I’ve played X-Wind and TIE Fighter in 2008 
1 Like
In the UK we had GAME stores at the time around may 2003, the young assistant there came running up to me to tell me about Eve, All i needed to hear was multiplayer space simulator and I was sold, i paid £29.99 for the box and I had to wait 2 weeks for CCP to receive my payment and activate my account. I’m so happy I was in the right place at the right time.
6 Likes
Good memories … 1993. Tie Fighter class was never reached again, though Alliance was close IMO. Else I miss Kyle Katarn.
Here’s the issue, the time sink required to build assets is considerable, but the game is also one of risk - so when the time-sink required to build / train something is compared with how quickly it can be lost - it’s not going to meet the gratification that other games have.
The game is based on the notion that assets are disposable, extremely so but the time required to develop assets is protracted. For assets to be disposable and appeal to the larger base of players, they would need to be more accessible.
The notion of ‘fly’ what you can afford doesn’t sort of stand with advancement - especially when gamers have been trained for rewards.
Eve will likely be around for some time - niche as it is - it can never break through and become mainstream because the mechanics that make it what is, will never appeal to the mainstream audience.
Eve’s problems will come if it has corporate growth projections beyond what it can achieve as a niche game.
Risk V Reward is one facet of a game like Eve but it is “Time V Risk V Reward”.
The next issue is that a large portion of the player-base has been trained to play in a certain way, so optimising or widening the game’s appeal will drive that base away, which leads to the slow-death of compromise.
If any game or business wants to be successful - the first thing you have to do is know what you are and what appeals to people - and then refine that, until it’s the best. Dilution is death, but concentrating on what you are doesn’t mean going overboard on a particular style, it means making the appeal more appealing.
3 Likes
I agree with most of what you say. also much of it depends on perspective which you touched upon.
My perspective is that I will never bore from having to survive in a dangerous environment where assets are viewed as disposable. Eve has challenged me in a way that no game ever has and has allowed me to role play survival scenarios.
We live in a wonderful technological era where gaming has become a large part of digital entertainment. I feel this means great things for Eve, secretly I am hoping for Eve to expand into the ability to walk in stations and on planets. Perhaps setting up and defending a planetary base using first person, or exploration of planets using first person may help it become mainstream. Eve is probably the best platform for growth out there currently. it is prolific.
You talk about a large amount of the player base being trained to play a certain way. All thats happened here is that people have learned and adapted to the mechanics. Once people have new mechanics to adapt to then something similar will happen, the player base will develop a new common play style which may appeal to a different or new set of subscribers.
I believe CCP is a successful business which earns millions per year. They have been running for 14 years which I think is very close to the longest running online multiplayer game.
2 Likes
Meridian 59 is still going since 1996. lol
They’re skilled at managing their enterprise and their cashflow. Other AAA MMOs will need a subscriber base of 250K paid users.
Eve has perhaps 40,000 subscribers and perhaps 50% of these accounts are using Plex.
Millions ain’t millions anymore - a million used to buy a lot but not nowadays - so they do very well with the resources they have to produce the standard of game they have. It’s impressive.
In any business there is the pressure for growth, for Eve their price point hasn’t changed much if at all for years. So if growth is the aim, then the game needs to compete for more gamers; to widen their appeal is the risk area. Growth is needed simply to stay ahead of inflation unless other factors like price change.
You’ve adapted but not all players have adapted, hence the decline in player retention. So what are those players to be replaced with - that’s where the things like the NPE come in. But what Eve needs is player retention.
It’s a niche-game always will be. That’s not a bad thing, it just means it has limited appeal and limited growth opportunities.
1 Like
If you want to make it simpler, in terms of its niche, Eve is at its fundament, a ‘sadomasochistic game’, as a player you either find your entertainment in destroying others or trying not to be destroyed (and when destroyed take pleasure in being destroyed). That’s as niche as it gets.
The destruction of another player and their assets is to a different degree than most other games - which for many is its appeal but also its limiting factor.
1 Like
I think #5 is the most pertinent of Alundii’s post. Just look at Rookie Help - not unusual to see that 10% of the people online are in there. Yet how many of those end up translating into long term players? This becomes even more obvious when corps recruit a lot of rookies - within a month, half or more have not logged on since the first couple of times.
I think part of the problem is that many are lured into trying the game because they saw some video on YouTube about massive space battles. But when they actually get into the game, the harsh reality of the fact that just to get the skills to participate in such events will take them not weeks or months, but years.
I don’t know what CCP can do to retain more of all the new players that rapidly fall by the wayside, but I think the skill curve is the biggest barrier. Perhaps something like some lower level missions also giving a few thousand skill points or something would help, just for example.
1 Like
There has to be a lot more than that. I have seen as many as 39,000 online. So the actual subscriber base (paid or not) is probably 10-30x that.
Over 14 years Eve has had over 3 million subs. I found the total amount of characters ever created on Eve Who (over 10 million) then divided it by 3 and came up with the figure of over 3 million subs.
