Sure everyone complains about something. We, as eve players, invest a huge amount of time into the game. Having invested this time and settled into a play style that’s makes that time input worthy and fruitful, huge changes affecting said play style are bound to cause objection and distain. I believe the changes are always applied with the best intentions of improvement, but CCP fail to listen to the feedback. Some of these changes are years old yet still causing people to gripe.
Any argument you would make to introduce more PvP into PvE would be met with strident outcry by Jenn.
Do you see what I mean?
You are not two sides of the same coin.
Your complaints are in direct conflict with each other.
I totally see what you mean, but both of us argue that changes are the reason many are leaving. Albeit they are totally opposite changes, they are changes nonetheless.
Some people leave due to changes.
Some people leave due to lack of changes.
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Fair enough, can’t argue that 
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I think it is safe to say that changes re-invigorate the game, if nothing else by rekindling interest of ex-pats to reconsider playing again. Certainly, it is safe to say that change potentially brings back more players, than no changes would.
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Jenn defeats her own arguments. For years she has whined about PvE changes (almost on a daily basis), and yet she, as one of the most hardcore PvE’ers in the game, is STILL here. So its ironic, from her, to claim that PvE changes have caused people to leave, when she herself, as the most affected by them over all these years, is nonetheless still here running PvE.
Im not saying she should leave to make her arguments valid on specific PvE changes. Im saying that she cannot generalize changes to PvE as having caused mass player attrition, as she herself is a shining example of how that is not the case.
I have returned after a 3 year break (because of burnout). The number of players online has reduced drastically in that time 
I love solo PvP, but it’s next to impossible to find a fight. RvB fleets have become as rare as rocking horse poo (even at weekends). New players must think this is a PvE game…
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This may be the same situation for many others.
Factors in the game, of whatever shape/form, may have caused waves of burnouts from which activity has never recovered.
Heuristically, the game may have become too much of a job/chore, leading to mass burnouts.
Barring leaving due to specific things, my observation is that burnout is by far the most stated reason for leaving EVE, both now and then.
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Also Jenn suffers from a selective memory, in this particular case the destroyers had their DPS buffed, before that you needed a BS to gank T2 mining ships (this was before Tier 3 BC’s), it then became stupidly easy and cheap, result two and a half years later CCP finally adjusted the tank of mining ships having lost a load of casual hisec miners.
Obviously a lot of people started doing mining ship ganking as it was so cheap and easy due to the destroyer buff so that counts as a nerf when the mining ships were adjusted, but of course the gankers had a massive buff before that.
At this point it is good balance because miners have a choice to use a tankier ship and to fit a good tank and of course gankers can gank those who make different choices, before all of the mining ships had the tank of a wet paper bag and could be killed by a single catalyst in an 0.5 system.
And I got a mail from a contact in game, he was quitting and biomassing his characters as it was too big a time sink for him to justify.
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I agree with this sentiment. Running for 15 yrs, so its to be expected that some of us brun out, once in awhile. I know I did 2 yrs ago. And the alliance fell apart and none have returned (to my knowledge).
If EVE is to cater for the next generations and get old players to revisit the game, then it needs to be fun almost immediately, when you log in. It shouldnt be something that both has one of the steepest learning curves in the universe, cost a lot of time and isk to play. The grind need to be there, but not as an imperative to even be able to play on Omega-level.
Ive now seen so many say, that making isk in EVE is too easy. And it may very well be. But it sure dosnt seem like it, when youve been away for years or never been in the game before.
Now, before everybody starts telling me Im whining, lets at least agree, that the numbers dont lie, and know, that I personally want it hard. I just dont want it to be expensive to play or less fun to grind. And WAY less monopoly on the market and resources in the game.
I saw NO fighting anywhere, last I logged in on my Alpha-clone, just to see what was new. I saw a tradehub with under half the numbers of last I visited. And only old people and their alts running around. No gatecamps in LS either.
But yeah, all this may already be known or denied by the collective lol. But thats my view, at least…
In as far as that change affects you, as the Dominion sov system had developed into such a naff game due to players, I was in NPC nullsec, along with a number of others who could not compete in nullsec when it was supers and carrier blobs online for sov warfare.
