There isn’t a declining population…so how can that discussion be ‘furthered’ ? In fact concurrency is generally up by 25-30% compared with last year when 21K log ins was a good day.
ngl I think there are more multiboxers than ever these days.
Source? Me
that’s how EvE players roll 
(doesn’t make them “tough”, just EvE players, sometimes even for many years).
You can go mining or running anoms in border systems in null and lowsec, crab and hack in w-space, get hunted down (and escape from attacks) during every PvE session - i.o.w. deal with the PvP during PvE at all times and get an adrenaline reward, lol. It’s fun. I really do believe that is a significant part of being an EvE player, to come to that realization.
Elitist ? EvE has that rep, yeah. Wanting to succeed (or “survive” in this game) and perhaps even excel, not a bad gaming proposition, is it ?
Come on, you’re not serious, are you 
What about the good old “earning an extra buck”, or “funding the next project” ?
I agree that the advertizing is “off”, 100%. I’d prefer having the old advert of “You’re not ready for this game”.
Must be those new roids near the blue dwarves that did it 
I agree with your source, and will raise you some data.
The first time I saw a fair shot at an “account per player” estimate, I think it was around 1.2. By 2015 ish (pre-alpha) I think that number had risen to around 1.5 or 1.6. Obviously it went up after Alpha in 2016, but the most recent numbers I saw were from Fanfest 2022:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/ukd9pg/average_accounts_per_player_stats_from_fanfest/
2.6 accounts per player, and nearly 8 accounts per player by the kind of ‘core’ crowd that attends Fanfest.
This implies that over time, the online numbers we see represent fewer and fewer individual players, and more and more multi-boxed or alt accounts. Which also means that any time CCP drives players away, they lose a multiplier of that number in subs, accounts, and online count. It also implies that more players are being driven to create more accounts to “fill in the gaps” caused by lack of other players.
When a newer player recently (@Yuzima, iirc) started a thread about how so much multi-boxing could be potentially off-putting to new players, it generated some good replies. Of course, our own resident Dunning-Krueger poster child immediately jumped in to say “Nonsense, you’re a new player, you can’t possibly have anything worthwhile to say”, so the thread got deleted at the OP’s request.
Related to the thread OP, I think the EVE player-online count is being propped up more and more by multiboxers and Alpha alts. I think the actual overall player population is decreasing. And I think a lot of that is due to design problems in the way EVE is set up, advertised, monetized, and presented to newer players.
As well as other design issues, of course.
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Wild 
And being replaced by multiboxers 
Before I begin, these are just musings. I’m not representing this as gospel, just my not quite perfectly thought out viewpoint, so I’m not going to put in a lot of effort to defend it, or any, really, since I can afford to be lazy.
I do not know if the population of actual players (or paid accounts) is going up, down, or staying the same since CCP does not publish this information, but I suspect that if this figure were positive they would be inclined to publish it. My suspicion is that the game is at best maintaining altitude.
I think what Io said about the basic game loop of Eve is essentially true. I’ll repeat it here so you don’t have to look all the way back to find it:
Just replace “lose a ship” with “lose something”, be that isk, ships, cargo, time, or whatever. It doesn’t have to be PvP, if PvP isn’t your thing, but no matter what you do there will probably be setbacks. Eve was marketed to me as a harsh game where your bar for success was surviving as long as you can. This wasn’t hard for me to wrap my brain around because video games were exactly that when I was very young. Examples are like Pacman, Galaga, Road Blasters, and Stargate. You are just trying to survive as long as possible and get as many points as you can. If you’re skilled enough, you get to input 3 letters to identify yourself as a high score earner. You put your quarters in knowing you can only lose. (In my case I just wasted my time since I didn’t have money for Arcades and didn’t get to do much gaming until consoles like the Atari.) Anyways, the point is we were, at the time, relatively open to games where loss was inevitable, and Eve was targeted to people like us.
Fast forward and games are more progression based. They have a beginning, an end, and a set path to follow in between to get you from and to. This is what the so called modern gamer expects, and Eve doesn’t have that. It wasn’t made to have that. Eve marketing, for better or for worse, takes that into account and is modified for those expectations, along with the idea that you can, for extra cash, buy your way closer to the endgame. Eve sort of mimics these ideas of progression and progression for cash, but it doesn’t really deliver, and it’s reasonable to think that a lot of players start and quit when they start to catch on that this system wasn’t what they were expecting.
CCP, as a company, also seems to cater to large homogenous groups. Small groups are under-represented and new players are by default in that small group category. I’m not just talking about miners here, either. Small groups of pirates are probably even more under-represented than the average new miner. When I joined, Eve was a frontier like environment with lots of small rogue groups. Chances were pretty good that when someone went to war with you it was just some band of rapscallions out to prove themselves. Nowadays it takes considerable wealth to declare war so these ragtag bands no longer exist. People don’t come eye to eye with conflict until it’s a big one, at least in highsec. Outside of highsec, you’ve got to worry about capital ships so there’s no good place for a small gang of outlaws to reliably set up shop, and so these seeds of small scale conflict are lost. This again leads to any opponent able to declare war and initiate conflict being overpowering to the point of being impossible to beat. Then that reputation spreads, and you can hardly blame people for being resigned to lose if a fight ever starts.
