EVE General Discussion

The hate people receive for playing differently to others.

Low Attention span/need for instant gratification

Weakness and inability to deal with the loss of unimportant space pixels

Discovering they don't like the game in general and are smart enough to cut there losses and go find something they actually like (unlike our own form of carebear who discovers the same things but stays "because EVE would be great and get so many more subs IF [insert game destroying idea here])

Wife Aggro turns into a "no nookie while EVE is still installed" perma-dec.


....So let me guess, this is another of those stealth "EVE would get so many more subs if" threads right?

From the players that I've spoken to that quit the game:

Obscurity / Confusion: There is a lot in EVE that is not easy to figure out because the information is not easily accessible in the game. Stuff like how to fit a ship. What does a specific item do? The amount of information that is -not- there that creates confusion for a new player can become overwhelming. For many players, it isn't worth the effort or time to spend trying to hunt down this information when it really should be right there for them.

What does a new player do next? What skills do they train? The certificate planning thing was a step towards helping this but the systems are still really obtuse and needlessly complicated.

Tedium / Boredom: Many players quit EVE because it is boring to them. There is a lot of content to go through and, at first, it's all exciting because it is new. But after discovering it and doing it there isn't much more out there. The best content in EVE is the player versus player driven conflicts but because players aren't directed towards that via game mechanics a lot of players never experience it.

People will reach the repetitive boredom breakpoint at different times in their EVE experience. Some do it early from mining (because the game and many "helpful" players direct newcomers towards mining - although it should be noted that some people really enjoy mining it just isn't for everyone), others from mission grinding (let's face it, missions are simple and very predictable: aka boring), and others from everything else in the game that is repetitive and simple.

Bitter vets leave the game for their own reason but a regular complaint can be boiled down to having reached the end of the sandbox and have come up against the hardcoded limits of what can be done. Basically, they've done everything that they wanted to do in the game and there isn't anything more for them to do or they discovered that what they really wanted to do wasn't actually possible due to coded limits.

There are many more reasons as to why people leave the game over time.

I am glad that CCP seems to have a commitment to improving the New User Experience (this seems to have stalled since the implementation of the 'updated' tutorials) and wish them all the best in this undertaking. I hope that as part of this initiative (I'm probably giving it more due than what it really is) there will be a move towards linking all the various mini-games of EVE together into the ecology of the game beyond just being linked via the economy.

I really hope someone sits back and looks at the overall game experience just like they are doing with ships.

Not in any order of importance:

Being a ship
complexity (some of which is derived from poor mechanics in the UI -drone management, advanced manufacturing jobs, etc.-)
And the misconseption that is spread by bad community members that you need to play for 6 months to a year to be "competetive".

Edit: and the horrible generalization that EVE is "spreadsheets in space".

Sometimes I think EVE would be suited to have a "suspend account" option that allows you to freeze your account for a few weeks.

That way, when this happens to someone in the first few months, they can rage, click suspend, and then take a few weeks to cool down and come to the realization that getting blown up isn't a bad thing, and be able to come right back to the game.

This is a example why by far the most players will quit EVE long before they found out what it's all about. Noob is using failfit and unsurprisingly fails to accomplish a fairly easy task. The OP in question does not know what he is doing wrong (failfit in his case). In contrast to most human beings he is capable to admit defeat in public and get's the help he needs.

In pretty much any other MMO any person with halve a brain can not possibly fail to accomplish most tasks because any player is given the tools to do so and can't use those tools in any wrong way. In EVE it's fairly easy to bring the wrong tools and use them in the worst possible fashion. As a result most players will quit the game.

Extremely long skill training times and the disparity between new and veteran players in regards to wealth. Just like in RL, a few control the majority of the wealth in eve while the rest struggle. Such is life lol.

The same as every other game, boredom. In truth eve does very well at retaining players long term considering its pve play basically tops out after 6 months.

The Op doesn't ask the underlying question of "why should anyone care?". Eve is a unique, hard core niche spaceship game that (at least until recently )skewed away from the common themes and ways of other games , even other MMOs.

Other MMOs hold your hand, tell you you are special, you deserve the best and you're just like everyone else, entitled to the same rights and freedoms regardless of when you started, or what you like.

EVE tells you you are a scrub and everything you own can go poof just like that, throws you in the deep end and says "sink or swim", gives you a half assed new player/tutorial experience which is akin to giving anew soldier 1 week of boot camp then shipping him off the Afghanistan and expecting him to not only live, but come back with 2 Medals of Honor, and laughs at you when your ships explode over and over and over and over again.

I prefer EVE, even if that makes me crazy compared to must human beings. Screw em if they leave before subbing so long as eEVe has enough population to keep going/being profitable for CCP, more Serpentis Rats for me.

For one thing the pve is mind numbingly boring to most people and obviously not worth a monthly subscription let alone a free to play title. Go in and shoot the little red boxes, then you win. What is higher level pve like? Same exact thing but bigger.

Then, the exciting world of mining leaves an awful taste in the mouth of most players. So resource collecting in this game is just sitting still and waiting? For hours?

Then you try to get them to do the fun part of the game, pvp, you have to make them wait for all sorts of support skills to train for a few hours before they can even consider going to fight or just keep the guy from running away. Trying to find someone to kill might take many minutes and end in utter failure without scratching the guy or only lasting a few seconds before you instantaneously die and then get podded while panicking on what to do.
Secondly, when trying to get a 3 day old noob to tackle in pvp they are clueless and have no idea what is going on. You could be waiting around 20 minutes to kill one dude or just instantly be vaporized for some arcane reason. Then in a fleet you are not allowed to talk while you listen to a stranger give orders that make little sense to someone who is new to the game.

The sci fi aspect is what got me through the first few weeks.