Any theories on why so many people have quit over the last 2 years?

You should reread that post it was not anti-change. Here is Jenn’s final paragraph with a different emphasis,

Giving us new “tools” would allow for change. Just not change attempting to push the game in a given direction…which is hard to do when you have a complex adaptive system.

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I haven’t read all the posts.

I will ask this: why is soccer still fun to play and why does it have international appeal? I can think of many analogies to use when framed this way. It’s usually the simple stuff that brings people in and keeps them interested. Things that are novel are fun for a bit, but the basic simple things are the most important. I’ll just leave it at that.

You really need to learn how to read. Exactly where did I EVER say that anything to do with PVE has ‘driven people out of the game’. Link one time where I ever said that.

Your problem is that you can’t remember who is saying what. And who said anything about ‘safe’ PVE? I advocate EVE PVE rather than trying to make so called ‘interesting pvp like NPCs’ that PVe players demonstrate we don’t want by running missions and anomalies non-stop.

Could you please try to actually read what’s being written, and by who?

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People are writing opinions without regard for anyone elses. There will be nothing gained from this thread. Without some consensus we are fish in the ocean. Even then, any eureka ideas will be squelched most likely by forum mods.

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The problem on the player side is that people who play games like EVE think they are smart, so they always (and I mean always) advocate these stupidly complicated and, frankly, unworkable solutions to every single problem. They literally cannot understand that simple is better.

From the dev (ie “corporate”) side, there is this constant pressure to ‘innovate’ and ‘expand’. They respond to this pressure by trying to stay ‘fresh’ and ‘relevant’ at all costs. Problem is that doing so many times means forgetting about and moving away from the thing that made the product special in the 1st place.

When I started playing EVE, the game had a very simple elegance. It didn’t have 1/100th the stuff current EVE has, it was way harder to generate wealth and way easier to lose it. Yet it was growing at a fast rate player-wise and I’d dare say that the game was more satisfying. At least it was to me up till about 2012.

Still a great game, in the same way that an over-cooked Steak is still Steak.

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Yup. That’s why I posted it and left room for folks to think about it.

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Well considering that high complexity facilitates more specialist players. The more esoteric each field becomes the more people you need dedicated to each aspect. It’s part of what made wormholes special back in the day imho because wormholes were still kinda fruity and a bit hard to understand without considerable exposure.

But now like everything else the number of specialists has hit a saturation point and it’s absolutely no surprise to see oligarchies have risen in that part of the game as it has everywhere else.

My absolute favourite part of EVE though has been laughing at the entitlement to free kills wormholers have been openly demanding CCP to spoonfeed them for literally years. Go to the old forums and look at the number of threads bitching about how dead WH space is from these same myopic tards that are the people who made it this way.

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This is wrong. Name something that has gotten worse in terms quality, but has gotten more expensive. I am not a car guy so I drive a fairly modest car, but it has things in it that at one time were considered luxury car items. Power steering, power windows, and AM/FM stereo with CD player and bluetooth, it seats 4 very comfortably and because of improvements in terms of the weight of cars it gets great gas milage. And safety has improved…and in real terms it is not that much more expensive than an equivalent care say 10 years ago. Same with computers. Quality has gone up and yet price, adjusted for inflation, has not. Toasters, microwaves, coffee makers, DVD players (to the extent they still are made given internet streaming) have all gotten so cheap nobody repairs them anymore. When they break throw them out and spend another $15-50 bucks. And before anyone says, “$50 is alot!” microwaves used to sell for several multiples of that price. Cellphones have gotten more expensive, but then again they do things that cell phones were never ever capable of.

Businesses are always looking to reduce costs, but also to maintain quality as much as possible as that is yet another dimension of competition. If a firm reduces costs and thus price, but the quality deteriorates then some customers can and will switch to a competitor.

We have more stuff, different stuff, stuff our grand parents probably never even imagined (our cell phones make Star Trek communicators look clunky and old), jobs that never even existed before, the myth of growing unemployment as posited by Marxists and others is just that a myth. But the world is getting worse when you listen to most people. It is an awesome example of pessimism bias. “Why things were awesome in the good old days!” No, they weren’t they sucked. Go back far enough and women died in child birth with great regularity often taking the child with them. Get and infection you died. Anti-biotics have only really been around for about 80-90 years and many of are alive because of them. Travelling sucked balls. Sure John D. Rockefeller could go from New York to California on his private train car, but there was no AC, it was hot and dusty in many places, or cold and unpleasant in other during the winter and took days. Running water was a luxury as was electricity. Today, you cross the continent in fecking hours compared to days.

