have you considered that players alts not be as you thinks with many players alts being in Null Sec with their mains safely docked in High Sec.
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Yeah, but these are still no genuine highsec players (those who know and want nothing else) 
Whoever they undock on is the main. Anything that sits in a station forever is an alt.
Well, putting aside that destruction is a large part of the content of a sandbox game, a resource-based game like Eve is meaningless if everyone has infinite resources. Sure it sounds great, but a survival or full-loot game where safe and easy resources are available to all, both removes targets and reasons for conflict, and undermines the meaning of loss.
Eve is primarily interesting because the things we build and lose have meaning - the represent effort to acquire. Not only this gives the PvP shakes and provides consequence to PvP battles, it provides much of the incentive for builders and gathers to do their thing. If everyone has all the ships they need, then why would anyone buy an industrialist’s stuff?
We aren’t there yet of course, but definitely we are too far along the road to devaluing assets in my view. Ships are cheaper than they have ever been, and drop more in value every month, yet there is no apparent increase in destruction or PvP numbers. Losses just have less meaning and are less compelling than before, and much worse is that there is less reason for industrialists to do anything. It is harder to make a living as an industrialist when everyone’s hanger is overflowing, especially for upcoming industry dudes.
So many people play Eve to gather and build things. If the economy does collapse and drives these people away (and possibly we have got a taste of this with the exodus of highsec players in recent years who can’t earn a PLEX there anymore) it does not bode well for the long-term health of the game.
Heh, this is suppose to be a highsec thread, not an Eve is Dying one. I’ll stop pontificating and quit distracting our space politician friend with my ramblings.
On the topic of losing population, I think that content attrition is a key element in it. The Rubicon plan was about more than the roadmap we know; was also about implementing “customer oriented design” in EVE. To do that, CCP had to figure what was their target, what did the players expect from playing EVE Online, and how could CCP align development with those aspirations. CCP not only interacted more with players, but also developed and began using behavioral tracking tools, to see what did players do and get better data to develop the game.
It was an amazing idea, actually. But it went wrong in oen key aspect: since CCP had a lot of feedback from certian players, those players shaped CCP’s perception of what did the players expect from EVe Online. By talking to the people who talked to them, CCP developed the game as the people who talked to them wanted it. Mind you i am talking at very meta level, the general trends, not specific cases or what individual cases mean.
The problem was, and is, that the majority of EVE players NEVER TALK TO CCP. The only way to detect those palyers and care for them, was to tune the data gatherign tools to them… but those tools were tuned to represent what the players who talked to CCP were saying.
And those players were, and are, a minority of CCP’s customer base and income. CCP has been sacrificing a silent majority to their wrong concept of what a EVE player is and what he expects from EVE. And now that majority is mostly gone, and their money left with them.
Ask yourself: Would you subscribe for highsec content? Probably the answer is “no”. Highsec is not a endgame. It’s the place where lucky players become good EVE players and the rest just leave. Instead of addressing WHY THEY LEAVE, CCP has strived to address WHY THEY DON’T BECOME GOOD PLAYERS.
Becoming a “good player” is easier than ever. and yet the majority of players are not “good players”, will never be, and are quite wise to leave a game where CCP doesn’t haves time nor money nor people for them… for no good reason.
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Thanks - and your post was absolutely helpful. I appreciate the level headed approach.
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I don’t know how you’re going to get the high sec guys who never go on the forums, never watch a podcast, never run or vote for CSM, or do anything other than log into the game. They’re unreachable and they don’t really seem to care. I don’t know what “data gathering tools” could be tuned to them, honestly. If they don’t do that stuff already, they aren’t likely to fill out a survey or serve on a focus group, even if they’re directly asked.
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Behavioral data is everywhere in a online game. But you need to look for it.
If you ask “how many players talk to a missison agent, then warp, then fire at NPCs, then talk to the same agent”, all those are events recorded by the server (since the sever must track everything in the game, just recording it is easy), and once recorded can build a profile on what things happen together and how much time a player spends doing it. So that would be a tool to detect mission runners, if applied to ALL players for several weeks, that would build a snapshot on hwo many people run missions, how often they do it, what else do they do, et cetera. It is just an instance so you understand how behavioral data tools work.
There is many information, but CCP must decide what to look for. Do they look for interaction with other players or NPCs? What questions should they ask to the data?
Thent hey turned to players engaging CCP… mostly nullseccers, PvPers and other highly engaged players. and CCP focused on how to get more of those players becasue it was what they had in hand, and nobody could tell them “well, maybe you should look for how many highseccers there are in game, before devoting a 5 year plan to backburn their wishes, their needs and the reasons why they pay you a subcription”.
