week.


Quote:
2) The inflation factor has a big turn of for a lot of people; i.e. too much work for to little reward. I remember when PLEX were first introduced and sat around 300mil.
Plex went up slightly on the cash side. It use to cost $35 on a third party site( battleclinic) for 60 day GTC. It now cost $40. That contributed some to the increase in cost. Some more of the cost comes from flexibility in how you can convert real money into isk. Plex use to be the only way to do that. Now their are other ways to do that. I would say the AUR store in general has drove the price up.

Another big factor is Ihubs and the butterfly effect. Ihubs made deadspace and pirate faction more available on the market. Changes to locating sites also made it easier and faster to find combat sites. People that do this for isk started making a lot of isk. This influx of deadspace and faction made such things fairly cheap, while the people that find it got super rich. 900 mil isk is really nothing in null. thats like 300 mil in high sec. The price of the high end stuff has went down and the price of the low end stuff has went up.

The mineral market is actually much higher now than it was 5 years ago and i actually stumbled across an old grismar ore page that gave mineral prices...for early 2007. Trit = 2.37(5.79 now), Pyer= 4 (9.28 now), mexa=21(74.80 now), isogen=64.06(91.08), Nocx=93.76(479.96), Zydrine and Mega lost half their value while morphite lost about 15% of its value. That has to do a lot with the changes to ores, drone poop, and recycling of modules( which most people dont even bother to pick up anymore)

Over the price of a plex reflects how hard it is to make money in Eve. And its not that hard to make isk in eve unless you are a grind/wage slave and do the whole x amount of work= y amount of isk per hour. Risk and thinking outside of the box are the big pay offs in eve. Grinding missions and mining are like working front line at mc donalds.


Quote:
3) Cookie cutter class changes also took a lot of fun out flying different ships.
I disagree with the first part of your statement. People fly a lot more different ships now. Use too each race had a best in class for each class of ship and all the others were trash. Now each ship has more of a purpose based on what you are doing. I fly far more different ships now in pvp fleets than i ever did before. And i fit them differently. Usually having 2 or 3 fits per ship depending on situation.

However i do agree with you about module tiericide. What they should of did was cut the mat requirements of t1 modules in half, increased the cost of t2 modules by 50% And then adjusted drop rates of the t1 metas so meta 4 was more rare and more expensive than a meta 2. As you go up from meta 1 to meta 5 the pg/cpu requirements increase very slightly per meta. Then made some slight changes to faction mods and above. What they did was heavy handed and dumb the module part of the game down to WoW level.

Roenok Baalnorn
Baalnorn Heavy Industries
#38 - 2016-07-18 13:57:51 UTC

Quote:
4) Nullsec decay and blue donoughts lead to a large number of people quitting the game as CCP dragged their feet years too long to change the nullsec mechanics. The new sov at least gets people actively playing again, but there's still room for improvement even if it was too little too late.
Nullsec is generally more populated than when i first entered it 7-8 years ago. I could go several systems and not see a soul. Getting a system to myself in alliance space wasnt hard as long as i didnt care about true sec or a dock. Now you will be hard pressed to go more than 2 jumps without seeing people most times of day. And thats after they added 2500 WH systems which take probably a few thousand people out of sov null.

There are alliances that have few to no blues. The norm is to blue everything still. But some still only blue on a temp basis for certain reason and then the blue status is removed. It has always been an issue since i started playing eve. Its a hard problem to fix because certain alliance leaders have narcissistic issues that lead them to grow there alliance into a stupidly huge state and then blue a bunch of other alliances so they can keep their space using overwhelming numbers( to make up for a lack of pvp skill) and their ego intact.

Jedi mind link sov is boring as hell. Id rather bash POSes. at least the shoot back. Playing frigate chess with entosis frigs and jamming frigs is just a stupid way to do sov. It would be like Cuba and the US fighting over florida using cars to run around and hoist their countries flag at the city hall in select major cities in the state. and whoever gets all their flags up at the same time wins and takes control of florida.

Sov should be about fighting and require a commitment of assets to acquire and keep. Not 5 guys and some entosis links. I understand what CCP was trying to do. But making it more boring and less about fighting was not the answer. It didnt solve any problems really. A decent size alliance can still take control from a smaller one with relative ease. If they want to get rid of the mega alliances and blue donuts then they need to directly focus on them rather than skirting the issue and trying to lead people away from that tactic.

There is one alliance in this game that really keeps this blue donut and owning large amounts of space going. This one alliance that has a leader that tries to project their "influence" to areas of space that isnt even close to their actual boarders. They are basically the mafia of eve trying to get other alliances to pay "tribute" to them to keep them from invading their space. THAT alliance needs to die permanently and its narcissistic leader needs to be banned from the game. Because that one alliance is the major proponent of everything that is wrong with null sov warfare. Until people wise up and destroy that alliance and force it out of sov null forever, it will always be the cancer it has been for years on null sec.


Quote:
5)* I won't classify this one as a major issue but I feel with all of the 3rd party sites that monitor everything I feel like the game, espeically nullsec is no longer wild and dangerous.
Eve has lost the feeling of being in space. Space is suppose to feel vastly empty and like you can go places very few to no one else has been. Eve is pretty much like a metro area in space.

The problem is if you spread people out to much there is no reason to interact. If you pack them all together than it doesnt feel like a space game. You might as well be in a major city and alliances can own blocks and players building. Same thing difference graphics. So you have to find a balance that gets people to interact but makes space feel spacey.
Demica Diaz
SE-1
#39 - 2016-07-18 19:33:33 UTC  |  Edited by: Demica Diaz
I am probably all alone on this boat but I started playing EVE during promise of human avatar gameplay and I would play much more EVE if that had come true. But it didnt. Straight
Judaa K'Marr
Shadow Legions.
Insidious.
#40 - 2016-07-18 20:29:48 UTC
The game seems to be in a perpetual state of transition.