EVE General Discussion

Read the bolded and italicized section again. This is where you will find your answer.

Then CCP has to accept that people won't bother building stuff when it is so easy...

But people do, do that work. There are big alliances and there are people in positions of trust.

So again, as a reason for the decline in players logged in, this could be a factor I suppose, but it does not fit with when the game was growing. This explanation (by itself) says the game should not grow.

Now, here is one possible extension of your argument that would deal with the point I have raised (oh and I'm helping you because you are not nearly as smart as you think you are, which is truly ironic given you implying everyone else is brainless but you).

New products go through a life cycle and surprisingly it is a similar life cycle across a wide variety of products. The way this life cycle is characterized mathematical is via the Bass Diffusion model.

The Bass Diffusion model (BDM for short) is that of an 's-curve'. First we see an exponential growth in people purchasing/utilizing the new product, an inflection point, and the growth in customers become logarithmic (i.e. concave). So, suppose the rate at which Eve loses players for *reasons* is a constant rate with respect to time and the number of players [1]. The BDM and this constant rate of player attrition suggest that at some point Eve will go into decline because it cannot replace those who are leaving with those who are coming in.

In this case, the number of players is going to go down. However, it is not tied to any specific reason. This would explain the initial growth and then the subsequent decline.

The solution is to try and "reinvent" the product. Upgrade it in some manner so that it will be seen as a "new" product again and put things back on the exponential growth path again.

However, while one might be tempted to say, "let's make Eve kinder and gentler!" That could be a risky strategy in that you might find your remaining customers quitting wholesale since it is not the original product they bought.

[1] The loss of players would looks something like this:

players leaving = -0.01*(number of players*t)

Note this is for illustrative purposes only.

I would say I have been straight up aggressive to you. So I'm not sure what you think I am projecting.

"He is quite welcome to say no its too much work" - You seem to be assuming that the answer is laziness or unwillingness to put forth the effort.

No - you can not. That is one of the inherent risk of having anything in this game. If someone else wants it bad enough they will try to take it. Hopefully you can puzzle out who is responsible but that is not always possible. It is the essence of the game.

Yes, it is called uncertainty as opposed to risk. With risk you know what your are dealing with and can mitigate it. Uncertainty on the other hand is much harder to deal with. It has always been an inherent part of the game.

For example, when Goons turned off BoB sovereignty that was awesome. And keep in mind at the time my alliance was part of the GBC. Yeah, it was annoying in that it was nearly impossible to fight, but there was fighting and I was part of it in my own small way, but still in the back of my head I knew I was playing a tiny role in something that would be big.

Or when Goons screwed up their wallet when sov bills came due and dropped sov in key systems across their space and IT Alliance rushed in to take advantage. Awesome. I was unfortunately at work, but reading the write ups later on various discussion boards was quite entertaining (especially Manfred Sideous' write up about how Goons had a carrier response fleet up trailing the hostile invaders trying to knock out sov structures and finally they managed to catch that carrier fleet in a bubble...which really meant it was all over for Goons in Delve).

They are not unique, sure. But one thing is to lose half of your 13,000,000 playerbase, another is to halve your 60k online players.

In 2011 something happened. That something broke the camel's back. CCP took a sharp turn which alienated a lot of players. Real players revolts happened. Among the many things, about 60% of the 3rd party utility developers quit playing or stopped coding for EvE. Since then, a plethora of terrible changes have happened, players have been shown some CCP important people being blind and greedy and sometimes arrogant.

There are many more things that would be worth mentioning, but nobody would care to hear them and, frankly, they have been debated to death.

The fun thing is, markets always win, expecially when people have to find a reason to pay a subscription and every year that reason gets weaker. In the end swearing vs gankers or vs miners or vs 0.0ers is not going to save EvE. Facts could save EvE, but facts are a rare commodity in these days.

Overlayed average players graph + google trends graph for "MMO".

http://i.imgur.com/83w8OnG.png

Mostly the following-the-industry theory is right. EVE is basically a boat being lifted or falling with the MMO tide. The exception is in 2012-2014 when it breaks away from the trendline, and refuses to go with the MMO downtrend. At the start of 2016 the lines are almost touching again.

2012-2014 were the years when CCP was humbled by the Incarna fallout, gave up on over the top Jesus visions and worked on long forgotten issues.

Eve version of a server merge = making the map smaller.

If they start deleting regions off the map, you know there's trouble. "The universe is too big" is already a meme among some players.