I agree here, and I wasn’t even ever a wardec aggressor, and it was still the most fun I’ve had since day 1 (literally, that’s how my EVE experience started.) Its lack wasn’t why I quit logging in, but it was a big part of why I kept playing as long as I did.
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There’s a bit of context to that 1% figure: The number of two week old players that got suicide ganked.
If we think about that the first question that comes to my mind: What noob is going to have accumulated enough resources to even show up on a suicide ganker’s radar? Yes there will be wallet warriors but it’s rather telling that we’ve got a PLEX vault now. (Note: My own SWAG is that CCP got tired of dealing with the charge backs but I doubt we’ll ever know the real reason.)
But more philosophically, is it even a bad thing? Would we really want to play a game where you couldn’t lose stuff? And if there is a possibility of losing stuff and someone experiences a loss and decides to quit because they don’t like losing, have we lost anything really?
I think the disposable nature of gear in this game is utterly brilliant. It’s what makes the economy work and makes crafting relevant at all tiers (kinda). Losing somebody that can’t handle any sort of loss is inevitable. Losing somebody because they don’t see any sort of counterplay is something else entirely.
I’m going to point out the current bumping mechanic. I don’t particularly have a problem with it as a limited delaying tactic but when it goes on for an extended period of time then you’re going to chase people away.
That person was just playing the wrong game.
And the problem that Eve faces today is that it’s becoming the “wrong game” for too many people. Something has to give. There are many more attractive alternatives in 2017 than there were in 2003.
Villains get profits from killing ppl. Carebears get profits from doing content. Villains stop Carebears from doing content… then Carebears Plex. Eve gets profit… this cycle only works so long then Carebears quit cause they never get ahead in the game. Then Villains have to Villain themselves till someone out Villains the other Villain and then someone quits or gets GigX’d. So you have an ever shrinking pool of mud… which no one wants to jump into cause its a villain mud wrestling pit. #VirtualFirstWorldProblems
Post is decrying ppl leaving… Can you think of incentives to play? Or ways to Draw ppl in?
An Idea for replacing Advertizing: Eve needs a TV show to draw in younger viewers. Somewhere between CloneWars/HeavyMetal that tells a REAL story not bits and pieces or having eve players sit infront of typewriters till they come up with George R.R. Martin. Hire some writers get a real animation team(the scope videos with ppl in them are terrible for animations(not talking about release ads : those are good)). Mocap studio would solve alot of that.
CCP needs to follow their own teachings. Gotta spend iskies to make iskies. Cash Cow this stuff up CCP.
Well, there’s the immature players who do stupid things to annoy people. Some code flunkies didn’t like the truth so they’ve been spam flagging my legitimate posts all morning expecting a reaction of anger. I take it in stride because I excel in this environment. I’m sure many have quit to players like these.
Plus I think there’s a daily limit to flagging…i guess I win.
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That wasn’t ever made clear. All CCP Rise said is “on top of that, if you look at account cancellations for Eve, less than 1% of players cite ship loss or player harassment as a the reason for leaving.” If you listen to that part of the talk again though, it seems to me he is talking about all cancellations especially given that most of the 15-day players would still be on the trial and not have an account to cancel.
But even then I wouldn’t read too much into that number. It is self-reported in either case and therefore isn’t especially useful to judge exactly how rampant rage-quitting after losing stuff is. It does support the view though that “griefing” isn’t a significant factor in player retention as CCP has concluded.
Indeed. I would argue though that this is a problem of the developers trying to make too many people happy short-term by making everyone safe and rich at the long-term expense of the greater game. This has alienated some of their core players, and the changing economy has pushed others out. Fresh blood is needed, and I wish CCP success in their efforts to attract and retain new players but some of their design choices really haven’t been good for the long-term health of the game.
I see little evidence CCP grasps the nature of the core nature of the problem though, and a relatively pessimistic about the future. Their game’s primary strength is player interaction and the shared economy, history and universe, yet they seem unwilling or unable to add mechanics to the game to get players competing over things (rather they just rain wealth down on everyone while reducing the opportunities to lose that wealth to other players), and their neglect of the economic part of the game has become increasingly serious. Forget ganking, industrialists are leaving the game because there is less and less demand for their output of their game play as we all get richer and safer year after year. Even just a few years ago a highsec miner or small-time/solo industrialist could realistically PLEX their accounts but now, they just can’t compete against the increased flow of the nullsec wealth faucets. Whether that is good for the game overall long-term I am not sure, maybe it is moving people to nullsec, but it terms of this discussion it must have had a negative effect on the PCU.
The game will be around for a long while yet, but I don’t think the accessible and “fun” version of Eve where everyone is so wealthy losses don’t matter the developers seem to be steering for is going to be one that keeps many players for very long. Dwindling PCUs will be in the cards for a while yet until something gives and CCP makes some bold changes.