Even participating in war as a target is expensive! I had to buy and maintain a structure somewhere just to expose myself to risk of attack outside of ganking (which to me is not a significant enough threat to be interesting). For a full loot pvp game to be not only ‘opt in’ for war, but ‘pay to participate as a defender’ seems absurd. Technically I suppose it always was, but the cost of founding a corporation was accessible and once paid you couldn’t lose it by force. You could always revert to an NPC corp if things got too rough. This was great because just having your own flag was motivation enough to opt in to the war system, and that was nearly free and you didn’t need to post up any 500 million isk or so pinata for someone else to break. You could opt to undock only in corvettes for the duration of the war if you wanted to.
If, (As in this is a hypothetical and not a statement of fact) Eve is losing players in the long term because it can’t attract and keep new ones, I think it’s because CCP is afraid to give new players the autonomy to be a thorn in the side of the established large groups. Those groups are afraid of what would happen if people with little aside from a few skill points and a mischevious bend could meaningfully interact with them. Whether this is made up for by the illusion of ‘progression’ Eve currently offers to satisfy the modern gamer is up for debate.
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The only thing it implies is that you just invent ‘issues’ based on your totally biased manipulation of ‘data’ for a game there’s zero evidence you even play. Indeed it is typical of these forums that the biggest ‘issue’ raisers are invariably those for whom there is the least evidence they ever undock. Which really says everything anyone needs to know.
You can bet that if the figures were going down, the chronic wailers wouldn’t be saying that it was due to less multiboxing. They only come on here like Macbeth’s doomsaying witches when there’s ‘data’ to be manipulated. Whatever happens, they’ll have some ’ woe…woe…thrice woe’ rendition of it to regale us all with from their lofty perch from which they only undock once every 7 years.
Most of the Null Sec alliance players gather around central system hubs, usually the systems with large asteroid belts and combat sites.
You can determine the number of players in a region by looking at the galaxy map and not acting like someone is talking through you.
Do we have the ability to view the hours spent inside the game for our pilots? Ie /time
There used to be an ESI endpoint for this, but it appears the answer is no in contemporary Eve. Keep an eye on the future 3rd party developer news to see if they add the feature back at some point.
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In case you play through Steam it keeps track of total play time but it is for all pilots and even counts running the launcher if not mistaken and does not count running the non-steam launcher AFAIK. Also not sure how accurate and reliable it is even in general.
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I’m not cloaking the hours I had done in the past…
/I think I meant clocking, but who’s counting on my ability.
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And it was supposed to be so beautiful, with so many advertisements and loud announcements about how great it would be. And what? And it turned out as usual. Nerfing ships complicates the game for industrialists, making it easier for idiots who shoot at everything that moves.
And then they wonder why the number of players is not increasing and has been more or less at the same level for years.
CCP’s great success is genuinely enormous. 
This is very possibly the most pathetic statement about the player base I’ve ever seen.
It’s especially the one you failed to understand. But thanks for trying.
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I tend to understand things in black and white.
That’s like trying to use 3-D goggles with one eye closed.
Or…
more on topic: pretending to play EvE by ignoring the PvP.
@Wadiest_Yong I haven’t been on the forums for a bit, when I read this topic I thought someone necro posted an old topic. Then I read the start date, had the same thought. So I suppose people just don’t have anything really new to talk about Eve, they just keep regurgitating the same old thing.
@milkyway_miner if you really didn’t know, there is 2 simple ways to calculate this question. Over on Steam Charts the game has dropped -0.2836% of the players from last year (April 2023). If you look at the launcher in the upper right, it has the current server population. As I type this up it reads 26,227 on the one and only game server. Steam has a current population of 3,341 which indicates Steam is roughly 13% of the total player base at present. I am not on Steam, so I count only as part of the 26,227. If you or anyone else want to know the game population, there are the best 2 sources and you just apply the math.
Then you added … and why? There are too many factors to say but here is the short list;
- Commercials - Population increases for a month while the ad campaign runs on social media.
- Self Life - Players get bored playing and take a break, I know I did, population drops.
- Weather and Health - People get sick or bad weather has them stuck inside, population increases.
- School and Work - People have to eat and attend school, depending on the schedule they might not have extra time to play this or other games.
Over time all games decline with age. Steam Charts lists Counter Strike 2 as the top game, a quick sum on the year gain and loss shows a +0.1329% increase in players since April of 2023. However a net loss means a lot more to them, as they have more players.
It is my opinion, that after 20 years this game is still up and running at all, is amazing. However from the looks of it, not much changes from visit to visit. Both the game and forum topics seem to be stuck in neutral. I would like to comment about the parent company’s part in all of this … however the last time I spoke my mind, the post got deleted completely. I have nothing “nice” to say about Pearl Abyss, so I will say nothing at all.
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No it ‘implies’ that you are just making stuff up as you don’t have any real actual data.
It was just more nonsense…as nowhere was it ever stated WHAT about multiboxing could possibly ‘put off’ new players…especially given that most brand new noobs don’t even know that multiboxing even exists. And why would a noob who did know about it even care ?
It’s all just another forum example of people just inventing ‘problems’ out of thin air…and then tacking on a ‘think of the poor noobs !’ excuse for raising the non-issue.