EVE General Discussion

I wonder if there has actually been an increase in players and yet a decrease in multiple accounts.
Before these graphic "Improvements" I was able to run 6 accounts simultaneously, now my computer struggles with 4, and every few hours the card crashes, locking the whole comp.
My computer is quite a decent quad core with a 1 gig graphics card so I can imagine users with lower end machines having to abandon secondary accounts or even quit playing EvE all together.
There is definately a good market for EvE as long as CCP don't disqualify themselves by having to high system requirements.

As other people have pointed out, if CCP were interested in increasing player numbers to 'hundreds of thousands' they would have to make Empire truly 'safe'.

This will never happen as they don't seem to care about making more money by doing that. Why bother when they can sell us monocles instead?

The uniqueness of this game is that it is full of wanktards who like making other people's online lives miserable because they get bullied at their school/office/prison and CCP prefer to keep it that way

Arent we nearing the half million mark soonish?

As others have mentioned, EVE started hemorrhaging customers after Incarna was released (Summer of Rage, Jita riots, monoclegate, etc).

Crucible was a step in the right direction, but that doesn't change the fact that it was a lackluster expansion thrown together in 6 weeks, instead of 6 months. Crucible stopped the hemorrhaging, but because it wasn't a "real" expansion the healing has yet to begin. EVE will not return to its slow and steady growth until at the very soonest the next expansion full expansion.

At what? 1% every year...

umm eve is growing but it is a niche game and its going to stay that way.

Also - people work,
- sleep in
-have families

of course you arent going to find 50k people on at 0900 GMT.

70,000 pod pilots have yet to outlive thier usefulness.

There is more then one reason, that's for sure. Here a few:

- alarm clock ops are not fun
- timer based pvp is not fun
- shooting structures are not fun
- PvP means you are online when your IRC/jabber client makes a funky sound, AFK alliances are AFK in general
- being in a terribad corp as a new player is not fun
- realising that EVE is a highly competitive game is not fun for those who don't want to be challenged
- not understanding why you keep losing ships to NPCs is not fun
- the lack of a handbook that explains things is not fun (and the reason for the point above)
- having a bugged tutorial (why does the alien ship wont spawn) is not fun
- there is competition now in the form of perpetuum (it's EVE on planets)
- average income in the target markets for EVE are dropping and high youth unemployment can't be helpful either
- EVE keeps rising the bar for the hardware you need to run it, your trusty ol' notebook wont cut it, see the point above
- CCP stopped on adding new gameplay, instead keeps reusing old gameplay under new names
- the stuff that got added (PI, shooting the same sleepers over and over again) is not overly hot
- income from carebearing keeps growing and as a result players don't have to be online as much as they used to

EDIT: There are quite a few reasons to quit the game.

I honestly like the game at its current size, it could grow a little more but I'd rather have a more complex game instead of something like Runescape where being good is just a matter of having the right weapons.

My personal thought is that 2009 was about the time that folks realized that Null was for War, not empire building, not ISK making but for war. The people who were into large scale empire building drifted away from the game and took a bunch of the supporting community infrastructure with them.