So I was talking to some buddies ingame and I expressed at how I hadn’t been Omega status for almost a year.
You can’t sit there and say it’s because development of the game isn’t happening: CCP have a model for completely changing how structures, SOV and NPCs interact. We got Drifters, updates to WH space at large, new PVE content for mission runners, new pirate factions and new ships to collect and shoot.
We’ve had storyline progression with things like pirate supers/titans being released, the empress getting killed, Jove space getting nuked, Thera etc.
So why are so many people quitting?
Stagnancy in nullsec? We just had WWB and a large reshuffle of the power players and where they live. Lowsec also seen some serious drama with big players slugging it out for almost 2 years now. Is it the general game balance? I can’t say I’m totally up to date but today I think the game is more balanced than it’s ever been, back when I started there was like one single viable ship per size catagory and race. Some races had no viable ships at all in a given size bracket. The tiericide project has been a long overdue antidote to horrid design decisions that need to be accounted for.
It’s not PLEX prices either. That mainly affects older players with their hordes of alts. It’s not ganking, ganking has been relentlessly nerfed over and over and this change doesn’t seem to positively affect retention. Scamming? Market pvp? No. Been there since the beginning, arguably more of a strength than an issue. Is it botting? Probably contributing with cash inflation but they’ve been around forever as well (I used to bot in runescape back in 2007, so I understand that some things are truly immutable facts of life).
So we could argue it’s not even a question of farms and castles, the building of or kicking down. We’ve seen more changes happen in the last few years than I could recount on a single post. Empires have fallen. New ones have risen. It should be a good time to be alive by all counts, but still the avg player count goes down year on year.
Are there any theories even left to explain this phenomenon?
Burn out? Real life issues? I know they have pulled me away and limited me to only maintaining one account. Summer doldrum that will shift as we head into the school year? Sample bias because it’s only a select group of your friends that you can prove have left the game when in reality many others have not?
Yes, but i’m on my phone now… i’ll reserve this spot.
btw, it’s not just the last two. 2013/2014, post serious highsec nerfs, quite a lot left as well. and before that, or course, as well. different reasons, though.
Burn out doesn’t affect new players. I remember in fanfest 16 they showed a graph showing how the avg value players had fallen suddenly thanks to a large number of high value players leaving. Like any social structure we understand that the majority of currency is concentrated in an upper 9% of the population so while a lot of money had left the game forever the actual player count wasn’t proportionally falling.
CCP nerfing content/content creators for their sjw wow_esque pipe-chasing dream is the correct answer.
Freyd Gone.
Solestis Project gone
Lady Spank gone
EROTICA1 gone
PSYCHOTIC MONK gone
Many many unsung AWOXers gone after ccp nerfed AWOXing and added Corp Friendly Fire ■■■■■■■■ mechanic.
The Watch List nerf basically killed small corp wardeccers and solo-wardeccers.
“BE THE VILLIAN”!!
CCP HAS PANDERED TO BEING THE BAD GUY FOR YEARS. SINCE THE BEGINING.
Then they seen shiny profits from other games and mobile apps and microtransactions and sold their sold and stopped promoting “BE THE VILLIAN” and nerfed the villian repeatedly over the past 5-7 years.
CCP gave birth to EvE, and CCP will be the death of EvE with their terrible decisions.
It’s hard for a very old online game (and Eve is really old!) to get new players, so when one leave it’s usually for good. Some might come back, but it’s a minority.
thesummary is that CCP alienated a lot of content creators and started reaching out for content consumers, as evidenced by their new marketing tactics (see relevant threads) and by the increased amount of people who need new content and a reason to log in; see: events and The Agency. they began targetting nullsec masses instead and the outcome was actually predictable, at least for those who left many years ago.
