I started playing after remembering an article I read in a gaming magazine (publisher is long gone) about this “huge space mmo” and decided to check when servers went offline. To my surprise they weren’t offline.
2 Likes
Same here
Everyone who quit did it for their own reasons. Trying to fit the majority into a select reason is just stupid.
6 Likes
one word on this, if it’s been nerfed so much, why is the level of ganking never had been this high?
I remember ganking being really hard and costly, especially for freighters, now it’s cheap and efficient.
and yes, I know a few people who left because of it.
6 Likes
Changes. People don’t like to adapt. Most of EvE player base are older players. Also skill trading etc. Disconnection with rpg avatars.
6 Likes
Some thoughts on OPs question revolve around a few factors.
- Eve is a niche game. This makes capturing/enticing/retaining players hard.
- Eve takes a lot of time. Time to setup, time to get people together, time to find people to contest. This is the most “time-expensive” game I’ve ever been aware of (in terms of what it takes to accomplish anything outside of a mission/quest). This makes it more challenging for the older and more responsibility-laden players to really invest.
- Eve is an old game by any measure. This makes capturing/enticing/retaining players hard.
- Eve is advertised as a hard game (in the sense that actions and choices have consequences). While this is still true, that truth is somewhat less evident in some of the more recent changes to the game.
4a. Skill injectors - this is probably the single most damaging aspect to player retention. It flies in the face of “consequence” and meaningful choices. “Don’t like your char? Extract, ReRoll, Inject.” “Chasing the FOTM? Buy the leftovers of someone else mistakes (SP).” “Sullied the name your parents gave you? Disappear and be born anew with injectors.” Not only has this reduced the consequences of choices and actions, but it has also allowed people to short circuit all of the learned game knowledge about different ships and the way they play. So, instead of helping the new player “catchup” this change has pushed them further into the realm of “I’ve just spent $xxx and still got destroyed.” There is only so much of this that a credit card warrior will put up with before they decide the rest of the game is not engaging enough to warrant sticking around.
4b. Citadels and asset safety - this is probably the second most damaging aspect to player retention. Storing gorillians of ISK/assets all over New Eden (kspace) is now completely safe to store thanks. No one really wants to shoot these as they are everywhere without any limit whatsoever, take far too long to kill (see point 2), and provide no tangible benefit to doing so. And compounding that problem is “Why?” Where’s the consequence to the group that anchored dozens of throwaway astras? They can just as easily anchor more next door.
4c. PLEX vault - could be argued as a QOL improvement but the opposite is also true. Took the some of the consequence out of (poor) decision making.
4d. Clone costs - could be argued that some change was needed there, clones are now pretty much throw-away implants notwithstanding. - Terrible PVE - most players of MMO games are PVE players. Even in EVE, the majority of players spend the majority of their time in HS where the primary activities are PVE and mining. These game systems are industry leading in terms of catatonic-induction. I, and many others, have said that to engage new players and hope to hook them long enough for the meta-game (Eve’s real long term draw) to grab them the PVE activities MUST be engaging, fresh, and something that requires some attention. It has never been, and is still not. Though some of the high-end content can be very challenging (pirate sotiyos, wspace escalations) and the adapative NPC AI work is intriguing and may offer some improvement, if that content is only accessible to the highly-skilled/well-equiped crowd of older player the mark is still missed. Those aren’t the players you need to try to retain, you’ve already got them.
- AFK “gameplay” - this is highly related to points 4 and 5 in the sense that there are no consequences to AFK “gameplay”. In the context of mining/ratting; that the optimal way to do this is “create as many alts as possible, drop them in an anomaly or belt and walk away for 20 minutes” is shameful and speaks to the issues quite poignantly. Even more now that the “cost” of failure is effectively nil (“I died. No problem, I’ll stick the alt back in there and walk away and in x minutes I’ll have completely, and mindlessly, replaced the loss”). That is NOT engaging.
These points are, quite frankly, sad to write down. Eve is an amazing, ambitious game. I cannot discount that enough. So seeing it flounder in so many (almost schizophrenic) ways is very disheartening. No game has quite captured my imagination as well as Eve has over the years. But it’s the people and the stories that they generate against the backdrop of Eve that does this. Not the game built missions or lore (though those can be nice). But people who are actually engaged are needed to help create those stories. The fewer people there are, the few the sstories, the lower the draw.
32 Likes
Because most of the sand in the sandbox has been scooped up by the big boys who sit in the corners with their big sandcastles while everyone else has to make do with a few grains here and there.