CCP asked the wrong questions, got a wrong answer and here we are. Some people have hit our head on a wall for so long that we are beyond hope. And yet we try to ge the message through. A highseccer has the same potential to become a long term player as anyone else -but not with highsec as it is and CCP devoted to make it easier than ever to be a multiplayer PvPr in nullsec or GTFO.
(Sorry for the typos, ti’s very late here and neither my eyesight nor my mechanography are good)
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Living exclusively in highsec when I’m solo, there’s a few things that could be looked upon to diversify what we can do in it and how to do it :
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Rebalance Scout incursions, they’re just bad, very bad, reward is bad, fleet requirement is meh, too many ecm and logi etc, it can surely be made fun for a few friends to run without the dedication and numbers needed for the higher tier incursion types, reward can stay low though if it’s a least fun to do
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my personnal opinion for this one : to make few ore anomalies instead of many static belts, to put miners together more, make them see each other way more and remove the routine of roids which are spawning at the exact same places all the time since these static belts exist, with players not seeing each other all day long while they do the same thing in the same system
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I have no experience of highsec wardec really but I would like to make it less of a “free shooting pass” and more of a real war declaration with a proper goal to reach, like taking down a structure or destroying x in ship isk values
With that, I feel over the years everything cost more and more for highseccers (those that don’t do incursions regularly that is), while the payout stay the same, making it feel more and more of a pay to win game in the eyes of the new/casual player over time. I’m thinking mostly about T2 ships and the multiboxing orca fleets in highsec.
ADDED : consistency with the NPCS in highsec, basically if you don’t know it beforehand, you’ll get wrecked by NPCs half the time when you shoot at them, although all of them will show up in the same red in the overview. Some are red and hostile but really very easy to kill, some others are still red but neutral and will easily kill if you’re in a small/weak ship, some other red will sometimes show up and sometimes not and will hunt and outright obliterate you whatever your ship. For the casual or the long time coming back player, it doesn’t make sense, is frustrating and plain bad experience. Making pirate fob systems with warnings similar to incursions could be a start, making it more clear what rat will be a threat and which one is just an annoyance would be better.
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Funnily enough, though, this topic is more active than those of other sec issues. And feedback threads are always full of posts from all kinds of people when CCP announces a thing but CCP largely ignores feedback on things actually important for high sec (more missions, an actually usable agency window, shuffling agents to enliven more worthless high sec areas, landmark usage for roaming exploration agents (not limited to high), removing the citadel scams from high sec again because there was more than enough risk with hauling without it before citadels already anyway, for instance).
And the old forum had loads of suggestions for new activities, augmented activities and improvements as well. But we needed a clean-slate, new start with this forum, and the old forum is partially unavailable.
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Aside from lack of development resources to make or remake tons of neat PvE content ideas, which I’d love to see - there’s disagreement on what is important for highsec, thus the high # posts and back and forth discussion.
CCP has no pressure on the development, no external owner is expecting something from them, they are not in the same position as many other developers with a publisher demanding results from them. They have all the time they need to develop things, yet they get caught up and tangled up in their own mess time and again: the new map, the structures, the agency window, various new unfinished, not fleshed out PVE experiments, and so on.
Personally, I would very much appreciate if they would stop creating one mess after another and instead concentrate on 1 area for a year to properly develop it so that they can then move on to the next big project. Structure development, for instance, has been dragging on for over 2 years and despite a detailed initial plan, it’s still not finished. Tiericied is another thing that has been dragging on for more than 4 years (granted, though, there they listened to a lot of important feedback over time).
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One day a month to not focus on anything new would be a great start. Reminds me of Rise Against - Satellite.
“You can’t understand what lays ahead if you don’t understand the past.”
Yes, that’s another thing: Can we please get another Crucible expansion? This one was one of the most well received expansions ever in the last couple of years and it really helped to make EVE a better place. There are so many more things to fix that you could fill up 2 Crucible expansions.
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What always bothers me is the use of CCP’s development resources to produce and implement either changes into EVE that few, if any, have advocated for (see The Agency/agent finder, map changes,etc) or trying to force feed HS into a style of play that a large number of HS players are generally inclined to avoid and have told CCP before,during , and after development that the HS community will not do (see RW). The squandering of precious CCP dev time on work that is neither requested nor meets the needs of HS is just astounding and still amazes me how many times the devs try to herd the players into a direction they just will not go. It’s like you need a new family car because your old one is starting to break down and not meet your needs. So you look for another,better car and the salesman offers a Lear jet, yacht, group of motorcycles, and some rickshaws as your choices. He then can’t figure out why you don’t buy any of the choices he offers and blames you because “you don’t know what you want.”
