EVE General Discussion

What extra revenue do you get from allowing 3000 ships into a massive null sec fight?

If I was in charge of EVE Online's financials and looking for ways to expand income, I'd want to find out what the largest, lowest-hanging fruit was. What would return the most on any investment: a million dollars spent on fixing space simulation to allow the existing groups of null sec players to do the same thing they always do, a million dollars spent on fixing null sec sovereignty so that new players can participate in raids and small skirmishes, a million dollars improving something as nebulous as the "new player experience", or something else?

With time dilation and other fixes to the simulator, we've increased the size of feasible fights in null sec from a few hundred to a couple of thousand. Has this increased the number of subscribers? Has this increased the spend per subscriber? Or has all that work only meant that the same group of 10k subscribers just keeps doing the same thing they were doing last year?

With the introduction of Faction Warfare, did we get more subscribers? Did existing subscribers spend more? Was there any return on investment?

If Faction Warfare bought us more subscriptions, is it reasonable to expect that introducing the same mechanics into null sec sovereignty (remember, FW is "sov 3.0 beta") would bring us more subscriptions?

On another front, what is the low hanging fruit of failure to convert trial players into subscribers? When they answer, "the community is just a bunch of bullies trying to make my life difficult," is that a comment that reflects reality or just their excuse for not subscribing? If their comment does reflect reality, do we try adjusting the community attitude? Is it possible to have a game based on PvP where we also have respectful interaction between the people playing the game?

Would a million dollars spent on "cleaning up" the EVE community social dynamic be more valuable than a million dollars spent on cleaning up the space combat simulator?

My money is firmly on the "return on investment" scale looking something like this: a million dollars spent on the following activities will produce the following returns over five years:

1. Community rehabilitation: $10M (another ~10k players each year for five years)
2. Sovereignty 3.0 (allowing smaller groups of players to participate, removing structure bashing): $2M (veteran ex-players resubscribing, plus a few new players staying on due to attainable goals)
3. Bigger space battles: $0.5M (mostly from veteran ex-players resubscribing)

If it was your money, where would you spend it?