17 Likes
Tell me more about large entity who prevent you from playing the game how you wish.
6 Likes
Takes the grains, add some lye(s), some water from sweat and tears, and bust some rocks.
Mix them together, and you have cement.
The cement structures (ugly as they may be) will outlast the sandcastles.
–Mixin’ Gadget
Except it’s not, ganking is in decline; the easiest metric to look at that shows this is how many people Concord kill, because they kill each and every person that participates in a gank.
Although ganking now requires more people than it used to, the number of people that Concord kill is lower than it used to be. The logical conclusion is that there are less people ganking, and those that are ganking are having to work together in order to kill their selected prey; which in turn suggests that fewer ships are getting ganked.
The spikes in Concord activity roughly correspond with player driven events such as Burn Jita.
Edited so the graph is up to date and added a linear trendline. Data is pulled from CONCORD | Stats | Corporation | zKillboard
11 Likes
I quit years ago because null sec was getting stale and I was tired of flying in big fleets where I have no personal agency or control over my play style. Just had to fly what the alliance wanted if I didn’t want to be left out. Eventually I got bored and I left EVE for other games.
Years later I’m now returning to EVE. I thought about joining my old corp, but It has significantly shifted to EUTZ (I’m in USTZ) after speaking to current members. Despite this I still have a lot of loyalty for my old group so I might still try and join up. But I’m also strongly considering divesting from this character by using skill injectors to move SP to a new main I might use for wormholes or something else. So actually skill injectors have made it easier for me to come back and start a new life in New Eden.
I really think null sec becomes boring quick for a lot of players, especially because it removes so many decision-making elements from the game for individuals. Small-to-medium groups seem to be more interesting now. Just my opinion of course
Edit: just wanted to post a potato quality video of a time I killed a goon sabre in my ishkur because they bubbled me thinking I was a free kill https://youtu.be/SmbntWjoClY
5 Likes
Fozzie sov (what, I can no longer hot drop cruisers on the other side of the Eve universe?) and the severe restrictions place on folk using ‘automation’ to strip asteroid belts clean very quickly.
Both of which probably needed to be done for the long term health of the game.
Neither of which directly affected me, but this seems to be the opinion of folk I have asked when they say they are quitting.
3 Likes
The jump range changes came with the Phoebe update which predate Fozzie SOV by quite a bit of time.
1 Like
CCP are too busy chasing the pot of gold at the end of the VR rainbow and not on resources for the game that actually pays their bills.
15 Likes
I don’t play nearly as much as I used to. Why? Look at the options. HS is boring, to put it simply. There’s no challenge, and there hasn’t been one in a long time. Sov Null? Boring also, it’s glorified HS with the safety that exists there. PvP isn’t any fun out there either. Hitting F1 whenever someone tells you to isn’t how I want to spend an evening. What’s still fun in the game? WHs, really. Due to real life time constraints, I simply can’t put in hours and hours every night like WH living needs. That doesn’t leave much of anything, at least not for people who have less than 4 hours/login to play.
7 Likes
Instead of asking why EVE is dying (yes, I know you didn’t say so… I liberally rephrased your question) I think the better question is why EVE is still alive. EVE is one of the oldest MMOs around, in a field where hundreds have gone offline and been forgotten. Most only last a few years, EVE’s 15th birthday is coming up.
We might not agree with all of CCP’s decisions, but clearly something is going right!
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My guess is because they removed a lot of content without replacing it.
- jump drive changes
- watch list removal
- multiple gank nerfs
- asset safety mechanics of citadels
less interesting things to play, less people who play
7 Likes
I’ve been thinking about this a bit more, and I think there may be people who leave disappointed because they came here hoping to be Han Solo, but found that the only real endgames are Darth Vader or Gordon Gekko, with most just winding up as Imperial Trooper 50793 or Willy Loman.
35 Likes
PVE Missions are boring & in short rotation. PVE grinding should not be restricted to missions producing the spawn. If I play Black Desert I can go out to any number of spots to grind any number of different mobs. But in EVE nothing like that exists.
You can say EVE isnt a PVE game or whatnot but this is why I’ve quit.
6 Likes
Because the game has hit a plateau. EVE used to be about creating a virtual world or “the biggest sci-fi universe you could imagine”. This included investing in the game, expanding the game into other genres that were supposed to be integrated and even providing an overarching narrative through books and magazines.
Now it’s just spaceships. So much has been cut down to the point now that all we seem to get is revision of current gameplay and ship models. While these are great, there is not really anything new. The vision has become so narrow…
17 Likes