I’ve been playing since September 2010 and for me it was a lot more fun as a new bro as back then I had only one sub and no skills to do much of anything, everything was hard and needed more than one player to accomplish my goals.
Today I have six accounts with six mains and can do, fly or build most everything as a solo entity, I no longer need others to make ISK or help me accomplish most anything I want to do and maybe that’s when I got to the point of complete mind numbing boredom…
But I never quit, have taken breaks but always come back, I’m still plugging away at skills even though I’m perfect at everything I want to do on at least one character per account, if it wasn’t for selling the SP of all my unused alts to play for free I most likely would quite when my ISK to buy PLEX dried up.
Because they were advised by doctors to lower the Salt content in their lives
2 Likes
I been playing eve since 03 I quit once over a loss of a BS at a gate not because I lost my first BS but because I saw the scout above the gate but jumped anyway. It took a year before I resubmission my account.
I took 2017 off to start a movement irl but I’m thinking I might come back next year as a alpha
Love the new forum 
Goons
Maybe you need more adventure in your game, how does coming to Stain sound for a dramatic adventure of a lifetime?
Far too many unnecessary changes, like the skill sheet, for instance. It’s an aggravating chore now, due to the drop down crap. This forum design as well, if love to have one of the two incarnations back. The PLEX change is another. The little things, though not game breaking, feel unnatural to me. I know they’re trying to attract new players and trying to keep things fresh, but IMO, don’t fix what isn’t broken.
2 Likes
I’ve had lapsed accounts since eve launched and then again in 2007, that I don’t even remember the logins to - I’m talking about ‘active subscriptions’.
A search on the Internet reveals in 2015 - the most plausible answer was 146,000 paid subscriptions. If that’s in the realm of reality, CCP makes an impressive game for the resources they have, and in fairness does quality updates on a better cycle than most.
3 Likes
Boredom OP. I been playing a few days and it seems pointless.
4 Likes
Obviously I can only speak to my own experience and waning interest in Eve over the years. I found that the things that appealed to me about Eve, those years ago when I found it, have slowly withered and died off. I moved into low-sec very quickly after joining and never looked back. Ransoming was a common activity and easily allowed me to sustain my play. Static DED complexes provided a nice bonus when making my rounds, and high sec ganks provided a quick, and often profitable, activity for those days where I was just too lazy for a long roam. Over time, ransoms were honored less and less, and so getting them from players caught became harder and harder. Static DED’s were removed in favor of Faction Warfare sites, and while high-sec ganks still existed they slowly became less and less profitable as methods of tanking, and indeed player awareness of the issue, improved. The boosting alt meta made it much more challenging to roam alone, and the triviality of sec status made it a moot point.
The one positive I found over the period leading up to my leaving was with the changes to suspect/criminal timers, particularly with respect to gate guns, allowing small ship gangs the freedom to sit at a gate, if need be, even with a criminal timer. In the end it was a lot of small changes and issues that slowly piled up to create an Eve that wasn’t at all the game that was pitched to me so many years ago (discovered by a banner advertisement saying “Be a Space Pirate,” instantly sold.) Good or bad, it’s a very different game now, and attempting to return after 2 years of absence has been an eye opener. We’ll see if there’s anything left to keep my interest.
Personally I’ve always felt it was the ganking. EvE should have areas where everyone’s playstyle can be expressed. There’s the hardcore PvP types that “should” live out in the lawless areas of space, and those that are totally not interested in PvP, who never leave highsec and enjoy the game for all the opposite reasons, like mining, trading, and spreadsheets. 
There has always been this pressure against those players though, as the gankers and other like-minded players force their style onto them. This of course, is EvE and it is viable, but the side effect is that the victims don’t have fun, lose out and stop playing the game. The thing i find the worst about this is that many people then have the mindset of “Good ridance to them, worthless highsec miner/trader scrub” etc. But this is a bad thing for EvE, for it’s playerbase and it’s future. As much as you might hate these players, they are vital to the game.
Lets be honest here. It is the absolute ease of highsec ganking that makes it popular. Even more so with alpha accounts. It’s playing EvE on easy mode. Why venture out into low, null and wh space for targets that are prepared and willing to fight back, when you can get such easy kills and loot from all those crying highsec carebears? No-one is scared of Concord, and repercussions are non-existant. The bounty system is still a joke. For these non-combat orientated players there is no defence or recourse.
I’ve always strongly been of the opinion that a protected highsec for these sorts of players is of vital importance. It’s the economic core of the game. Some people just have to accept that there are actually players that have zero interest in fighting and explosions. Some of them don’t even undock! It’s likely you’ll never understand how they could possibly be having fun.
All that being said, I don’t think ganking should be banned. Crime is definately a feature of the EvE universe. But some sort of balance needs to be reached to ensure highsec does remain viable to the players with zero interest in combat.
And no, I don’t live in highsec. 
5 Likes