If you ask me, all they have to do is look back to their roots for some inspiration on how to make their game great again and re-read the original design documents and double-down on those ideas.
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Boredom,
RL happened
Or they got banned
That makes up 97% of those who quit (that’s my personal opinion)
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Don’t fly anything you cannot afford to lose. For me that means if I can’t go out and buy it again…don’t use it, or if I do and I lose it, that is on me. Not on the game, and not on the other player. I took a risk and it bit me on the ass.
CCP Rise provides a fairly detailed description in his Fanfest presentation.
True enough, but in this instance they have actually tried to investigate this, and according to the link back up stream, they have tried hard to verify your narrative and failed. And in trying they found some surprising results…even to them.
Yet, here we are with the usual refrain, “The study/analysis is crap because reasons.”
Adding to @Black_Pedro’s point in that post…
If you are losing £400 in one go…you really, really, really screwed up. And why did that guy, who may have as you note spent hours and hours acquiring that wealth, screw up? This is NOT a trivial question. We have seen comments about social interaction. How can a guy who has spent possibly months if not a couple of years make such a huge blunder?
I will tell you: by fecking up. And it wasn’t just “Oh he put too much value into his freighter.” That is a big, big part of it. But also we are probably looking at someone who is not being very social in this game. He insulated himself from people who could have helped him avoid that loss. Warned him of the impending disaster that would lead him to rage quit. He probably never visited the forums…maybe never even looked at a killboard. He literally went out on the savannah fat and dumb and then was upset when the lions, which have been there for years and eating fat and dumb players like him every day…eat him.
The tragedy here is not just that this player quit…but that the insular and hostile nature to playing with others in an MMO is a significant part of the reason he left the game. Yes other players were involved, but if a guy puts on a blind fold while driving a car and then gets hit by a semi…should we blame the semi driver? Maybe he is partly at fault, but the guy putting on a blind fold was the primary problem.
People are complaining about people who took on very large risk. Why are people shocked that when you have hundreds maybe even thousands of people taking on very large risk that some of them suffer the downside of that risk? If there is a risk of a bad event and you have a large number of people taking on that risk…then there will be people who suffer that downside risk. That is the expectation.
And lets look at the sequence of events, it goes something like this:
- Player screws up
- Player screws up
- Player screws up
- Player screws up
- Player screws up
- Player screws up
- Player gets ganked.
I’m sorry, but what in the ■■■■? Oh boohoo this guy quit. Well maybe if he didn’t screw at step 1, step 2,…step N he’d still be with us.
And I’ll toss out another conjecture. Even if a player does suffer a large loss, but if he has friends in game with whom he can talk to and even help him bounce back from it, and help him learn from the mistake…he’d probably be less likely to rage quit.
Why does everyone want to incentivize this type of behavior. We want to disincentivize it FFS. You want people to rage quit less after suffering large losses…why not look for ways to help people realize they are taking on massive risk and not do that?
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No.
There were 2 “1%” numbers.
The first was the number of 15 day (or less) old characters who were ganked: about 1%.
Near the end Rise then tossed out a “side fact” the number of people reporting ship loss as the reason they left the game, also about 1%.
So Black Pedro is correct.
Do we have a PLEX vault because of ganking or to make PLEX more easily used and thus pump up the demand and improve CCP’s bottom line?
The counter play is don’t be dumb. If you put a giant target on you and run around saying kick me…somebody in this game will kick you, probably sooner than later.
Oh good God. 
It always comes back to bumping. But who gets bumped? Players who serially screwed up, by and large. I was in an empty freighter once getting bumped. Know what I did. I logged off. Why? Game theory. If I log off and they gank me they lose out on ganking a full freighter with that fleet. If I don’t log off and pay the ransom I could still be ganked. So the sub-game dominant strategy is to log off. I came back 15 minutes later and convo’d the bumper asking why I wasn’t ganked (he said if I log off I’d be ganked) and he replied: juicier target.
So don’t be bad and put billions in your freighter. Yes you might still get bumped if you don’t use a scout/webber, but log off. There is still an opportunity cost there for that bumper and the gank fleet. Use that to your advantage. And of course you should have fit bulkheads.
No. It has become harder to gank, not easier. Gankers now are essentially professionals due to various nerfs over the years. Yes professionals make things look easy. But then you are essentially dismissing the effort and process that lead these players to becoming professionals.
In my sphere of contact, most people I know that have stopped playing, that had been playing in earnest, have done so for IRL reasons. Jobs, Kids, Death being the big ones. A few get burned out here and there, but they come back. New players quit for all sorts of reasons and lets face it, not everyone will like this game. 