Even food is cheaper. Innovations in production of something as banal as eggs has resulted in the price of eggs decreasing by several multiples. Back in 1915 a person might work for 2 hours to be able to purchase a dozen eggs, now most people work for 10 minutes to make the same purchase. Are eggs any different? Not much, but quality has probably improved (i.e. you are less likely to get a rotten egg). What happened was people. People figured out cheaper ways to run their chicken farm and improve the quality as well.

A bit of historical perspective…

The minimum wage was a racist policy advocated in the late 19th and early 20th century by Progressives. Progressives were to a very large extent believers in eugenics. They believed that some races were superior to others and that it was down to genetics. Naturally in the U.S. the white male was the evolutionary superior human and that the other races and women were inferior. Thus, the minimum wage was designed to price out these inferior races. The view was, “If it costs as much to hire a white man, why not just hire a white man.” See the research of Thomas Leonard. (you can see his Journal of Economic Perspectives article here)

As for increasing the minimum wage to kill small businesses yes it does harm them. But it also raises costs of large businesses too. And it is not clear that it would increase the bank accounts on net. A good economist looks not only at what is obvious and easily seen, but what is not so obvious and not seen. For example,

  1. An increase in the minimum wage can cause job gentrification. Instead of busting your butt at a job that pays $15/hour you move to the easier job, which thanks to the minimum wage, also pays $15/hour but is easier to do.
  2. This can lead to unemployment as the person doing the gentrified job at say $10 is displaced by the better qualified worker, and the displaced worker is not qualified to take the job opening that the qualified person vacated.
  3. Firms are always seeking to reduce costs, if labor costs go up then the relative price of capital (plant and equipment goes down) so that firms will re-allocate towards more capital–i.e. doing as much as they did before but with less labor.
  4. Workers may find it harder to find employment either initially or between jobs, thus their overall wage/income “trajectory” over time maybe lower.
  5. Firms can respond to a higher wage by reducing ours worked–i.e. instead of being open form 10 AM to 10 PM The firm is 11 AM to 9 PM, from the firms perspective they have just reduced their wage bill by about 1/6th.
  6. Firms will try to pass on the cost increase to customers, and an increase in prices is kind of/sort of like a reduction in incomes. If all prices go up 10% it has pretty much the same effect as reducing my income by 10%. So if a increase in the wage rate results in an increase in other prices through out the economy it will reduce the increase in the wage rate.
  7. The minimum wage acts very much like a tax when looked at via supply-and-demand analysis in neoclassical economics. Taxes reduce output, in this case the amount of labor, and society incurs a deadweight loss.

All of these factors can be at work to different degrees and they are hard to spot and verify empirically because with an economy you cannot run experiments with the experimental group and a control group. At best you can hope for a “natural” experiment–e.g. one city raises the minimum wage and a nearby city does not. This was approach pioneered by Card and Kruger in their studies of the minimum wage.

This is not to say there are not any reasons for policies that affect wage rates. The efficiency wage and monopsony are two such hypotheses.

Even before minimum wage laws market based economies would have very high rates of growth. When one looks at say 1800 to 1900 the increase in incomes and general welfare are astonishing, with incomes doubling, tripling, quadrupling, and even quintupling depending on the country (see the work of Deirdre McCloskey). Economic growth is not going to result from minimum wages. Another fallacy of the minimum wage is the following:

If the wage goes up for the worker earning the minimum wage, they’ll spend it resulting in more economic activity.

This is false because that money has to come from somewhere in the economy. That extra money is not the result of the government simply printing more money and giving it to businesses to pay their workers more. For example, a firm might raise its prices. That means that all the consumers of its product have less money to spend elsewhere in the economy. Thus, the “more economic activity” is offset by the reduction elsewhere in the economy.

What drives growth are things like specialization, innovation, and technological advancement. Specialization increases productivity in that human capital and physical capital is being more used more intensively. Adam Smith used a pin factory example. In this example making a pin takes several steps.

One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them.

Yeah, it’s boring reading, but the impressive thing here is that if a factory has each of the 18 steps being done by different workers working cooperatively, then they make many more pins than if each worker each makes his own pin. The reason is that a single worker, as he goes from step-to-step is unproductive in the other areas of pin making. That is if you are on step 9, you are not producing anything for steps 1-8 and 10-18. With specialization this is not the case. If you do step 1, as the next guy is doing step 2 you keep doing step 1 so you can hand off your intermediate product to the guy at step 2 and you are always producing.

Innovation takes current technologies and uses them differently. This lowers costs. When costs go down that allows the firm to earn economic profits, which are a social benefit in that those profits flow to shareholders who in turn will either reinvest or spend the money elsewhere. Further, as other firms try to compete and keep up they will look for their own innovations or copy the initial innovator. Overall costs decrease and the competition lower prices. And just as rising prices act like reducing income, lower price act like increasing income meaning it will have a secondary effect in other markets thus improving economic growth. (See the work of Levine and Boldrin)

Technological advancement also improves economic growth. Look at agriculture. At one time, around 1900 about 40-50% of the U.S. work force worked in agriculture. Today it is 2%. And guess what the U.S. does not have famine or starvation. In fact, the U.S. makes a huge vast amount of food. Food production is higher than ever before. Food is plentiful and cheap. And all those workers that were in agriculture moved on to other jobs (not all, but most) resulting in even more output of different kinds.

