EVE General Discussion

I'm afraid that title belongs to a social MMO that is about 7 years EVE's senior that caters to furry fans.

And if a game where people stand around all day literally looking at each other's manimal sprites can last 18 consecutive years or so then I don't see why a game where people literally sit around all day in CQ ogling 3D sapceships can't last just as long if not longer.

That being said I'm waiting for Hyperion's update to the NES for my space Barbie.

eve-offline doesn't track subs. It tracks logged in accounts. Skill queue online manages to keep a lot of people paying, even when they aren't actively playing the game.
It's brilliant, really.

EVE will last as long as a certain number of players are willing to pay for it.

But **** those players off, and ... well... 'nuf said.

Didn't the 500,000 include Serenity and Dust?

Also lets be honest, we have no idea what level subs are at. They could be doing great or they could be dropping, we just don't know.

Sure the PCU is not doing great but as many people have said, the PCU and subs are two totally different things. The PCU could be crap but that just means people are not logging in, they could still be paying their subs.

The worrying aspects is that the longer people do not log in, the less likely they will be to renew their subs and people not logging in shows that there is something wrong.

Of course people will come out and say "Its Summer" yet it is clear that the drop in PCU count started way back in February.

This all day long.

We could go even further.

Lets say Eve does have 500,000 subs on Tranq. (Pretty sure it doesn't but hey, I am feeling generous )

We can also say with confidence that on average people have at least 2 accounts.

That would mean only 250,000 actual real life players sitting behind their keyboards playing.

If the average is more and people have 3 accounts that would mean we are down to 125,000 actual players.

If you only have 125,000 actual players then it doesn't take much to go from doing well to **** were sinking !!!

Eve will never die, it will evolve, reach true transcendence and end up playing us instead.

Sometimes I think it already is

Having played Elite recently i do wonder how long EVE is going to last.

One argument - which i've used myself before numerous times - is that EVE is simply a very different game to Elite (or WoW, or Star citizen, or whatever other game you may want to use in comparison). However, those other games offer something EVE doesn't.

It's all just little bits and pieces. A small amount of people will move to a game that specifically caters to their wishes.

Personally, i really wish EVE had more proper exploration content, as opposed to the static (star and gameplay) systems that are in place now. There's nothing left to find and what's more, the game cannot give the feeling of being lost and alone somewhere. It feels small. It's one of the aspects that draws me most to a game in space, yet EVE cannot offer it.

So, i might jump ship entirely (don't count on it though) to Elite, as it offers exactly what i want. People may join me here, losing EVE some players. It may not seem like a big deal at first, it's only a few people, good riddance etc.

However, it's not just Elite - It's also Star Citizen (a more direct competitor to Valkyrie as well), it's The Old Republic (for people who just want to run around in a scifi setting with more direct control), it's numerous other games currently existing and not released yet.

If EVE remains stagnant (as it has been since Apocrypha, realistically), it will lose little groups of players over time to other games that offer new experiences or features EVE has not implemented yet. People will go to those games first because those games offer those features already.

You'll be left with a hard core audience, for sure, however you will be left with a self destructive community - Everyone wants to be the big guy, and at that point the game might become far too frutrating for everyone involved since the 'common folk' have left the game, which in itself might lead to another breakdown.

EVE is unique, but it really needs to get moving again.





Also: The reason no one is logging in is actually different to my rant above. It's because so many activities in EVE don't actually require you to be active. POS do the work for you. PI does the work for you. Building does the work for you. You wait far more than you do anything in EVE at the moment, very little actual action is involved.

Activities in EVE should require more actual activity if the number of logged in people needs to be raised. Right now people are just going right past each other. One logs in for 5 minutes, the other logs in for 5 minutes after that, etc, untill 12 people did so. Now you have 12 people logged in after one another in that hour, but it only shows 1 the entire time at a time. You need to get those 12 people all logged in for an hour at the same time.

I've been playing computer games for nearly three decades now (started on Apple II computer with those green pixels), but for the last decade and a bit longer only three games remained constant in my gaming life.

Eve online. Civilization. Football Manager

I have played other games here and there, been in MMORPG guilds and FPS clans, some great single player RPGs, racing games, simulations, etc, etc, etc. But EvE, Civilization and Football Manager - to these games I ALWAYS came back to.

I'm not insightful enough to analyse what's common between these games to get me hooked for over a decade. Maybe it says something about me more than about these games.

But I remember this quote from a UK PC Gamer review of Civilization 4 when it first came out (which was a God sent gift to all the civ-fanatics) - the reviewer said that this game made him realise that 'great games are like toys that gives you stories when you poke them'.

These words left deep impression on me and I can apply them to my three all time favourite games, eve, civilization and football manager. All these games allow you to build stories yourself - both with the game and the AI and other players.

Playing a game of Civilization will churn out a brief (or sometimes epic) history of the world that you shaped. Football Manager will give you a career story you build by yourself. Every eve vet has his own story in New Eden.

And what's more - all of them have very strong element of the 'uncontrollable'. In football manager, you could plan and craft everything so carefully. Got the best players, best tactic, everyone in top condition - and then, your star player gets sent off two minutes into the champions league final. This heart breaking miserable fate, which is totally out of your control, and the fact that you have to accept the defeat and proceed with no reload to actually enjoy and experience the game - that you accept that the life of a football manager brings both joys and despair - this is what makes FM so special.

Consider civilization - you start with the map you are given. Sometimes it's not fair, but you live with it. It's not your fault that your Indian empire with Ghandi started squeezed between Tokugawa, Napoleon and Genghis Khan. But what can you do? You play diplomatic, you use every trick you know as a player to survive, expand, and then to conquer. It's exactly this uncontrollable element, the cruel joke of fate that makes the game fun, and once you live through it you will have a story to tell.

EvE Online? Need I say more? On one hand this is a game you can control so many things, but yet you can never be free of influence or control from other players too. The fact that you can put so much into one thing, and that one thing can become space dust in split second by a random passing gank squad. The fact that you can build an empire and it slips away through your fingers because one man you trusted stabbed you in the back. The fact that anything can happen to you, that you will never be untouchable or invincible. This, in my opinion, is what makes this game classic.

People have tendency to want control over what they do. But total control doesn't have a long lasting appeal. You can have total control in some single player games by using cheats. It gets old. Real fast.

Games are fun when they contain elements, whether by clever game design or by virtue of other players, which you cannot control. It's only when you carve up your own story in this uncontrollable thing that you feel like it IS your story. Not a story told to you by someone else, but story you made for yourself.

Well, it was a long ramble, but to cut it short - to me at least, eve has already reached a status where it will not die. It has become classic to the level of games like civilization or football manager. Sure they are single player games mostly so it is somewhat different, but nobody asks when these two other games will 'die'. Asking when eve will die is like asking when football will die. It's a silly question.

However, football CAN die. For example, if FIFA enforced a rule that if you score from outside the penalty box you get three points, the game will die (serious, wtf would that be like).

Only thing CCP has to do now, and players should be vocal about and help CCP sustain, are the following two things I mentioned,

1) Give tools to the players to craft their own stories
2) Don't let anyone be invincible

As long as these two rules are followed, the game will last really long time.

Just my two cents.

eve dies when ea try to get it, each module and ship will be in the form of micro transactions, star citizen i keep hearing people talking about but i cant see any competition not compared to development eve has done with this game, star citizen will probably fail like alot of games and may push the players who play star citizen to eve, making eve even stronger