The game never needed this and now it does. if that’s not telling, then i don’t know what is. that’s, pretty much, the tl;dr of what’s going on. people quitting in the last two years is, more or less, a direct result of other people quitting thanks to nerfs to social interaction and ccp reaching out for people who care more about short term fun, than about long time satisfaction.
or, in simpler words: the game is boring for those ccp wants to have around. they’re consumers and easy to milk, but they’re not actually good for a healthy EVE. they’re only good for CCP’s wallet.
EvE is a very word-of-mouth game. You start to play it because someone talked you into trying it. Very rarely (especially these days) do the ads actually work to draw in NEW players - these tend to be better at reminding vets that you never really leave New Eden, you just AFK Cloak for an extended time.
EvE is also a long-term game. You aren’t going to get very far just as a game tourist. EvE requires so much effort to accomplish something (even putting a small gang together), that the instant gratification crowd will eventually drift away.
And while the learning cliff has been reworked to be just a steep* hill, learning the important parts of EvE that aren’t in the tutorial and career agents is still rough without a teacher.
Lastly, new players that have never heard of EvE and maybe were suckered…er… enticed by the ads to join us are likely to be younger than EvE itself… New generations look for new things.
–Gadget…still here
*If you stop your car, you’ll roll all the way back down - steep
People join this game because of the wild crazy stories/blogs/articles they read. They hear of massive heists, evil trickery and ganking, severve evil and villianry that just isnt in any other game.
“THE BAD GUY” attacts hot emo chicks and also video game players.
Ccp saw this and pandered to “BAD GUY PLAYERS” for years, and sometimes still do.
Yet as you pointed out, they just NERF NERF NErf villians at every turn. This makes those blogs stop. This stops new people from coming.
I started EvE 8 years ago by reading Psychotic Monks wild crazy corpmate-killing/stealing expoilts of him and the biligerent undesirables.
The MY LOOT YOUR TEARZ blog and alliance about ninja salvaging and blowing up missioners attracted THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF NEW PLAYERS.
And guess what? THOSE type of players subbed for YEARS.
The “LEVEL MY RAVEN” type player quits super fast, yet ccp keeps trying to keep the RAVEN BEARS while shunning the VILLIANS.
This is ths logical reason if you think what has really changed in the past 7-5 years. It is MAKING THE VILLIANS UNWANTED AND NERFED. That is the only change
you kinda can
you have to wait years for anything interesting to happen
and when it does its just nerfs
or uninteresting changes like sov stuff
or ways to make the game more boring
yeah but it only stays fresh for so long
things need to be reworked and rebalanced constantly to keep things fresh and interesting
ships need to be fun
they need to be powerful
people who say power creep dont realise the power has already crept
the vast majority of ships are underwhelming because they got left behind
and underwhelming ships means boring meta
means boring game
There is no MMO currently on the market, except maybe some of the tiny niche ones or the ones just coasting with no more updates, that is surviving just by retaining old players. The majority of players in any MMO at any given time are relatively new. This shows in Eve in the CSM voting results by character age and it’s something MMO devs are well aware of.
People get older, their lives and priorities change, and they lose interest in old games or ones that take too much of their time.
Especially in terms of content there’s just physically no way for any dev to put out enough content to keep the game “new and fresh” for the majority of players. Players will always consume content faster than devs can put it out.
Eve is a deeply social game but it has an extremely toxic culture. The same people who are big swaggering badasses one moment are giant crybabies the next, the most vocal players think they’re geniuses but are actually too dumb to know how stupid they are, and there’s really no way to engage in any kind of interaction without putting yourself at risk. In many ways the game is a metaphor for nerds’ social phobias.
I really have little patience for any of that and as much as I enjoy playing spaceships I always wind up unsubbing after a few months, then come back to the same old same old after a couple of years.
