EVE General Discussion

Ok, Then show us all what you mean. I mean, you are always skirting over what I say, present some counter facts, show us why you think the way you do, the evidence you used to come to your conclusions.

15 days of played time. It has been pointed out and this is from the top of my head that:

- To sit in a battleship takes 8 days minumum + misc skills + fittings, so that throws most of the newbies that quit after losing everything in one of those out of the window.
- Newbies aren't worth ganking when they are too new.
- Newbies getting into duels, seeing how feeble they are, how long they will take to get better and quit are under the "legally killed" group.
- That 15 days covers a lot of trial players who weren't likely to stick around, they came on, had a look and quit.
- They don't mention if this counts alt that aren't played again because they are forum ones.
- This doesn't break down if they are throw away alt accounts used for scouting.

So on and so forth.

Taking the 15 days of people's play is too limited and ludicrous.

That this was even used, even run through the database makes CCP look very questionable. That people are clutching onto it is even more ridiculous.

you're assuming that the limited example designed to demonstrate the importance of getting proper data at the beginning of a talk is the entirety of the data ccp collected

is that correct

or are we suggesting that ccp rise presented a conclusion he knew was false

e: and knowingly presented misleading data to support the false conclusion

How about how many of the 13% were tricked into a corp under war dec and then mowed down?

How about how many were ganked in the next 15 days of their first month?

CCP does know how tip toe around the stats.



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Signature ganked by CCP

Example:
Someone goes and eats loads of junk food, takes no exercise, almost dies of a heart attack and proclaims, "You see! I was right about healthy eating and training!"

Then I think, "Well obviously. That was plainly stupid to begin with; why did you just waste everyone's time?" It then leads me to question how that person's thought processes work to begin with that they present that.

Thank you. I will use it as bait and keep shooting the vultures.

It doesn't matter if the data is from one person, 80 000 or twenty million. It is useless if you ask the wrong questions of the wrong people.

Yeah they have. They don't want it to be true.

Oh, you said reasonable.

Go back and read your own example. They are your words. No one else's. It's your example.

Here, I'll requote it for you:

Example:
Someone goes and eats loads of junk food, takes no exercise, almost dies of a heart attack and proclaims, "You see! I was right about healthy eating and training!"

But even that aside, if you believe there are no children that have heart disease, you would be wrong. So even for that population, where the incidence is very low, a population study is better than an individual data point, for broad decision making that will affect that group.

It's the same here. if CCP's aim is to increase the rate of conversion of new players from trial accounts to subscribed accounts (which they have been saying for quite some time now), then understanding the reasons that this group leave is important to making changes that might bring about improvement. Your single data-point example is no where near as useful as a population study (in this case, 80,000 individual users) and so far, we've seen no reasonable counter to the data that was provided. Why is that so difficult to understand?

Well, I don't really think mechanics are at the heart of it, and looking at graphs of correlations or covariances probably doesn't tell us much.

Mainly, I think it is the social element that makes or breaks a subscription.

If we were to look at a mechanic, we might look at killboards, as many players are more afraid of them than they are of losing ships. They fear that if they lose the ship, they'll somehow "look stupid," and consequently don't "undock" or rather simply avoid engagement. We might make the hypothesis that the more they avoid engagement with other players, the more likely they are to leave the game.

How do you address that? Perhaps a bit of judicious carebearism aimed at propping up the ego.

One thing we might do with APIs is ascribe a record of losses to a corporate entity rather than individual players. Your record lives and dies by the lifespan of that corporation. European countries are big on scrubbing search history results these days, and maybe EVE could benefit in the long run by some player "bill of rights" as regards how they shape their persona.

Some people really really like their killboards of course, and as such perhaps such APIs could be linked to a numerical character ID. If players want to register their IDs with that out of game killboard service, then they can do so. Their own records in their kill history will still be limited to corporate centric records, so even if they manually copy it out, they cannot manually force another player to exist on an out of game service. Alternately, if we find that players look for ways to circumvent this, then we allow players to cycle their keys, or give the option to issue them new ones when they join new corps. Ideally, these API tags would be multi-part tags, identifying both corporate identity as well as the individual, allowing those who do hold those kill mails to retain their record in categorical form.

I know the purists are raging at this point. However, I will focus on one practical consideration, which is solo pvpers. Many of them like to look up their pending opponents as a form of free intel. Well, it probably isn't too obsequious to expect people to establish their reputations in the game, rather than out of it. Gaining intel on corporation habits and activity is more vague, but it injects more uncertainty into the equation.

Is this a fair outcome? No. Grizzled old vets like me can't really be embarrassed by our shoddy and lackluster pvp performance. It's not that easy to be rid of us. However, I can see how it affects a range of intermediate players negatively. If anything, it errs a bit more on freedom and less on consequence. It takes the burden of PR consideration off of the shoulder of more timorous players, and puts it more squarely on the shoulders of specialized corporate flakkies and propaganda spinners.

If not being able to wring the tear sponge for longer than a moment results in more risk taking behavior overall, I think we can all make the calculation of what is being gained versus what is being lost.