This game has been around for a long time, people’s lives change, they come and go. Hell when I started it was just me, but now my family plays; wife, son, son-in-law and now (as of a few months ago) my grandson. Changes, some pull you in, some pull you out.
It was entertaining read.
I think so too. Old players go, new players come.
Interesting… I have been for the past couple of weeks looking into the many (MANY!!) abandoned POCO’s scattered all over high sec. I see no real pattern of them quitting after losing a fortune by getting blown up or not - but it seems that the vast majority are owned by corps that have been totally inactive since 2015/2016. And many of those corps go back years. Yet the vast majority seem to have quit just in the past 18 months or so. Not a clue in their history as to why, but I suspect much was sheer boredom. You reach a point where you see yourself just doing the same thing over and over again. You log in once a week, or once a month to see how your next 50-day skill is doing that gives you 2% to something, and just say… “why bother”?
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Citadels…
They forced many small to medium corps to fold, which forced players into larger and larger corps and alliances to be able to use them.
All part of the master plan to force players into a handful of alliances to try and drive conflict, the biggest issue with that ofc is that CCP misses the fact that not everyone agrees with that plan.
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Eve is 14 years old. It predates the Iphone by three years and Android by four.
Peoples’ taste and expectations about gaming have changed fundamentally over that period. Eve is hard and takes a lot of time to accomplish much of anything. That makes it difficult to attract and retain new players who can pick up the latest descendant of Farmville on their phone or tablet and master it within a half an hour.
The game’s age has also given it something of an ossified power structure, despite CCP’s best efforts. To really be a power, you now need to be able to mobilize a large fleet of Titans. No new player can see a clear path, even one spanning years, to get to that from scratch. That’s not a design problem, it’s just a reflection of the fact that Eve is too old to have the ‘wide open frontier’ feel that it once did, and that probably turns new players off somewhat.
I don’t see any way in the face of that by which CCP can greatly increase the player base. But at the same time, there’s no reason it can’t remain reasonably stable. People who like it like it a lot and tend to stick around. I expect the Eve servers will be churning away for many years yet.
I don’t know the 1st thing about the high sec war deccer lifestyle. Just commenting on what you are saying.
What you describe happens a lot. CCP changes something to make it ‘better’, but it doesn’t get better, it gets worse. Some examples:
-
They added the skill queue which killed “alarm clocking”, to which we all rejoiced. Turns out, having to log on to change skills was a major driver that got people to play EVE (since they are already logged in lol).
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They changed anomalies in null sec with the hopes of getting alliances to move around more and fight each other. It got us to move alright…move our alts to high sec to run incursions lol.
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Dominion Sov. Read the part at the bottom that says “We get (hopefully!):”. Because the opposite of all that happened…
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Making EVE “Easy to learn, hard to master”. This is where EVE fell off the tracks, literally, you can see the PCU declines start right here, CCP stopped telling us how many subscribers EVE had right here. CCP made the game ‘better’ and more ‘accessible’. Added all that safety and crime watch stuff.
In reality, they took a winning formula (“here is a space ship, go **** yourself”) and “New Coke’d” it. (Here is a Wikipedia article for the people too young to remember the New Coke debacle). -
Thye buffed mining ships as a nerf against ganking, which led to way more ganking…
I could go on of course, but I think everyone can get the point.
My whole point when talking to CCP these last few years can be distilled down to this: for the love of God, stop trying to make the game BETTER (because you don’t know what ‘better’ is), concentrate on giving players new tools with which to use against, with and for each other and let us figure it out for ourselves, like you used to do. Your attempts to ‘improve’ the game have all backfired. Stop ‘improving it’ before you kill it outright!!!
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You have no way of showing that EVE would even exist anymore today had CCP not changed a thing in a decade.
Change, and adapting to it, is part of EVE.
Its ridiculous to insist that CCP should stop attempting to improve the game.
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Jenn, I can’t fault any of your comments. I have to agree wholeheartedly. The “fixes” have killed too many play styles and made the finest PvP game little more than a wealth accumulation exercise for the players.
The irony here being that Jenn is only concerned with PvE, and maintaining it as safe, non-reactive and stale as possible so that she can continue running them as she always has, and as is her expertise.
She abhors any change to this, as it makes her expertise redundant and means she has to adapt to change.
No irony at all, it just shows that both sides of the coin are complaining. Surely this should at least make someone raise an eyebrow?
Everyone complains about something.
The further irony, is she posits that changes to PvE have driven people out of the game, whereas most discussions on PvE clearly state that most people do infact not like the stale, lifeless and safe PvE in this game (which is what Jenn wants to keep).
Jenn is the stereotype of a player that has min/maxed so heavily into something, that they lose perspective of the larger whole and become resistant to any and all change to how they play the game. She cant see the forest for the trees, anymore, and her ideology is the only one she sees as justified in her own self-interest.
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