EVE General Discussion

Except there are many factors that affect the price of PLEX that have nothing to do with that.

You wil shoot blue republic until one day you no longer see the fun in shooting blue republic. Then you will leave. Of course if you were losing regurlary, you would leave way sooner. This is why PvP based games always die; they need a continuous stream of losers who still haven't lost enough times to leave the game.

For each winner, there is at least a loser, and people don't play games were they lose (shocking, eh?). In EVE, they boast about how hard it is to lose, and so they boast about how effectively they lose subscribers. The only way that this can be balanced, is by drawing in new blood, and that's exactly what EVE is not doing, and CCP can't afford to do it without neglecting the existing playerbase.

Alts and multiboxers are setting up the stage for catastrophic drops in subscriber count. In a healthy game, you lose one player and lose one subscription; but in EVE losing a player increasingly means losing two, three, four or God knows how many subscriptions. Make a single wrong turn, anger a single demographic, and you will lose N customers and N xY accounts.



It should be growing healthier, with actual new players rather than piling alts and ISboxers.

And when you run out of "right" people, you must turn to the "wrong" people or die. Branching is a sensible way to do it, but so far CCP has managed to collect a money pit out of their branching efforts, and also has compromsied itself in a three year plan to try and satisfy a minority of the "right" people at the expense of everyone else, new players included.

And this decission hasn't been taken by the right person hired to make such decissions, but by CCP Seagull, who should be implementing what the EP (vacant office since Q1 2013) told her raher than have her own ideas on how the game needs more content for the shiny whiny 10% who provide free advertising and are so cool to hang by at Fanfest.

When their time comes, CCP epitaph will be: "They never got it".

EVE has a growth record any other MMO would kill for. We all want new players but they do need to be the right players.

"EVE is about player driven content, and that content consists of killing players until they leave."

" killing players until they leave "

Why is anyone surprised?

This is Something Awful's raison d'être; it is what they purposely do to every game which they infest.

They have infested EvE, all the way to the core; they sit in dev chairs.

They will continue until EvE really *IS* dead, and then they will move on to their next victim.

They cannot hide from their history.

Do you really feel the current NPE encourages the right kind of new players?

That's not its job.

It's there to teach people the basics of using the tools EVE provides. The rest is down to each individual player. If they want to be fed content then they are going to have a bad time. If they don't like being punished for bad choices they will leave. If they enjoy making their own story and see setbacks as challenges to be overcome and enjoy this kind of play then EVE is for them.


I have found that the trick to getting new players to stay is to snap them up the second they land, get them out to null sec and get them into a fight as soon as possible. This is why we run lessons on things like how to tackle and survive and interdictors 101. An hour old newbee in a condor is just as deadly to a dread as a 10 year vet in a HIC, the only difference is pure joy and fearless nature of the newbee.

Some people just are not made for EVE, some thrive in it.

Bwaaaah, now I need an alt in a second Catalyst to kill a ship worth 50x more than mine!

Only 30 plex?

Anyway this is serious here, it helps to have more tank on my barge so that friends have 0.5s longer to not warp to me when a Mordus Angels faction spawn appears in the ice belt.

I don't think EVE is full of twats- number is fairly low, although the perspective of it being full of twats maybe be biased by not understanding the social rules of various EVE communities, what is acceptable, etc., which is a common place to be in as a newbie. It's also biased by the fact that, again, it's one of those things that gets made a fuss about- there's plenty of good-neutral behaviour that goes unreported, far in excess of twats being twats.

Goons are funny people. It's funnier when people take them and what they say (especially to non-goons) seriously.

Even if it were true, I'd say people have been attempting to drive people out of EVE for years now and they may have some limited success, but EVE seems to thrive despite this and some would argue it is part of the selection process for a game that doesn't really cater to casual players looking for an easy experience.

Fact is, you can lose ships all the time and still be winning on other criteria (biggest being dying cheaply so that it doesn't matter).

Alts aren't a huge deal. Most people have alts for other jobs- I know mine are things like industry, PI, alt for mining ships, alt for freighting + carrier, alt in a command ship, cyno alts, scanning/scouting alts... Very few of these give me an overwhelming unbalanced advantage in any one area and most of them don't often get multiboxed (exception being the cyno alts, for obvious reasons).

Most multiboxing is for fairly boring, but straightforward stuff like mining- most people don't want to do it, but the economy needs the minerals. All alts are paid for, the miner gets income proportional to their investment, gankers get juicy targets, it's wins all around. The amount of people who multibox combat characters into combat and create a distorted PvP environment is incredibly low, enough to say that it doesn't make any significant impact and people are making a fuss over nothing.

Alts remain optional and a way for people to put more money into the game, which keeps the game afloat. Most alts are not active all the time, so while it may inflate the number of characters per user, the effect on concurrent logged in characters is much smaller. That's more money per CPU expenditure, which works in CCPs favour.

The way you describe works when someone takes an interest in you. Having to seek it out yourself leads to an entirely different starting experience which could take a multitude of different directions.