I was belt ratting for faction and officer spawns, and I often did this in contested systems with people actively trying to blow me up. I had worked out a good approach and then CCP removed combat recons from D-scan negating a number of important tactical choices that I had made. Like being able to D-scan the stations.
At that point my fun was gone as all they had to do was use a Curse and a Hugin and I was up shite creek. Dual Phantasms was my ship choice… So I left the game for a bit…
The lifelessness of highsec, and increasingly lowsec, is not a very good selling point for the game given it is where new players start. CCP has cranked open the mineral and ISK faucets in nullsec and successfully increased activity there, but at a cost to highsec activity by inducing some players to follow the wealth, and others to be unable to compete economically and pushing them out of the game.
Lifeblood is an attempt to directly address this, but we probably need much more to bring highsec alive again. A revamp of the corporation and wardec mechanics, complete with objectives to fight over is what is needed to get people out into space and interacting like in the past. You see a spark of this in some of the limited-time events like the Crimson Harvest which feature valuable things for players to race for, or even fight over but most of the time players just silently grind infinite missions, effectively infinite minerals and anomalies in near empty systems.
There is just too much space and resources in highsec to make anyone want to fight. Criminals used to provide some excitement with their shenanigans, but years of nerfs and some other factors have chased many of those away and there are not enough, actually no reasons, for regular corps to ever want to attack each other.
Maybe the toning back of the safety Upwell structures will stimulate some conflict, but there still is no reason (outside of the Market Module) to sit through the tedium of shooting a structure that probably will drop less loot than the wardec fees. In any case, a structure bash isn’t as obvious to the other players as the antics criminals and wars used to provide.
Players need purpose in this game, at least if they are to stay around for any length of time, and most of them are not very good at coming up with reasons to do things in the sandbox. It’s CCP’s job to give them a nudge, and dangle things that they may want, to get them interacting both cooperatively and competitively - if they want them to not get bored and leave.
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Yes, Yes, Yes and hell YES!
This is so much on the spot! Couldn’t have said it any better.
And for me one of the reasons I can no longer do anything is because my salary was halved and the prices were doubled or quadrupled. Back in late 2006 I lost my first battleship, which I should not have been flying at the time. But stubborn as I am, I knew better - and paid the price.
So 5 hours for ONE level 4 mission kept me afloat enough to get some of the fittings and after a week and after 5-6 level 4 missions, I could buy a Raven again.
Now the give-mah-naow!!!111eleven-kids have devalued everything and throw away titans like nothing. Doesn’t matter to them, they just buy a new one since they get baked like donuts.
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Exactly what I am saying.
I quit EVE over two years ago due to the game changes at the time, namely due to changes on how POS research was managed, item/mineral compression changes, multi boxing changes. I used to enjoy building supers but with the jump mechanic changes it seriously effected my logistics chain. I am not saying that the changes made were not necessary but they seriously effected how I liked to play and enjoy the game.
The changes made essentially cut the small corp/lone industrialist out of the market and handed the keys over to the null sec alliances at the time, as research stations were the only show in town. The introduction of the engineering complexes more recently has had an impact but they should have been an option earlier.
So essentially at that time CCP’s changes impacted negatively on what I enjoyed about playing EVE so I took up World of Warships instead! Just don’t ever go and train a Yamoto, it burns… ALOT!
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And thus life imitates art. I’ve always wondered how the world will fare now that we are already using the cheapest possible manufacturing, the cheapest materials and the cheapest labour and yet still people are too poor to buy anything. If consumption drives production not having enough consumption means there’s no production.
So in the real world we see world govts pushing up minimum wages everywhere to achieve two goals: firstly to kill small businesses and increase traffic for big companies, secondly to increase the size of bank accounts for the proles so that they might start actually buying stuff again. Since I was 18 the minimum wage has risen over 90% in my home country, in the previous 18 years it rose barely 25%. You do the math what it says about the economy having completely stagnated due to mass poverty. This isn’t even considering the debt-driven housing bubbles so many economies have entered, quick short term money printing for the land bankers, huge risk and debt slavery ahead for the first home buyers with their 5% deposits.
In EVE we observe that things are so cheap to make thanks to proliferation of BPO’s and minerals being produced at record rates, yet prices for services continue to rise and with PLEX being the defacto subscription for an obviously large part of the veteran playerbase we see commodities rising in price as well to fund these PLEX’d characters. CCP have also talked about scaling back high end dedspace module/ship BPC drop rates so that their scarcity will increase (ergo raising prices again) which will benefit only a tiny number of people but generally shaft everyone else. (it’s actually a boost to the profits of explorers and margin traders but not much else).
