EVE General Discussion

I don't doubt it. But your anecdotes suffer from an extreme form of selection bias. You don't see the vast majority of players you don't know that never got engaged with the game or talked to another person and quit out of boredom or because they couldn't figure out the game mechanics or interface. You only see the people you met or knew before they tried the game who may not be representative of the typical new player. Further, the study we are quibbling over was specifically designed to look at true new players, mostly during the former trial, to see what correlated with them subscribing and staying with the game, not those who had already made the decision to subscribe. Turns out exposure to ganking (and losing ships in wardecs) is actually negatively correlated with not subscribing, shooting an arrow through the heart of the "think of the children" argument, at least for the bulk of new players trying the game.

Now, if you want to get into the more murky question of does ganking or wardecs negatively effect novice - say 1-6 month players, I would say there data isn't as clear. Your anecdotes still have a selection bias as it appears you are/were a miner and thus associated with other miners so of course you only hear about players who quit because they were ganked. You don't hear about all the other players that stayed with the game because of the fun they had when the corp they joined wardecced another or they enjoyment they get from ganking some bottom-of-the-food-chain miners. In 2014 CCP Rise did say that those that play the game as a 'traditional MMO' mostly solo and just "level their Raven" have an terrible retention rate, and in 2015 CCP Quant showed us the numbers that confirmed these players stay half as long as players who get fully engaged in the universe, both suggesting boredom is a bigger problem than non-consensual violence, which is supported by the 1% exit survey data, but we don't have all the numbers. You can argue this means more effort should be spent trying to retain these types of players by providing more scripted content, but what it comes down to is what type of game is CCP really trying to develop?

If you find yourself arguing that the New Eden should have a safe space to retain 1-6 month old solo mission runners and miners, you have to now question are you really trying to solve the problem of new player retention, or are you now trying to morph Eve entirely into another type of game which may have a broader market appeal (but at the cost of the current player-base)? If a several month old player can't handle experiencing the core and intended game play of losing a ship to another player, or having a war declared on them (which they can opt-out of with one click), are they really cut out for this game then?

Players will try and leave Eve. That is unavoidable. Many don't want to play a full-time PvP sandbox game which features permanent loss, zero-sum encounters, loss to other human players, and has no place where you can be 100% safe anywhere outside of a station by design. No matter how much you try to bubble-wrap them, some players will never be comfortable in such a competitive virtual universe. Quitting the game because you are unable to get engaged with it for whatever reason is something CCP should be concerned with, but quitting the game because you realize it is not how you want to spend you leisure time isn't. Those aren't long-term Eve Online customers. CCP should continue to develop new products to cater to those players, not break their current successful product in a futile attempt to keep them.

Some players just can't handle losing to another person even in an imaginary video game. I find it strange, but that may make certain people incompatible with Eve which is designed as a competitive game where we all win some and we all lose some.

:o

Thats deep.

o7

In fact I am in awe over that, nicely played DMC nicely played indeed...

You replied exactly how I expected you to, and confirmed what I had said. But as you are not able to work it out I am not bothered to explain it, neither am I bothered that certain other ganker aligned players cannot work it out either. o/ and all that...

They can say what they want but they're still going to be wrong. It only shows how disconnected they are with the original design and explains why despite their continuing fantasy of releasing OP ship after OP ship to boost subscriptions their game is still failing.

Competent game designers understand that the majority of potential customers are PvE players. They understand the minority are PvP only and that a decent portion of the former dip their feet in occasionally.

This is why competent designers created EvE with high sec (relatively safe, difficult to pirate / gank in), low sec (high sec loss, some safety with guns you couldn't originally tank easily) and null, the free for all area.

This made EvE successful and the new devs have screwed it by not keeping that original balance. Its one of the most original interesting games this century ruined by incompetence, mismanagement and a total lack of understanding of its core principles as new people took over.

If you can't handle a simple discussion maybe you should not start one. Maybe talking to an NPC is more your thing.

tehehehe

Well you couldn't be more wrong even if you tried. I have plenty of bullets left, just don't need to waste any more of them here. Also I said this game is PvP / PvE Sandbox. I definitely didn't say anything about wanting this game and new players to have the right to play Eve as a space mission simulator in peace. Don't know where you got that from. Everybody knows that space is dangerous.

I will say you do a great job of twisting peoples words around in an attempt to validate and justify your own views on how this game should be played.

As for that CCP statement about the game, obviously they need to update that info but probably can't be arsed due to creating ton's of new PvP content for the game. Oh wait, they actually create ton's of PvE content for the game.

By the way, here's CCP's newest main advertisement for Eve Online :
https://www.eveonline.com/


Anyway, don't see anything saying it's strictly a full time PvP sandbox but hey, guess it all depends on how you view it. Have a good night.

DMC

You presume, like others on here, that everyone wants to pvp..and i'm on about in the traditional sense not market pvp etc.

Not everyone wants to, or will ever want to undock in a pvp fitted ship. Nothing anyone says or does will ever change how they want to play.

There's very likely more of these types of players than pure pvpers.

That doesn't mean some mechanics won't become a problem as a game becomes more active or evolves beyond the vision of the original designers. Things that might have worked perfectly well with 4000 players might not pan out anything like the original intention with say 40,000 players online. (For instance early on it was theoretically possible to tank concord and continue causing mischief).

None of the core factors I mention can 'become a problem', they are the basis of the game. If you don't like the basis of a game you don't like the game.

Just like in soccer, the basis of the game is 'don't use your hands' (with a few exceptions like being the goalie). Thinking that playing a ball game without using your hands is stupid as hell is a totally ok opinion to hold....just not while playing soccer.