For years I wanted to share this story with CCP Seagull as a caveat of what can go wrong with custoemr oriented design and why it mattered to the Rubicon plan. Here it goes now.
A public library in a middle sized city had started a trainer program to teach computer use to the people. “Computer alphabetization” was the name and it had good success, enough that the library attracted extra funding to further the program. After asking people who had taken the program, the library developed a series of advanced programs to teach the use of software like Office, Photoshop and such. Yet after the first year, those programs were underperforming compared to the trainer program, and the additional funding was at risk to not be renewed.
Then someone who wasn’t in the decission loop talked to someone who was in the loop, and thus the decission makers learned of a demographic who wanted to take the trainer program, but couldn’t because of the times where the lessons were given. Thus, the worse underperforming avanced programs were cut and a second trainer program started at a different time of day, and it had a lot more success.
Morale is, based on people who had enjoyed the trainer program (their customers), the library undertook a bad investment of public funding as the advanced courses weren’t that much appealing, no matter what the people said after taking the trainer program. It was the intervention of someone out of the loop, delivering a stranger’s viewpoint, what made them realize they had under their noses a unnoticed large demographic in need of the trainer program which was being prevented to take it by the times when it was given.
EVE Online just went in a similar direction when CCP decided to focus on the very satisfied hardcore customers and give up on solo casuals.
Maybe stuff like highsec and mission agents don’t bring headlines nor make people travel to Iceland just to say hello, but the sheer numbers of people who were paying CCP for that stuff provided all the monetization CCP is lacking now when population has dwindled (and keeps dwindling).
CCP chose to keep quality customers versus keeping a quantity of customers. They lost in the bargain.
…but isn’t CCP currently putting most of their effort into the PvE element of the game which directly plays to the HighSec crowd (excluding the current Drifter happening).
No because WHAT they did is exactly the kind of high end PVE nobody cares about…invasions are just a copy/paste of incursions,nothing more and if one would ply this he would play the original and not the copy but CCP dares to call it “new content” anyway
And beside that,the fact that killing a normal belt rat as miner now calls a reponse fleet will drive even more people away from eve…
CPP hasn’t learned the lesson of the player loss…they simply go on to favor the wrong people.
CCP is aimed at hardcore PvP and hardcore PvE who also PvP. Casuals are mostly gone and that has an impact on revenue and retention. CCP can’t reverse now so it’s just talking for the sake of talking… But I wanted to share the story as I know it first hand and the Rubicon plan has turned as bad as I feared.
So your goal is to stay at the game with maybe 5000 others and pvp yourself in an endless loop,always killing the same people,getting incredibly rich without a chance to ever break the loop?
So your goal is to stay at the game with maybe 5000 others and PVE yourself in an endless loop,always killing the same bots ,getting minor rich without a chance to ever break the loop?
Well you are aware of the fact that 5000 people are not enough for ccp to make profit?
The end result of your dream will be a soon closed server…you forget that ccp is now owned by a company that wants to see profit…if they don’t get the profit they will close eve at the blink of an eye…
I bet you love it. But you know you’re in a small minority compared to all the people who left, leave and will leave because they don’t like the contents you like.
The trade-off for lots of people little monetized it’s less people quite more monetized. It’s a bad trade-off.