I am sure that everyone has their own theories on the lower server population. Perhaps the main reason is that people have become to comfortable/bored with EVE and it’s content. This is particularly evident in HS, despite the changes you mentioned. The new content and mechanics that have been introduced over the last couple of years has been heavily weighted toward null sec. While there is no doubt that null sec offers the best buzz/headlines for CCP on the world stage, HS still has the largest percentage of the population of players. CCP has let HS content languish because the big whales/multiple account players and large corporations/alliances appear to have more weight/voice with CCP development. There is no question that their needs and concerns should be addressed, but CCP’s resources for EVE have appeared to have been siphoned off for other avenues of development and this reduced ability to generate new/interesting content means that some areas of EVE suffer in comparison to,other parts.
In regards to introducing and retaining new players, the NPE revamp has helped, but more needs to be done. A way to generate dynamic missions needs to developed and implemented asap. The introduction of npc AI is a great start, but it needs to be also retooled to also include missions outside of burner missions. Incursions are nice, but the same fleets with the same players roam EVE, while newer players are usually left on the sideline; let’s revamp the scout sites by reducing how tough it is/rewards given such that a newish small group or couple of more experienced players could run just to get a taste of Incursions. Introduce new exploration mechanics/sites using some of the ideas mentioned elsewhere in these forums. Change EVE mechanics to encourage exploration of LS/NS by newer players; one way is to make gate guns at gates entering/exiting HS to be far harder hitting to reduce gate camps ONLY at those gates. Anything to get the newer players into the game and at least not discouraged/bored within the first couple of months.
The problem is that any changes made to EVE to reverse the downward slope of population always has to go through the question/test on how the larger groups will abuse/game the changes. It’s always been a part of EVE and part of the game’s charm, but perhaps one of the main reasons that change comes slowly in game. Perhaps the real reason is that new/different is shiny and EVE has a problem introducing new content that won’t be abused shortly after it is introduced🤔
Tangentially related, I’m fairly confident that since the game is marketed with “create empires with your friends”, then the first thing people get told is to get an alt because you can’t play that way is in no way healthy for player retention. Like I’ve said many times previously, I would have personally quit the game a long time ago were it not for my friends I made in my first ever corp and few after that.
This game, in my opinion actually lacks a lot of social interaction, where that is what is so special about EVE and what keeps people playing any other MMO as well. They got friends there.
All they needed to do was if you logged in and were in a super/titan, it would give you like a 30-15 mintute delay for the watchlist or something.
That’s all that needed changing was supers getting ganked nonstop upon logging in.
The 1-10 man wardec corps are gone basically or either assimilated into the massive giant merc corps.
Can be you and your bud trying to hunt down a 25-30man corp cuz you cant tell if any are online. If you have alpha alts spy in corp, need to keep logging out etc etc.
Watchlist DID NOT NEED TO GO and DIRECTLY made people UNSUB.
FACT
Particularly noticeable has been how things like random dungeon grouping and other “QoL” features that simplified human interaction in to being basically meaningless aside from trading guilds killed WoW and after being adopted by the many pretenders to the MMORPG throne, killed them too.
Just imagine that, removing one of the major incentives for finding and maintaining a strong core group of adventuring buddies (things like group dungeon running with people you can trust so that you can transfer or assign gear to the appropriate people, having a higher chance of getting a good group in the first place, removing wait times for common tasks, having people that actually bond with each other over shared objectives and mutual long term goals, sparking competition between guilds to see who can conquer XYZ raid first therefore promoting stronger bonds between guild members and more reliance on really having competent people in your guild to begin with) actively damaged the game and no matter how many times WoW has tried to reinvent itself with destroying the world in Cata or rewriting history with WoD and Legion they still can’t capture the magic of the original game and TBC because they’ve removed one of the simplest things that made their game so popular: the human connection.
Maybe you haven’t seen my corp history but I actually did Wardecs in a small corp and I’m aware of the very common tricks used by those in the business including the total autists who considered ganking someones mission ship with their proteus and 4 RR alts to be a demonstration of his SKILL at the game.
The mental gymnastics people needed to do to justify watchlisting was just incredible every time you losers open your mouths you slit your own throats. You admit you’re too weak and unmotivated to pursue war targets and instead need to be spoonfed their activity.