While I’ve mostly disengaged from EVE as a game beyond mucking about on SISI every now and then, I can still log on to TQ and turn 50-100% profits on nearly everything I trade because of the absolute glut of money that high-rollers have. I don’t even consider marketing towards the newbies because their needs don’t meet mine in terms of the income projections i have for my 17 open market orders. If I’m not making 100mil a day for the 3 minutes of work I do then I’m not making enough. When was the last time I undocked? Maybe 15 months ago. I don’t even know any more.
Just like real life EVE requires far too much work for the avg punter to make a living. And things will get worse. There’s a reason why the DNC tried to start WW3, there’s a reason why CCP keep trying to drive more big nullsec wars, because IRL and EVE suffer the same problem, huge rates of poverty and too much territorial control by so few people. IRL the USA needs to kill 43 million of its own people to lower that 13% poverty rate. In EVE they need to burn some of those 100’s of trillions of isk stockpiled in order to drive more consumption of fresh minerals.
First of all I’d propose that eves economy is just completely broken, there’s NOTHING you can do aside from convincing old rich players to quit that will fix the underlying issues the game has in terms of degrading the value of new players. Conflict makes old players wealthier, further increasing the problem. EVE’s only real solution to sustainability is to kill off old characters and destroy their institutions. No surprise elicited here from GigX eating the bullet though I’ve seen far worse spoken by gank victims.
v0v.
In the mean time I’ll keep farming isk from mid-tier pvpers who die with shinies on board. At least rich kids dying has a 50% chance of destroying outright the stuff I’m selling so at the very least I’ll always have a market to peddle to so long as they keep undocking. For my purposes I just DGAF about flying on TQ anymore. The grind is boring. The game is boring.
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Very good points, imo. Im not exactly in the loop as to how EVE functions, in its many varied environments and mechanics. But something definately is not as could be, and Im fairly certain, that planning for the future generations (and maybe more older ones returning), would sure be a sound advice for this game. Its too good to just fade away, afaik.
The solution probably stems from a multitude of areas; Plex-market, Monopolies, Big Player-dominance, the fact that anti-piracy died out, because you could suddenly just regain your sec-standing rather easy etc. Its a huge balance-game, that is daunting to mess with, as a Dev Id imagine. I used to accept that. And give CCP & CSM time to sort things out, for the best of EVE, rather than for the main powers in EVE (Big Buisness). In some ways, I feel they are still failing. THe new Bloodlines stuff might be a step in the right direction. Time will tell, as usual in EVE.
Ive been seeing a lot more streams on Twitch, which also helps “sell” the game, Im sure. But it dosent help, if people curious about EVE, after seeing it on stream, leave not long after trying it out. Because the game still seems almost insurmountable, in the eyes of a new pilot. Its always been both a strength and a weakness in the game.
The legendary battles in EVE usually shows as a Time-dialated snooze-cruise, for outsiders. Even though the scale and dedication of the participants warrants respect and admiration. So whats the real sell-point, for new and younger generations, for this game? THe scope itself, cant be the sole argument. The steep learningcurve will always only appeal to people with lots of time and patience, rather than the casual big spenders.
Its all very complex and rather hard to be certain, what would work and what wouldnt. I just hope I aint right in my assumption, that EVE is slowly dying out. Ive had too much fun in New Eden to not care.
They started redesigning EVE. All ships got a once over, jump mechanics, structures, sov, you name it.
Now they seem like they don’t know what to do and just keep changing little crap just to change it. A lot is changing but nothing that really affects day to day life in EVE anymore.
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The thread titled : retired vet something something, gives some good insights, created by character mobadder thworst.
I maintain that they should have rebalanced all small modules first, THEN the ships, proceed to medium modules, THEN the ships.
Right now we are looking at when they rebalance all small modules… they will need to rebalance all small ships again. Every single one of them.
I’m sure from their elevated position they believe they made the right choice but it doesn’t make much sense to me to start with the ships and build the guns later. When you design a weapon for example, you are given a caliber to work off and design the gun around that.
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