Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I've been thinking about player attrition around major point changes. I would like to propose that major game changes (e.g. sov changes, jump changes, high sec standings, etc...) also be accompanied with the opportunity to reallocate SPs.

Drastic change, while innovative from a development perspective, does not bode well with player / consumer psychology. Credible research (e.g. Harvard Business School) has concluded that it is cheaper to keep existing customers happy vs. the cost to acquire new customers.

On this point, other research within the field of social psychology addresses the idea of "systems justification" theory. The basic idea here is that gains obtained by a system logic which are lost due to an arbitrary change in logic are perceived as unfair. This idea makes sense as it pertains to CCP innovation because paid players make numerous decisions about how to spend time and money in Eve. The result is that big point changes are somewhat zero sum affairs which lead to a loss in paying members. The business logic states it is much more expensive to acquire new players to replace the lost revenue.

One way to offset this form of attrition that is rooted in a notion of systems justification theory is to allow players to readjust their SP allocation to accommodate game logic change. This wouldn't address every change, e.g. the change in the requirements to anchor a POS in high sec, but it might keep, at least a portion, of the paid player base paid up through major changes.

Such a compensation would allow CCP to maintain its culture of innovation while also respecting prior player investment in the game.

However, the exchange rate is not equitable for high SP players upon whom major changes often have the highest impact (unless I've misunderstood the 150k limit).

could you have found a more long winded way to say this?

Except you forget the most important rule of a F&I post.
How can this idea be abused.

This would not be used much by the (alleged) people who quit because a skill is changed in what it does.
It would be used by the FOTM chasers.

but the True Sansha titan with the afterburner bonus hasn't been released yet. Where would I put my 195 million skillpoints?

No. Unless a skill is actually made useless (in which case CCP has refunded SP) you should have to keep it. You gained use of it before the change, and could still after. The Eve skill system is not like other games where you are capped at a specific number of points you can use in specific ways to the exclusion of others. In Eve, you can train all the skills and thus aren't locked into anything.

If you want to fly the new FOTM or doctrine ship, just go train for it. And with extractors, you can even get some value for skills you are no longer using for whatever reason and with injectors, you can hasten than training along for a price just like everyone else.

The was done so bitters don't do massive fotm shifts. Main on another account could dump lots of mining and potentially fleet booster skills (waiting for testing on that personally) and shift huge amounts to something else. Herself or this accounts combat char. FOTM potential kind of high there.

For bitters the best use here is drain and sell. Which as a bitter-ish player....makes sense balance wise. I don't get FOTM power train ability but I get money if I did this. TBH....I'll take the money, SP comes in time anyway. But if I go back to 0.0 I have ulterior motives for not caring much.

Damn...I can't fly fleet spec t2 caps. Damn you ccp all those new skills while I was away for a long time. Guess no caps for me for a few more months, sorry guys I am so heart broken. With some practice....I could even make this sound genuine and heartfelt. Love sub caps, hate caps...my personal tastes/issues there.

Now if markets go to crap....thats the way that goes really.

The element of Eve that is different from other games is that the playstyle constitutes a form of success or satisfaction with the game independent of specific outcomes. Invalidating prior choices without a chance to adjust, I assert, causes players to stop playing. That is a net loss for CCP and every other paid member who benefits from a larger paid player base.

SP are an expression of decisions (including time and money) about how to play Eve based on how the game world performs at that time. These are not rearview decisions but forward decisions and they require an investment of time and money. Months or years of subscription fees expressed as SP, ie, your playstyle - the way you want to spend your time and income, are invalidated with major changes.

The key question about the above statement is ... is this provable in hard data like the rate of player drop off after such a change? If it is true, would the opportunity to adjust to the new eve universe prevent cancellation of subscriptions?

So I think you missed a few of my initial points. The Eve universe is *not* persistent. The big point changes are instances of lack of persistence. This change is a function of innovation. But that innovation often has a "zero sum" effect, it causes players to quit. Replacing that lost revenue is expensive. Human psychology is the issue.

The issue to solve is player retention. I never said people are complaining about lack SP reimbursement.

I think I understand your point which is that these arbitrary changes are part of the game. But the existential reality is people respond to that by no longer playing. Admittedly, the data behind this absent but it is observable in the over all decreased player base population online at any time.

CCP's financial reporting for this last reporting cycle is up but this seems to be largely due to how they've dealt with a bond/financing issue, not an increase in overall subscriptions. Subscriptions for 2015 were down from 2014. The net change between years was I think about 11 million less.

I have spent substantial time on SISI over the years. I am not complaining about any particular change but the idea that "big" changes (as measurable by a drop in paid subscriptions) can be mitigated by addressing consumer psychology. What specifically got me to thinking about this recently is the F2P clone change.

My speculation (since I am not a fly on the wall at CCP), is that CCP is looking for ways to extend the in game opportunities that convert trial players to long term subscribers. A free player is given an open-ended opportunity to become enthralled with the game. Substantial business research indicates that approaches such as these are always more expensive for business than attempts to keep existing customers as customers. CCP's innovation is a blessing and a curse, but the reroll doesn't require a cultural change within the genius core of the CCP model, but it does (potentially) address the weak link in the chain.