These are what give us our exponential growth for things like GDP. You look at the standard answers of taxes, investment, and so forth, these all give linear growth. And the growth rate is important. If an innovative and specialized society has a growth rate of say 4% it’s GDP will double every 18 years. A country with a growth rate of 2% will see GDP double every 36 years.

And innovation is kind of scary. Innovation is the driver behind what Joseph Schumpeter and others have described as creative destruction–i.e. the new ideas destroy the old while creating the new and that often means jobs which scares people.

Further, innovation generally cannot result from the political process. The political process is typically top down and often one size fits all. Further, we can turn to the results of Public Choice theory to look at how collective choice decisions are made via voting. When you have voting with majority rule one of the more powerful results is the Median Voter Theorem. This theorem holds that the median voter (median Joe or Jane) is the deciding voter. (Since the median can often be near the mean/average Median Joe is not that different from Average Joe). And Median Joe while very good at rejecting bad innovations–i.e. one’s that don’t work–Median Joe is also very bad at picking innovations that work, in fact Median Joe will always reject an innovation because innovations are something that happens at the edges of the distribution. When somebody wants to get venture capital for their crazy innovative idea only a tiny percentage of the population will invest. The vast majority, including Median Joe, will not invest. So you cannot have innovation via politics as a general rule. Or if you do it is something that tends to fly really low on the radar.

And government can stifle and stultify the innovative process. Intellectual property rights can do this. Intellectual property rights creates temporary (hahahaha) monopolies on intellectual property. Thus, if you are an entrepreneur and see what you think is a potential innovation using several types of intellectual property you might be able to negotiate with 2, 3 or 4 such holders of intellectual property. But if it entails 20 or 30 people such a negotiation becomes much more costly and as costs go up you get less…i.e., less innovation…and potentially lower economic growth. And why do we give the same intellectual property rights to all technologies…is Amazon’s “one click” as worthy of same protections as say a new break through drug for treating some horrible disease like cancer or Alzheimer’s? Further, having overly strong intellectual property rights can lead to a strategic use of intellectual property which limits innovation.

Anyhow this post is already very, very long (probably too long), so to bring some of this back to EVE.

EVE is a sandbox game with a very robust economy and economies tend to be complex adaptive processes, in fact I’d describe the entire game as a complex adaptive process. And trying to move it in a given direction is extremely hard when you have a complex adaptive process. It requires a very, very deep understanding of the entire process. You cannot have detailed knowledge of the constituent parts of the process and understand where the process will “go”. You need to understand the constituent parts and how they interact. And even CCP does not have that last part. They do not know how I will react to changes, how my corporation will react, and how the alliance and even coalition will react. They might make some reasonable guesses and they may get some predictions right, but not for the entire process. When it comes to economies Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek said that an economy cannot be “controlled” and “planned” for because the knowledge necessary to do so is too vast, too dispersed and no single person or (small) group of people can obtain all the information necessary for a good outcome. This is why when you look at command-and-control economies they are always failures. The former Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, Eastern Block Countries, and even the PRC which only started to experience strong economic growth by liberalizing their economy.

So I agree quite a bit with @Jenn_aSide. Go ahead and make changes to the game, but don’t shoot for a particular goal. Don’t worry so much about new players, or miners, or super pilots on an ex ante (forward looking) basis. Let them worry about themselves. If something is obviously out of whack, fix it (e.g. nanohacs, tracking titans, etc.).

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There is a very strong tendency towards socialism in people. My guess it was an evolutionary stable strategy way back when we ran around in small groups (extended families, tribes, etc.). And socialism in small groups can work. But in a large group where there is tremendous anonymity it quickly falls apart. Look at Venezuela or the former Soviet Union.

Part of the problem is that top down/one size fits all is often terrible when you have larger groups. Why don’t we vote on cars in our societies? We’ll hold a vote between a mini-van, a sports car and pick up truck and which ever one wins will be the type car everyone can get. Clearly this would be sub-optimal. The family of four won’t be happy with a sports car. The single guy won’t be happy with the mini-van, and he might prefer pick-up truck to the mini-van, but even that outcome might make him worse off than having a sports car. It is a terrible mechanism. Fortunately we don’t use voting to determine what kind of car people can buy. Nor do we need too.

