EVE General Discussion

... and what followed.


A few days ago, on August 31 Jester, aka Ripard Teg, published a post on his blog, with the title "Some curves aren't".
This Post contained a few 'fancy' graphs showing the average logged in users over a period of time,
and his interpretation of it.

The Post caught on quite quick in the EVE related blog scene, for example Seleene, aswell as the mittani took the graphs, agreed on the interpretation and published their own stuff based on it (well the mittani did more or less public).
From there some gaming related websites caught on,
and now hardly quarter an hour goes by without someone linking the graphs,
and/or declaring that eve is dying.

Now, lets all take a deep breath step back and think for a moment.

First of all:
Relevancy of the numbers, none.
The number of currently logged in players is a nice number for marketing reasons, but has no real value; if you want to measure the health of CCP's wallets, and therefor of EVE you have to look at the number of subscribed accounts - not on how many of those are logged in in average.

Now, to me that alone would have been ennough to discard ripards article, and don't think much more about it,
but apparently a chunk of the community does either a) not see b) not understand or c) not want to understand this.

So lets go on with a few more points.

In his post Ripard Teg calls out a growth number of 2.4% this number, calling 'flat-line' or stagnant.
lets look at this, the two numbers he pulls are:
29,113 to 29,841 - which is a difference of 728.
Which brings me to another conclusion, math is not his strengh.
29113 / 100 * 2.4 = 698.712
29113 / 100 * 2.5006 = 727.999678 (so you could say its about 2.5%)
(what he did is he took the result as basis, not the origin...)
now granted, 2.5% don't sound that tough either, do they?

so lets look at what 728 more people average on an eve online day means.
lets make an assumption and say the average player is playing 2 hours a day (and personally i think the number is much smaller) over all of his accounts. lets also assume he has two accounts (and i think that numer is actually larger.. so this is a very pessimistic view on it)
the eve day has 23 hours (in fact it has 23.5 now, something that was changed during the time that he uses for his graphs, and doesnt take in account, but we will ignore it for the sake of not breaking the character limit of this post)
23 / 2 = 11.5 * 728 = 8372 * 2 = 16 744 new accounts * 17,49 USD (yes i know, some of you can buy cheaper, but more people are euro than us players, and those pay in euros, which is actually more.. so this, again is pessimistic)
which leads to 292,852.52 USD each month. That means 2.5% growth. (in pessimistic, in reality it will be more!)

A few more things that Ripard Teg has not mentioned in his post:
- some larger other MMO are actually shrinking, and not 'only growing by 2.5%'
- CCP recently banned a shitload of bots, which has an impact on the number of concurrent online users aswell.


Claims that EVE is dying have been there 5 years ago, when i started playing allready,
and the truth back then is the same today: its not.

have a good night,
and fly safe,
PP

you don't have to do fuzzy math to see ccp failed to make the game a success after so many years...it should/could have tons of people playing it....

edit: i meet enough ppl that came back to see if things have changed and stuff including myself, now i admit some things did change for the better and they even added some cool things but that took years...and at the same time tons of stuff still as broke as they were

Erhmm ... OP, rather than (trying to) debunk the irrelevant niggly bits in the graphs (which I'm seeing as pure sophistry), I'd like to see your entire analysis that can provide strong proofs and arguments that EVE isn't dying.

Lay it on the table and we'll see if it survives peer review

Tippia, I agree with most of your post, but I think that the introduction of Incarna has had an impact on people logging in multiple accounts, which would probably have a noticable effect on the correlation to which you refer.

I am concerned with reduced PCU, but I don't automatically assume that it means reduced subscription numbers.
I would welcome CCP releasing the current subscriber numbers.

If people have alts that they can no longer use at the same time as their main why would they keep those accounts active? Thats one of the issues thats being brought up with Incarnas release, many alts are only there to support a main. If you can no longer multibox these accounts then people will not keep them active. Which means a reduction in sub numbers. At least thats one correlation between PCU and sub numbers. I doubt CCP will release the current sub numbers anytime soon unless they seem "healthy" enough to release. CCP seems prone on hiding information that makes them look bad, this is evident in with holding the CSM minutes.

Of course this could, and in some cases I assume would, happen. I used to run multiple accounts just because it was convenient to switch between them quickly, but I didn't really play them side-by-side, so now I just log them on when I need them.
I'm not saying that is the norm, I can't make such an assumption, but I *know* I have reduced the PCU ever so slightly by doing it.
As all my accounts are paid in plex I do let accounts lapse if I don't use them for a while, which has an impact on subscriber numbers, but I often have multiple live account which previously would be running concurrently.


Yeah, I got the point you were making there and completely agree - terrible foundation for his theory.


I have to say though, the more I think about it the more I would like to see some month on month subscriber numbers.
It would be interesting to see if they have seen the drop that the PCU clearly has.

It's always possible the CSM has seen the actual CCP sub numbers, but are bound by the NDA and cannot discuss them... so when Jester released his PCU numbers that showed similar results, and were in a format they COULD discuss, they ran with them.

Since CCP refuses to discuss the actual numbers the debate is a little pointless, but the fact that CCP refuses to discuss the numbers does seem a trifle worrying in these times. It's fairly obvious less people are logging in from the PCU numbers alone.

We do know from things the CSM has said that there was a sub hit from the MT debacle, which has never been properly resolved as CCP still refuses to release the minutes from that meeting.

This is where I remind people that we used to have 55K + on Sundays and 45K on Weekdays.


When that happens again I might try to eat a sock. Otherwise numbers in Eve are down.


Revelant for the slow

+2.5% over 30 months, or 1% a year. This is commonly known to sane people as 'flat'.

Just how miniscule does the variance need to be before you'll be willing to accept it as flat? Are you seriously looking for exact equivalence here? You seem to think nothing other than a precise 0% variance can be considered flat, which is rather deluded.

And now for some constructive criticism:

LOUD NOISES.

*FRANTIC POINTING AT NUMBERS*

SCREAMING ABOUT GRAPHS.

YELLING ABOUT UNSUBS.

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As long as EVE has players it will go on.

Does it have players? Yes.

Do you not like it? Get out.