EVE General Discussion

Find it, quote it, make a sensible comment, and I'll respond.

I was "catching up" on this thread, which had 5 or 6 new pages added since I last looked at it, and was tempted to point out that the majority of posts are coming from people who won't read each others posts carefully, or try to simulate rational arguments by "cherry picking".

Of course this is a waste of time ... but then I found this right at the end of the thread :)

If you read the whole thread, instead of just reacting to what you think is an easy target, you'd find that I actually defined griefing step by step, spread across several posts. I do this to discourage the whole irrational "dictionary attack" approach. In my experience the better and more detailed an uncomfortable definition is, the more likely it is to induce a flurry of fallacious responses - this turns a potentially interesting discussion into a free lecture in logic to people who don't believe in it in the first place :)

I did make a pragmatic definition of sorts after a while (page 7 or 8 I think). You'll know it when you see it. Find it, quote it, make a sensible comment, and I'll respond.

All of these things can annoy certain players so much so that they post threads complaining about it. Funny thing is these things are also things CCP pretty much boasts about in their advertising.

If you pay attention to what he actually says during the presentation then you notice that they did look at older players too. There are two parts.

The main reason for the study was to find out if suicide ganking has a detrimental effect on the new players. The questions they asked themselves where "how wide spread is ganking for new players" and "what is the retention rate for never, legally and illegally killed new players". The answers where basically that it is a non issue despite the sentiment of the community and that it almost seams to have the complete opposite effect of what they expected.

The reason for this may be (and this is my opinion) that it suddenly introduces a mortal enemy into the world of the new player which gives it meaning and a goal to reach for revenge in an otherwise rather bleak surrounding of missions which get repetitive after two hours and staring at rocks while shooting them with lasers. There may be other factors which play a part in the outcome. But no matter what the reason is, the finding was that ganking new players makes it more likely they subscribe at the end of the 15 day trial period.

The second part got only mentioned in one sentence. They looked at all the reasons ALL the players state when they unsubscribe (trial members can not unsubscribe). And the result was that only ~1% state ship loss and harassment as a reason.

So, there may be a few people who actually quit because of ganking. But the study shows that they could not find any shred of evidence for that and that at least in the first 15 days the effect of ganking was more in the direction of retaining the players instead of driving them away.

They started from the very same position you are at, they expected that ganking is detrimental to retention. This "carebear hypothesis" was proven wrong when they actually looked at the evidence. This is how science works.

Now you come along and start all over with the very same wrong assumptions and completely ignore that people actually looked at this with more than just a whim and a gut feeling and proved those assumptions wrong. Also you don't even bring any evidence with you, just your personal feelings and an uninformed opinion.

What you did is point out that EVE is declining, and then construct a correlation with ganking out of thin air. A correlation which has shown to be absent already in the cited study.

There are a ton of reasons why EVE was declining and we can speculate all day what the reason was. But one thig is sure, because CCP actually checked: It ain't ganking

You know it is impossible since CCP stopped releasing that information a few years ago. Another important point is how many accounts belong to the same person, no info is available on that either. I'd gladly show you if the info was available.

Look, it may not be perfect, but they at least try to verify their assumptions by looking at the data. You on the other hand have only a gut feeling and wild guesses based on assumptions you have no shred of evidence for.

Guess which position is more scientific?

Studies based on input from self-selected participants are not very useful. The only certain thing about the data is that it is affected more by the self-selection pattern than by whatever you're trying to understand.

(by the way Zoe Chu & Ima Wreckyou - not trying to directly agree or disagree with either of your posts, but this is partly intended to be a comment (of sorts) on both).


Here's a true story that might put the "perils of griefing" into perspective: