EVE General Discussion

Perhaps you missed the part where it is the players who make it interesting.

I logged in more during the war in the North. That had ****-all to do with CCP and everything to do with players. I logged in more when Goons turned of BoB sov and that had ****-all to do with CCP and everything to do with players. When my alliance went to Stain and there were fleets...I logged in and again, that had ****-all to do with CCP and everything to do with players.

Nobody is pushed into anything in this game. Nothing in this game says you have to run missions or mine. Nothing. That is what a sandbox means. Do whatever. You are not going to have your hand held while you are in the sandbox. Figure out what you want to do and find the means to achieve it. If you cannot or will not do that...well...wrong game.

She is quitting because of the symptoms, not so much the problem, at least directly.

And sad to say, the symptoms for many "diseases" can also be fatal.

And no, I would not say she is "playing wrong". The point of a sandbox is do what you want. If that is what she liked, good for her. I might disagree with her chosen activities/path in EVE, but that is irrelevant, ultimately.

Your two months in game do not reflect a well rounded knowledge of how EvE works yet. Likely you just don't know how to make money yet, which is ok you're new. ISK is actually way too easy to make, especially compared to a few years ago. Please avoid making definitive statements about a game you've hardly played :)

Maybe there are less people because they're sick and tired of EVERY SINGLE DISCUSSION turning into the same "bears vs gankers" go-round.

Except none of those are true.

Blanket War decs were already a thing before CCP changed the watchlist. In fact the watch list change barely caused an increase in the wars groups like Marmite were already throwing out and had been throwing out for quite a large number of months.

Code happened before the change to freighter ganking, and before the changes to mining barges. The fact they already existed meant that when the changes happened they made a whole lot of grand standing noise about it and launched a few specific campaigns, but quite honestly I found the old hulkageddon more scary when on my mining account than any of the code campaigns.

What has changed is social media. When EVE started social media and connections were nowhere near as evolved as they are today, the internet was not as easy to search since Google was not yet reigning supreme and didn't track everything that happens on it, we didn't have the super easy voice chat options, and we didn't have the insanely complex third party tools.
These changes to social media, the internet and communication tools mean that it is vastly easier to propagate noise, and therefore also vastly easier to propagate rubbish noise. And that is what is happening.

I'm not going to bother going over all 59 pages of post. The answer is simple. Eve has been out for a while now and that is to be expected, nothing last forever... This does not mean eve is going to go poof any time soon. I still see 20 - 30k people online during peak hours. And TBH I like when it is quiet. I don't have to drop what I'm doing to go kick a bunch of newts off my lawn

Using top notch hardware is not just about picking the nicest piece of hardware available, but also how much of that you buy.
As EvE became increasingly successful, CCP did not just have to buy good hardware, but also to purchase enough servers to deal with the numbers. If you suddenly had lost half playerbase, you'd have half of those servers sitting idle, consuming power, needing replacements and system administration.

Admin and hardware costs are an easily ignored issue but they are relevant. As I am playing online games since the '90s, I have been in most MMOs (and more). The ones that tanked, always went through servers consolidations. In the beginning of a MMO crysis, server consolidation is mostly a measure to keep a shard population healthy enough to avoid it bleeding to death due to the highly dangerous "server desertification effect". Past that, someone who cares to read the company's statements / devs posts etc. would see how dismissed servers would be used as broken parts replacement source. This still holds true for "brink of death" MMOs like Istaria.

MMOs that ultimately closed down (last famous case being Warhammer Online), in order to save on hardware and administration, ended up moving the last 2-3 physical servers onto VPS instances.

So, yes, I reaffirm my statement about this.




By "not quiet" you mean that guy out of 1000 who creates a GD thread about "whaa my Hulk got ganked" and then he never gets seen again?

About data: come on, you can't blindly believe on data released by the same company who benefit from them looking good, that's what 3rd party auditing exists for. I have worked on computer companies for 20 years, not a single time they'd spread the full, real data. They actually paid computer magazines and websites for friendly reviews and they got them every time.
I can't believe you play EvE (a game where deceit is seen as emergent, good gameplay) made by a company whose name is an acronym for: "Crowd Control Productions" and still take everything they throw at you.

I also have a Santa Claus sled for sale if you want!




Between "being aware" and "being able to deal with it" there's some meausurable gap.

CCP and not me, designed WiS and failed at it. They DID understand they had to cater to a wider, less "hard core purist we-are-playing-it-right-the-MMO-for-us-the-elite" playerbase yet they failed. And no, they did not fail just because of technology, but because of $1000 jeans attitude.

CCP and not me, created Apochrypha and it has been their last, huge success. It catered to those pesky "casuals" (I think we have got two different versions of what we think an EvE "casual" would be) who were fine with 0.0 "alike" gameplay but not with the useless mega-corp induced burden. I truly can't think of a single bad thing about WHs.
CCP, if they want, CAN create casual content that does not kill its "hard core" foundations.

However, they officially branded Apochrypha as a bad expansion and have steered well away off it. The results are speaking loud.

"Yes, but they wanted to stop those bad Holy Jesus expansions because of bugs blah blah" .

Oh well, guess which delivery model made EvE peak its success? Exactly that ugly kind of expansions. What did those expansions achieve? They renewed gameplay in a tangible way. To be honest, I immensely appreciated more having to deal with bugs and a GREAT WH experience, than having paid subs for 6 months just to see a sluggish inventory screen being remade. I guess this makes me a "casual" too. As casual as those hard core players who too enjoyed getting 2 expansions a year for a decade.

Some changes to ships, a new kind of base, some minor interface changes you call them expansion?

Please be serious, they make some little updates to the game, nothing more.

I'm almost moved by the attachment of someone here to the game but I would really suggest to be a bit more demanding, you are happy with very very few things...

Yeah there isn't really much value in the usual conversations ...
... but that's because of people not really talking to each other.

I wonder if the word "Gesprächskultur" has a direct translation...


Hey VV, maybe you should start a blog! You're just wasting energy here! ^_^

Well, must it be something that changed? There are always players leaving games, that's normal. But if nobody new takes their place their number will dwindle. Eve is doing everything to make it difficult to new players. There is just these monster game which got more complex by the year and you just kick in the player and hope he swims. CCP said that they have no shortage in new (trial)players but these players don't stay. They don't quit about ganking or some SOV changes, they quit because they don't get the hang on this game.
Take the missions, something most new players will do. Wall of text and just "kill this" or "get that". You quickly stop reading the text because there is no valuable information. No twists in the plot. All these missions will loose nothing if you delete the text part. And it is lonely because nobody is talking to you. You could be in a System with 30 players and not 1 convo for hours. And the agents also don't talk, no cut scenes. Do you see a (NPC)Titan anywhere just flying by? I remember with horror my first try to fit a ship. No infos, ****** fitting window, no money for experiments.....The expectations of the customers have changed and Eve is letting noobs down! It's not about players leaving but about no new players comming to the game.

Edit: IMHO the crappy fitting window scared away more new players then all the gankers united. Fitting a ship is central to the success in Eve and it's the worst UI in Eve. Investing there would gain more return then the whole Citadel project.