CCP has always claimed that they have all the data they need to understand the game mechanics, interactions, and the players behind them, yet they keep developing in directions where a large majority of the targeted players reject the dev’s efforts. I have to blame CCP for the majority of this problem, since they are the largest originators of new gameplay/mechanics, but I also feel that a CSM that has had a history of being far too disconnected with the general player base deserves some blame as well. The echo chamber environment of CCP devs and CSM members who interact on the same chat channels, fleet ops, tweets, social group interaction, and fan meet interchanges has caused any input from the HS general population to be drowned out and diluted. Relying on a null sec heavy CSM may give us a better mechanically sound game, but it really doesn’t help the overall HS environment that much.
The first thing that CCP needs to do is dig into all the data they have and release a new and more accurate population density report to see what percentage of players are located in what regions. They then need to split those players by multiple accounts and solo and where the main character plays ( by time logged on, Jita not included). Those players who spend the majority of their time in HS as their main or only character should have a cross section chosen and a series of WELL DONE questionnaires/requests should be sent out to obtain more and , more importantly, accurate data on the HS players and their concerns.
Otherwise, we will continue to hemorrhage HS players and EVE’s health will continue to have issues. Yes, saving the null sec whales is vital for the game, but so is saving the huge number of smaller fish swimming in CCP’s universe. At the moment, EVE’s ecosystem is in trouble.
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Why do you think the folks who don’t log into the forums, don’t vote for CSM, don’t do anything but log in and play a few times a month, are going to take the time to fill out a questionnaire?
The point of these forums - and this thread - is to get feedback on specific items folks would like to see. We know CCP has their issues and I know there have been complaints about the CSM being disconnected, which is why I’m here and being visible.
What I need from folks are concrete ideas - the kinds of stuff they’d put on one of those questionnaires. Things they think would be fun, QOL fixes for high sec, issues where things aren’t working as they used to in the past (I’ve already brought up the agent finder and the Agency window, for example) and that kind of thing.
That’s the kind of feedback that is most helpful.
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Elaborate?
Eve is always dying. It’s a matter of which people leave and how long before they return because as much as I’d hate to say it there is no other game out there like eve. The second someone actually breaks that barrier theres a high probability of a mass exodus. It has yet to happen.
Maybe, but this will likely not happen in our lifetimes. 
The longer I play EvE, the more I come to the conclusion that a real competitor must be an EvE clone in its core. EvE has undergone 15 years of optimization and balancing, the chance you can build something different but still attractive to EvE players, is very small.
Maybe an EvE clone with another setting than sci-fi could work, but then I guess people will just play both.
…and that is part of the problem. An example would be that everyone pays their fair share of the income and property tax. Many of those people paying their share do not choose to vote, but their contribution to the overall well being of the selected group is essential for its long term healthy and stability. Now a politician may argue that he is accountable for those people who only voted for him, but in truth an honest person would strive to try to help the largest number of people he represents or to make his population as overall healthy as it can be, regardless of whether they voted or not. After all, if they chose not to vote but still pay their fair share, is the politician not supposed to represent them? I know, get real, right?
If both CCP and the CSM are going to solve the HS riddle (and a true question mark it is), they should try to base their decisions not on if they (EVE players) voted (i.e., representing actual voting for the CSM or voicing opinions in Forums or chat), but rather what the silent majority who paid their dues (taxes or subscriptions) would like. That information will not simply present itself to you without effort; it won’t be found through twitter or chat, forums or meets. In those places you are going to get the people who are already active and usually (but not always) on an extreme end of an issue. Their voices are already being heard (although they may not be heeded), it is the silent majority you need to engage. As it currently stands with HS, the silent majority of people are ,well, silent and refrain from social interaction in a macro scale. Go figure, even in an MMO. They will keep silent unless actively engaged and when they decide that EVE no longer reacts to their needs, will simply cancel their subscription/stop buying PLEX and leave without a sound.
I have been playing this game for over 10 years and the population changes are quite evident. Systems are noticeably quieter; friends and people I interacted with for months and years are no longer present in HS with the vast majority of them no longer playing EVE. Obviously, it is a multifaceted problem and no one solution will fix it. However, the first step to fixing it is to get an accurate read from that population where the problem is located. The current method of a post game questionnaire (why fill it out if you are leaving?), angry forum postings by a select few, and interaction via reddit/meets/twitter only give insight to a very small and select group.
I ask you directly, Brisc, to help devise a more accurate and fair way to gather the information that CCP and the CSM will act upon. To reach beyond the social group and alliance mechanics to a community group that is different in many aspects to what you are used to, but still have an enjoyment with EVE. Asking for information in the forums is a good start, but far more needs to be devised and implemented on a regular basis. I know the CSM will do a good job advocating for good game mechanics, but you (like us) can only react to what CCP tosses on your plate. Help them spend their time and effort wisely.
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