Most things we do not need voting. We don’t need voting for food, shelter, clothing, etc. However, we do make all of these things subject, in varying degrees, to collective choice mechanism and that is why housing prices are sky rocketing in many cities for example (land use restrictions). And why some food items suddenly become very expensive (ethanol raised prices of corn quite a bit for awhile).

So yes, we think, “Hey were are smart, we humans have these great big brains we can figure this stuff out.” But we can’t. Innovation is not, ex ante, obvious. We can’t pick the “good” innovations ahead of time. If we could we would not have very many of the problems we face today. And this hubris is something found not just in the players, but also Devs. One of the worst examples for me was CCP Greyscale.

However, this does not mean I am opposed to change or expansions. I think fixing things that are obviously broken is a good thing. And obviously broken is when that mechanic becomes pretty much the only way to play. Alot of players moved to nano-hacs. That was something that very probably needed to be fixed. Tracking titans are another example. Drone assist. Even tiericide is probably a good thing in that it makes the game a more complicated version of rock-paper-scissors and allows less skilled players to engage in the game and not feel left out because they can’t fit T2 guns or can’t fly that T2 hull, etc.

I am not even opposed to “shaking up the snow globe” once in a while either. But the nature of the game would suggest that one be careful about how it is done.

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Are you in journalism? I appreciate your article and its accuracy.

Nope, just an economist that reads alot.

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Well as was lost in the sea of text, character mobadder thworst has a good thread on his views as a long-term player with contributions from people who had done the same.

If you’re interested I thought I might point you there. It’s called : Notes from a retired vet, I believe.

I don’t think the views expressed are bitter and he was looking for intelligent discourse.

Sure. :sunglasses:

Actually it has not. The average and high/low has hardly changed over the past 3 years. What has changed I think is the mix of characters - more rookies, fewer vets. Just a few minutes ago the rookie help channel had 8% of the total online population. EVE-Offline :: EVE-Online Status monitor

Most people, regardless of skill level close the rookie help channel, that’s not the best gauge of percentages.

So if most people close it, then the percentage of rookies is even higher than 8%.

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Rookie help is persistent. It doesn’t truly go away until your account ages out of it. After closing it the first few times I just gave up and set blink off.

I think this describes the ‘shift’ we saw after 2010 in EVE. Yes, CCP would put out new content (usually 'Jesus Features), but to me it didn’t seem like they were trying to socially engineer the community. But afterwords, it seemed like they did things with an eye towards specific outcomes. I link that anomaly change DEV Blog a lot because it’s to me the clearest example of this. Greyscale predicted great things:

Expected Consequences

  • Some alliances will immediately start wanting to look for better space
  • In the longer run, there’ll be more conflicts going on, with more localized goals
  • Newer alliances will have an easier time getting a foothold in nullsec
  • Coalitions will be marginally less stable
    Alliances will have to choose more carefully what space they develop, where their staging systems are, and so on (low truesec systems generally tend to be in strategically inconvenient places)

and not one of them happened.

I think EVE now is an example of what happens when you try to tell people what they should be doing and what they should like instead of just giving people tools and letting the chips fall where they may (of course, within reason, sometimes things have to be fixed, like nanohacs).

And while I think EVE is still great, it can be argued that current EVE is less successful than ‘primitive’ EVE even though its more advanced , pretty and user friendly because of these failed attempts to ‘guide’ the players. No one is ‘anti-change’ (I get that stupid accusation a lot), I’m saying “stop doing stuff you should know by now does not work, just do what you used to do when the game was growing”.

Somehow, saying that is controversial…

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Ive been around Eve for quite a few years , playing only on Trial (timed) accounts , i used to play quite alot , but some critical changes have driven me out for almost good : the removal of the Training skill , the removal of the undeveloped yet highly important (for me) Captain’s quarters , removing only these 2 factors made Eve far less enjoyable to play in , CCP keeps making changes hardly no one cares about , for example , if they bothered to fully develop the Captain’s quarters , we could meet up “in person” for a huge variety of activities , instead of being stuck forever in our ships , and the next step could be even the ability to walk IN stations , instead of BORING icons of players / npc’s / station services , we could “go to them” with our character for a more “lively” experience.

BUT CCP doesent seem to have any SOCIAL Dev department to think of such things , they only have PEW PEW in mind like a 5 years old , thus alianating a Huge number of player with social interaction needs that dont revolve around being stuck in your ship for life.

also , the removal of the captain’s Quarters killed completly the need to use any clothing (not that the clothing section ever had any amazing variety / interesting designs to begin with) , in the CQ we could see our clothes , walk in them and love them , now our character is stuck for life in the ship , and only can see its character in a frammed out of context 3d image (BORING).

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I certainly have not seen any sign of that happening. Maybe it is time for CCP to sit back and look at what players DO, not what they think they should/will do.

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