EVE General Discussion

Hence why I advocate some targetted marketing. (Also quoted to the OP) DonePersonally
I play EVE because it is a tad bit more challenging that most of the other online games and I find solo games a bit lacking in depth with the AI.
I was under what is more and more becoming apparent, a misconception that the EVE community was of a calibre above average.

Because now that it's been conclusively disproved, that particular narrative needs stomped on until it's dead, then a little while afterward for good measure. People are still lying to newbies all across the game with this same nonsense.

The only people who don't want the truth repeated are those who have dedicated themselves to a lie.

So this is like a personal small scale poll i've come to note with a few friends of mine starting the game as fresh newbies. 8 entries, which is ridiculous compared to CCP data, but it matches perfectly what is described here. So i'll probably won't teach you anything, except maybe reasons why they subbed or not. My friends started playing between 2012 and 2015. I've personally been ganked a few times and here I am still playing Eve, though none of my friends have experienced that.

Out of 8 new players :
62.5% = 5 were sponsored with buddy program thanks to one of my accounts.
25% = 2 bought the game via Steam platform, with ships addons.
12.5% = 1 started the game on his own.

25% = 2 are still playing.
25% = 2 more have subbed for a few months and quit.
50% = 4 couldn't stand more than the trial.

One of my buddy invites and my friend who started on his own are still playing. So it's a 80% fail for my buddy invites, and a 100% fail for Steam, i'm sure that's irrelevant based on such few numbers.

Now reasons people quit from trials :
- Too complicated, too much rules that only experienced players know about.
- There's NOTHING in tutorial that makes you ready for pvp (maybe that's why 40% of new players play solo/missions).
- There's no reward to improve your ship or business doing missions except for tutorial (which is misleading people to think they're gonna earn stuff doing missions like in any mmo), just a few and useless amount of standing, isk, lp ... it's repetitive and broken.
- How do i warp to something ????? (yep, one dude didn't even try more than 2 hours and made his decision already cause he thought this was like Freelancer).

... and from subbed accounts :
- It takes too much time to be good at something, learning game mechanics faster than the SP is going. Vets SP advantage was also a problem.
- Death is one hell of an experience, and can be frustrating when you start the game. But because anyone can acess infos on how i died, i clearly don't want to be part of it anymore as i'm ashamed to be a noob.
- Highsec is too large, too big to jump from gates to gates. It is not enjoyable and time consumming. There should be intertwined connections between regions to ease transport. And then far away from these populated areas, outland it is ! Where only sovs can embark on easy transportation.
- I like the game, but it's boring, maybe i didn't find the right corp. Remind me later, when there's new things coming in the game.

Why the last 2 friends still play Eve Online :
- There's so much i can do, so much profit to make. I am in an awesome corp and I play for free. What else ?
- Not like any of those stupid mmo's like WoW where your stuff rules over everything.
- Economy, politics, industry, management, piracy, war ... Eve is real.

Case in point.

Yeah but these people could be idiots, you know?


Too complicated. What do they expect?
An easy game, that lacks any depth of gameplay?


There's no tutorial for PvP, because that makes no sense.
To learn how to PvP, you go and PvP.


Why should there be a reward for fitting a ship?


lol Freelancer.
All he had needed to do was point the mousecursor at one of the symbols in space ... and click.


If they think they are learning the game faster than their SP are going up,
then they do not really know what there is everything to learn.
There's not enough information behind this.
Unless, of course, he's a mindless instant gratification zombie.


If he's ashamed of dieing, then he wants to come across big and strong.
"Go back to WoW" on this one. It makes no rational sense to be afraid of dieing as a noob.
He's a noob. What does he expect? (exactly .....)


TL;DR:


I'm sorry, but we wouldn't have wanted them anyway. These people need instant gratification,
or a serious wakeup call and a dive into 80s and 90s gaming history.


Edit:
Thanks Hengle, I missed this.

The SP-argument.... nope.

.) All skills have a levelcap.
.) The amount of SP does not matter when you're an idiot.


Thank you, that was interesting. ^_^

TL;DR EVE chased away non-self reliant, overly casual (for EVE) impatient people who don't like complexity, need to be hand held and 'given things like in other mmos' to keep playing.

In other words EVE is working as intended?

This is something CAS focuses on - helping newbies try PvP, I mean.
(But it only happens every six weeks or so. So while it might help retain newly subscribed accounts, it's unlikely we're doing much to facilitate engaging trial accounts, unfortunately. Some, perhaps, if the timing is right, but not a whole lot I bet.)

Only happens every six weeks?

Can you elaborate on that?


Oh CAS ... and how's the Scope Project going? ^_^

Non-self reliant: Don't we *want* such players? The self-reliant player doesn't interact with others, right? CCP says such players are more likely to quit.

Casual and impatient: Yeah, not a good fit for EVE. There's a slower ebb and flow, hurry up and wait, to EVE that I'd prefer not change.

Complexity: Yep, complexity is a good thing. I hope CCP never makes an effort to simplify things. There's still stuff, over a year into the game, I am learning.

Need to be hand held: One person's hand-holding is another person's teaching. It might sound to you the players who quit wanted somebody to hold their hand, but it sounds to me like they needed the right sensei. Being taught by other players, rather than reading wikis and blogs, is a GOOD thing because it keeps the newbies engaged with the community. And EVE is so complex that we ALL need teaching. Which is a good thing that we like, right?

It's the CAS Combat Day, aka CCD. Happens every six weeks or so, as I said, depending of how we're feeling. It's a PvP roam of low and null sec organized by the CAS veterans who live in Syndicate. We typically get 100+ people in fleet at the start, but by the 14 hours mark of the event we're often down to 30 or so. 17 hours is the longest event I've been part of. The participants include the null-sec residents, CAS vets that live elsewhere and only engage in PvP during these events, and new players who have never PvPed before. (Each CCD I've been on, there's been at least one person who has gotten their very first killmail by being the final blow. That usually results in a pretty exciting exclamation over coms by the pilot.) Looking over the more recent events, we kill about a 100 hostile ships worth a total of 7 to 10 billion ISK each event. Not much when compared to big wormhole or sov null fights, sure, but pretty entertaining for a fleet full of mostly T1 frigs and cruisers.

Oh, and the pipebombing. We almost always get pipebombed at least once. We whelp most of the fleet, blow up some of their battleships with what we have remaining, reship, then head out again. Great fun.

We mostly advertise the events in the CAS corp channel, and some mailing lists set up for it, and word of mouth.



I don't know - what is it? (Is that Anslo's thing? Didn't they go join some SOV alliance? I don't recall which one. Haven't heard anything about them in quite a while.)