It’s far easier to twist the evidence to fit a prior belief than reassess one’s opinion.
If I saw more players in space I wouldn’t look for alternative explanations of the higher player count. But I am not seeing them. Did about 30 anomalies around Amarr tradehub, not one was contested by anyone. Ad I wasn’t any fast, low SP toon in t1 coercer. So where are these players? In Caldari space? Sure, but I didn’t see more players there than there used to be before.
Anyway you have a point. Just as well the player count going up could simply be more players being multiboxed simulaneously, player count going down could just as well mean that the big multiboxers reduced their fleets or quit. Which is something that a lot of players threatened here with when CCP added that package with combat boosters. I just never assumed their threats would be real and not just dogs barking.
I have an alt that’s 19 years old. That’s how long I’ve been seeing threads like this on the forums. “Eve Is Dying” thread 98 quintillion, 253 quadrillion, 487 trillion, 652 billion, 147 million, 455 thousand, and 983.
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Actually, it’s “I misunderstood what this thread is about” post. Number: somewhere in the tens of thousands.
Just FYI, it’s not “EVE is dying”. It’s “what do you think is happening with the player count?”
OP:
And also “drastic misuse of hyperbole” post, Number: something hundreds of thousands.
There are almost 8,000 systems in the game. If everyone was all spread out evenly, there would be between 3-4 people per system at any given time. However we are social and tend to clump up in certain areas. As a result, there will be areas with hardly anyone, and then there are areas that have plenty of people. So depending on where you are, an observer will see a lack of people or a healthy amount. Even if there are 60k concurrent players, you will see this result. The sandbox is big.
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I’m positive this is at least a weekly discussion in Reykjavik. They have data and statistics we don’t have. All we can do in this thread is guess and postulate, and eventually end up being locked as has happened with the 98 odd quintillion identical threads in the past.
All discussion falls under one of five types of posts:
1: Eve was better back in the day shakes cane
2: Grr multiboxers
3: Grr nullblocs
4: You’re not doing the right content.
5: EvE would be better if CCP did like this other game.
Granted, we haven’t seen all of them yet, but they’re an inevitable result of this type of thread. Personally, I don’t see the point in a thread for people to whine about whatever imagined state of the player base they may have. None of you have solid data, nor even enough valid anecdotal data, to form an actual educated conclusion beyond “the population of EvE fluxuates for [REASONS].”
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Everyone knows they’re the same thing. There are those who…even when the player count goes up from 22,000 to 32,000…have gotten so used to shouting ’ the sky is falling down ’ that they’ll mis-interpret data accordingly. For them, the sky HAS to be falling down. There can’t be a genuine increase in players…it just has to be because there’s only one player left and he has 32,000 alts.
Whether those extra 5000k players anytime over last year are real players or mostly multibox alts, you have your bias and I have mine, it doesn’t really matter. They won’t be all alpha, and so that means someone has to pay them. And that means that for CCP the EVE bussiness is blooming.
And the incoming expansion has a potential to bring even more players.
So even if the actual real player count is roughly the same, the game itself is not dying.
It’s actually about 2k more for the current quarter than last year. Player numbers were atypically high for 2020/2021 due to Covid, then atypically low for 2022/most of 2023 due to CCP working very hard to crush the economy (and some large game releases).
Recently we’re running a bit lower than this period for 2019, which we can think of as the last “normal login activity” year before things got wonky. So a small drop over 5-ish years is about what’s expected.
Unfortunately EVE Offline seems to have stopped tracking player counts recently. And some of the date ranges have gone off-kilter. Hopefully this is just a blip while @Chribba or somebody is on vacation.
Where the recent activity is being concentrated is a valid and interesting question though, as it would shed some light on how well CCP’s latest additions to the game are driving player activity.
Something is not working properly? Is it still like that? Looks ok on my side, else feel free to drop some more details and I will look into it (parts of the graphs are pre-generated, maybe there was an error that then got sorted once they were re-generated again…)
/c
You quote EvE Offline, but did you look at the graphs over time?
Yes there’s fluctuation, but the EvE population as a whole, and more importantly new player creation, is stable since the decline started in 2014, when CCP didn’t have the current content release schedule and nothing major came out for a long time. If anything you could say we’re still potentially on a rise in players when compared to a year ago, but that’s dependent on the Equinox roll out and fall out.
Thanks for checking in, and many thanks for all that you do!
At the time I had posted that, the most recent date showing non-zero player login numbers was May 12 or 14th, iirc. And the 10 segments across the bottom with ‘Year#’ labels showed 1970, 1975, 1980 etc.
It all looks normal and working now though so thanks again!
Yes, I look at them fairly often. Do you? Skipping past the significant decline of 2014, what part of this looks “stable” to you?
As for player creation and counts since 2016, having free accounts in a game that strongly encourages multiboxing (legal or otherwise) goes a long way towards covering drops in numbers. Besides, it’s not how many accounts are created, but how many stick with the game that counts.
Well, I think we clearly are on a rise since early last year, but that’s basically just saying “EVE is recovering from the 2022/early 2023 lowest activity numbers in almost 20 years”.
At any rate, as already said, 2020/2021/Covid and 2022/early 2023 “crush the economy” events distorted player numbers quite a bit in opposite directions. Presumably we’re now getting back to something like ‘the new normal’.
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Don’t forget that these numbers are also increased on average due to the fact the game now has daily login rewards and dailies which we didn’t have a few years ago.
I have seen plenty of players who’s daily ritual is to log into a bunch of alphas every day to get their SP bonuses and ship skins, and I can only imagine that spiked higher when they started doing evermarks and gaslit everyone into thinking they would be used for the SKINR system.
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Welcome to Eve forums ! Where the people who play the game the least spend the most time chattering about it.
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We know.
My pelasure and thanks for confirming, I’m 99% sure the pre-generated graphs must have become borked then and got sorted when the script ran for the next update. If it’s a frequent thing I’ll see if I can add some checks to render again (or keep old graphs until new ones can be generated properly).
/c
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The decline can be attributed to MMOs as a genre and the larger gaming market. Players just no longer kept playing them, as Eve correlates strongly with player numbers of other MMOs that survived this period (and this industry wide decline contributed to those that died, like WildStar).
Seems like this coming update will get people currently playing to maybe expand/try new things, but it doesn’t give off a a ‘hype’ feeling that would bring in new players.
Keep reading that ship destruction and pvp are what drive this game but this update does not seem to advertise that well.
Maybe show the new hauler getting ambushed and fighting off a few ships until help arrives? Trailers are just…meh.
And full apologies if there was a trailer like that and I missed it and now sound like an idiot.
That’s just pure nonsense, as players are playing an MMO online with others…not a stand alone game vs NPCs. Players cannot ignore where their ‘lifestyle’ intersects with those of others. I thus impose PvP on other players whether they ‘appreciate’ it or not…and I simply don’t care if they don’t…as they signed up for PvP by the act of undocking.