EVE General Discussion

I played a very niche game for about four years. I remember a constant whining of the game dying, and it got very loud when our usual player count of 200 got dropped to 170~ish.

That was eight years ago. They still write me time to time if I'm coming back. Peak player count is 130-150~ish as I hear.


What was I saiyng? Nevermind.

Please bittervets, crawl back to your holes, transfer your stuff to joyful newcommers (like me). All you do is demoralizing the rest.

It has been pretty amusing watching those who would normally mock those who say "EVE is dying", clamoring about on this same issue.

It seems pretty ironic watching someone from CODE complain. Abusing ****** game mechanics to steal noob loot has been totally worth it for you guys. Why go into low or null when you can find easy targets that won't shoot back?

Maybe, just maybe if the game wasn't such a skill-less joke in terms of pvp and a griefers paradise, it would have more players.

Well it brought me back after nearly 10 years away from Eve. I've heard many others re-subscribing after long breaks due to being lured back by the ads for the Alpha clone state.

Most games have a nerfed free-state in their games where subbing gets you full options. SWTOR has all sorts of limitations placed on free to play players (ligher limitations on premiums). Some people play permanently for free with those restrictions. Some pay some money to get past them. I fail to see why Eve's alpha state is any different.

Worse how? For making ISK? The idea here is not to create a new way to make ISK, we have plenty of those, but to have brand new players only a single jump from pew-pew that is reasonably equal to them. This was as close as I could come to something like an arena and still stay within universe immersion.
A new pilot may look at Rookie chat and see 1-2 thousand pilots but when they look in local they see a few dozen because all the new players are spread across 24 different starter systems. They undock and there are just a handful of other players and they can't shoot any of them because of Crimewatch. This is not a bad thing but it's not exactly useful to get people interacting either.
This "Alpha Constellation" can compress the spread. There will be a more epic feeling if local has, say, 10 times the players, and space has 10 times the ships moving to and fro.

Corporations can send their recruiters to the Alpha Constellation systems and hand out free sets of corvette tailored fittings and then give advice and help with combat. Entrepreneurial sorts could just stage out of the starter systems selling such fitting sets.
The local chat would have to have the same rules as the Rookie chat to ensure it's usability. If local ends up looking like Jita chat, with spamming and scamming, it would not help anyone.

The military academy schools' stations could have agents offering missions similar to Aura and Career missions. for example:
Go initiate aggression against another pilot's ship.
Go initiate aggression against another pilot's pod.
Go destroy another pilot's ship.
Go destroy another pilot's pod.
(Faction mission) Go hunt down and destroy a ship of our hated enemies the (fill-in blank).
Go gank a miner.
Go gank a ratter.
Those are the easy mission types to conceive of. I'm sure you peeps can think up more. Call these the "Real World" Missions.
There should be group missions too.


I've had a small bit of feedback by pm and with my friends in game chat and I've modified the map slightly.
Even just 13 systems is still too spread out. Also if the systems have null type aster-belts 13 of them is too much even if the asters are tiny. So I've reduced the number of systems to only five. Four yellow systems around the exterior and the central red one connecting the four.
Each yellow system would have 6 gates to the 6 starter systems and a single gate to the center system.
Each yellow system would have three NPC stations belonging to the appropriate faction schools. Again the central system would have all 12 schools represented by a station.

New Eden Free-Fire Zone

When a player jumps into the Alpha Constellation they would NOT get a pop-up warning them they are doing something bad, they would, instead, get a pop-up encouraging them to hop-to-it.

"CONGRATULATIONS GRADUATE, YOU ARE JUMPING INTO THE NEW EDEN FREE-FIRE ZONE! GO GET'EM TIGER! DON'T LET THEM GO TILL THEY ARE SPACE DUST IN YOUR HANDS!" or something to that effect.

All you artistically creative types out there, get cracking. We need names for these five systems.

Double the training speed of alphas, and unlimited access to skills isn't enough of an incentive for you?

alphas are (intentionally and rightfully) severely limited, if lifting those restrictions isn't enough for you then the game as a whole probably isn't right for you and no amount of extra shiny goodies is going to change that.

And that is the problem.

Imagine you are a kid in a sandbox, and you are restricted to one corner of the sand box because you dont have enough time or money to play in the 'cool kids' section of the sandbox, or make the same kinds of sandcastles that they can make.

The restrictions to alpha clones should be far more sublte but not TOTAL restrictions.
Don't restrict the ships and moduels they can use, c'mon!
This defeats the purpose of the Sandbox!!

Nerf their train time if you want to, but new players need to feel as if the sky is the limit in Eve at all times.

Either that or make the whole damn game (minus cosmetic items such as skins) free to play.

Yeh the more i think about it the more I think Alpha clone implementation was a mistake. Hopefully a 'beta' clone will fix some problems but I fear the discouragement and damage has already been done to the poor and oppressed alpha players from my observations.

???
eve community is the oldest one i know!
there are no kids playing eve.
only adults roleplaying kids

This is nonsense even from a factual level.

According to EVE Offline statistics, the current 24 high is 35,434 on Wednesday. The high of the week was PCU of 42,395. By contrast the maximum prior to Ascension was pushing 29k at most. To get even above 35k PCU you have to go all the way back to June and the infamous WWB.

That means our new normal was the most active time in the year leading up to ascension.

That is all without a strong advertisement push.
That is all without a complete NPE.
That is all without a new lore portal/website.
That is all without a new AI that creates realistic encounters of all kinds.

_Pretty sure_ this claim is unfounded, but time will tell.

You have to look at the bigger picture though - Ascension has spiked the numbers but not reversed or stabilised the overall trend just delayed it a bit.



Generally yeah - I think lifting the restrictions on T2 modules a little might not go amiss though i.e. there isn't really any reason not to let them use many T2 fitting/tank/utility modules and T2 weapons medium and downwards and would tend to get them more interested in what they can do with T2/3 cruisers and larger ships (an aspiration to use T2 medium weapons isn't really going to get people to go omega and would make them feel a little less like 2nd class citizens in the classes they can use).

I know it goes against the grain a bit with some purists but I think a bit more canned fleet content wouldn't go amiss to get a broader audience into the game i.e. as alphas they could train upto a reasonably competent cruiser and take part in 2-4 player fleet PVE and PVP opportunities given out by special types of agents (I know this is borrowing a bit from other games in the general genre but it would give alphas a lot of reasons to keep logging in and that only helps to increase the numbers going omega especially if that kind of content leads them either into the wider eve world or towards similar gameplay that requires omega). Not sure how well I'm conveying what I have in mind there.

Oldies pay...unless they let their sub lapse.