EVE General Discussion

TL;DR It is time get your facts right or you will kill EvE.

EvE has grown year to year constantly since release (except after the Incarna fiasko) . This is almost unheard of in the business and it has been done with a HTFU attitude. It is a proven strategy that has given a slow and steady growth to EvE for almost a decade.

Softening things up to retain even more of the new players will only make EvE grow too fast. EvE is such a vast and complicated game that it cannot grow too fast or there will be too many uneducated players whining about things they don't understand on the forums and ultimately CCP will have to respond to protect their (new) bottom line. Just look at the Incursion whiners already.

These players will not stay for many years like the current vets have because they are playing a much lesser version of EvE. They will move on to the next FOTM as soon as running incursions become boring and repetitive and they have a fully fit officer ship in their hanger. So we need even more new players ...

That is a dangerous vicious circle and it will ultimately kill the grand Everyone vs Everyone sandbox we call EvE.

tldr; You're awful at this game and need to be spoonfed newbkills with complicated mechanics.

Looking forward to your IQUIT post when you actually have to man up and do a little HTFU yourself.

Maybe so, but judging from Dust, WiS/Incarna, and the Incarna sub numbers, I think CCP wants and plans to grow Eve. Relying on the slow and steady HTFU crowd might not be viable anymore. More importantly, given the general malaise that seems to have fallen over traditional MMOs and that Western PvP-focused MMOs haven't had the staying power of Eve, it might be time for CCP to be aggressive and strike to grab market share. Meaning, Eve's take on PvP might be a magic formula that others haven't figured out how to replicate. CCP needs to capitalize on that fact because other games are starting to emulate Eve (e.g. Planetside 2.)



You say "softening things up" and I say "smoothing things out." Eve needs a learning curve that is smoother than "here's your boat anchor, now swim." CCP has been trying to make the NPE (new player experience) better.

Getting swamped with clueless newbies isn't a reason to keep clueless newbies out. And if you're worried about Devs listening to thousands of carebears whining and then dumbing down the game to mollify them, I think you're underestimating CCP, Eve's PvP paradigm, and Eve's players.



You have it backwards. FOTM players really are the people you want to catch.

Ask yourself, *why* are they FTOM? Think about it. Even WoW caters to PvP, because once you burn through all the PvE content, there's not a lot else to do. Gamers have had mindless and consequence free PvP deathmatch since Doom and nowadays have CoD, MW, TF2, and Free2Play MMO-FPS games. Gamers who want to PvP are out there in great numbers. The reason they're FOTM is because most PvP is mindless, shallow, insta-respawn deathmatch. So yeah, PvP gamers tend to be FOTM because they don't have skin in the game.

It's the old saying: when it comes to making bacon and eggs for breakfast, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed. Mindless deathmatch is the chicken. Eve is the pig. When you win or lose in Eve, it means something. That alone should be enough to capture those aimless FOTM game hoppers into staying. Eve PvP has pucker-factor and pucker-factor is what makes Eve sticky.

As for the worry that whining FOTM players will ruin Eve by "forcing" CCP to water down Eve to stop the cries of "imba", "shinies now pleeze" or "waaaaah, too hard, i ragequit!", you're forgetting that Eve players have a lot of skin bacon in the game in terms of time invested, relationships, in-game resources, etc., and had to fight to earn their stuffs and then keep fighting to keep their stuffs. All those corps, industrialists, kill-mail whores, alliances, etc., are too invested in Eve to give it up without a fight. It's the power of Bacon that keeps Eve from being overrun with FOTM Egg-layers. As evidenced by the Incarna riots, the established player base won't let CCP screw up Eve.


tl;dr - Eve is Bacon. Bacon will always triumph over eggs. But Eve needs more bacon, thus CCP needs to help more players get in touch with their inner pig.