EVE General Discussion

The survey when you unsub is rather pointless to actual suggestions of the game. It includes things like

"I have real life issues"
"I just want to cancel"
"I need to think over options for billing"

So we they can't use that as much as the comment section, but face it, humans are lazy creatures and won't fill out much.

The actual post-mortem survey they email out is a whole different animal, but still rather pointless and probably ignored by many.

Steam reviews are generally a horrible place to get reviews of a game this old and sophisticated but the general negative remarks are about the lack of effort based skill systems, high monthly subscription, horrible community attitude and lack of direction or purpose.

Now that all being said. Most likely CCP has a pretty good idea of who our recent lost player numbers are, probably why they left too. However they are in the middle of a community culture that thinks its cool to pump up their chests and scream "WE DIDN'T WANT THOSE PLAYERS ANYWAYS"

So there's that.

I'm increasingly coming round to the view that the big drop wasn't because EVE has too much ganking or too little W-space or hasn't got WiS or anything as simple as that.

I think the problem is that EVE is heavily populated with players who have played it for a very long time. As such the existing playerbase is largely simultaneously kind of bored because they've throroughly mastered the aspects of the game they're interested in while at the same time vulnerable to change fatigue because they're so heaviliy invested in that mastery.

So everyone agrees that this or that part of the game needs a "radical improvement" (even if they're not at all in agreement about how). But it's the magnitude of the change that's dangerous, because with a big enough change, there will be a large fraction of the players who - even if they were the ones calling for the change - will simply balk at the effort required to relearn "their" part of EVE and peace out.

One really good recent example of this is off-grid boosting. Until recently, it was near impossible to find anyone who had a good word to say about it. And from a game design perspective, there isn't much good to say about it. It exists purely because it's really difficult to remove it for technical reasons.
Then one fine day in the month of January In The Year Of Our Lord 2016, CCP casually let drop that they're pretty close to solving those technical difficulties, and OGB is going away Real Soon Now.

In a shocking surprise twist turn of events, it seems that a lot of the players who used to use OGB as a stick to beat CCP with ("Why won't you fix your stupid game CCP? Well FINE I will use OGB since everyone else is using it too! Hate the game, not the player!") err... actually didn't want to lose THEIR OGB at all. They were pretty much OK with goons/blobbers/russians/no-true-soloists losing their SS Lokis... but "Oh god no, not mine!!! We NEED that to fit goons/blobbers/russians/FOTM!!!"

Ahh fair enough, that's what I get for posting without the first coffee of the day inside me.

My bad, although to be honest your examples often appear on the forums as "serious" complaints.

I won't comment on PvP since that's not my trade. Yet what you say is why I say that anything done to PvE, must keep the old content exactly as it is. Improve PvE yes, change PvE absolutely no. That's somehting Sugar Kyle noticed when she asked the PvE community. Unfortunately CCP Affinity didn't bother to ask PvErs and some of the stuff she said at Vegas was like out-of-solar-system out of touch with that reality.

Nobody wants to lose the ability to run a Level 4 each now and then. But that's not enough. Level 4s are limited and repeat often. More different PvE is needed, but without removing the old one. Then factor that players are used to a degree of risk and rarely move away from it. So, find that risk and expand it. That's how to improve PvE... without changing the existing content.

Anyway, that doesn't explains why 5,000 characters stopped logging in within 4 weeks. My first hunch, which I discarded, was that something had changed in the way PCU is measured. But that's not compatible with the 4 weeks decline. I also considered that those were nullseccers hauling stuf around and readying for Aegisov, but that doesn't accounts for how the PCU was higher right until the end of May... and anyway "the big haul" barely was noticeable in server population the weekend before Aegisov.

The mistery remains. I will keep thinking about it until someone comes with a good explanation.

It is hard to know what happened. Did people quit, or do they just play less hours per day suddenly? Both would lead to a drop in PCU and ACU. As the main drop happened in correlation with aegis sov, it is possible that the answer hides within aegis sov (It could be unrelated).

I do not know to much about sov, but the implementation of a vulnerability windows, might have lead to people being online mostly in this window, and log off when it is over, where they might have stayed on longer before. This would for example lead to a drop in ACU.

With the new SOV system as far as I know capital pilots are also not needed at he same degree anymore. So It can be that people don't log in their capital alts anymore.

Also they could just have quit because they did not like the Aegis change, and was dissapointed that CCP did not listen to the criticism that was given about interceptor and boring mechanics based on SISI testing before the release. The possibillities are many. And is probably a little bit of each.

I'm patiently waiting for everyone to unsub so i can gate my titans.

This is a unique game and community. It will never be super popular as it is because of the level of difficulty involved in its mastery. Subs will go up, subs will go down. Bittervets will be bitter and super salty.

Rip multiboxing. Eve lost a lot of subs to it. Not nearly as big of a decline in players as it was decline in characters/subs. Not sure what all the fuss is about. You wanted it.

I'd still like a jump drive for my bowhead.

Also, interesting to note, PCU has its own cycles that need to be observed on a larger scale than by just looking at the day-to-day (or week-to-week) numbers. Seasonal activity needs a year-to-year comparison.

For instance… http://eve.beyondreality.se/pics/PCU2015.png
The drop-off after May '15 didn't necessarily start at the end of May. Yes, the numbers are lower compared to the same days a year earlier, but they are consistently lower, and had been since late April. If anything, late May saw curiously high numbers, which then returned to the regular lower PCUs in June. Similarly, the March–April period was strangely high after a period of high (but constantly slowing) decline. The reasonably stable numbers during the summer and autumn were just as much lower as the the seemingly precipitous May–June PCUs. In other words, part of that decline seems seasonal.

So whatever happened in May '15 seems to have happened in May '14 as well — so what did that period look like? http://eve.beyondreality.se/pics/PCU2014.png

An insane decrease in numbers compared to '13, starting in February and peaking in May. Why does it show up like that? It's because May '13 saw very high numbers, including the current PCU record.

This is what is known as an oxymoron.

The very definition of the word improve requires change to that which already exists, by means of making it better. The second part of your statement completely negates the first.

TL;DR You can't have your cake and eat it.

Given that the entire game is absolutely predicated on PvP of one colour or another, I think we must, unfortunately but wholeheartedly, disregard the rest of your post.

I totally get your point as I feel the same way when I look at other games that while free to play have a cash store for the better stuff.

Admittedly the cash stores in other games tend to be a bit more sensibly priced than the Gordon Gecko approach taken by CCP, who to their credit stopped at cosmetic items. They rely on volume, due to their larger customer base, rather than insane pricing to make their money, however they do often sell the dreaded "golden ammo" style items; which were a major bone of contention during Incarnagate because we couldn't get an answer on whether or not CCP had plans to introduce that too.

Both are valid models for monetisation but given the choice I'd rather pay a sub than have my wallet suffer the death of a thousand micro-transactions to stay competitive.