I vaguely recall making a post a few months back when I was drunk about average concurrent players online being close to dropping under 20k in prime Euro time zone - something I’ve never seen in the 10 or so years I’ve personally played this game. Ultimately it can be suggested that the majority of this decline is attributable to the way upper management at CCP have neglected what made the game and community unique in favour of the Commercial objectives and grand visions unrealised pursued in recent years. I hate to think how much Eve player sub cash has been spent down the drain on vampires, dust and valkyrie while the core product and only success to date, played second fiddle during this expenditure window. Unfortunately looking at concurrent numbers online atm, this appears to be case. Subsequently and regardless, we are where we (Community & Eve Devs). As a consequence- case in veritas - in light of the continuing drop of active concurrent player base (10k) on average down since Black Pearl acquired CCP - nothing is bucking the downward trend - @CCP Hilmar - if I’m wrong in this assessment, please enlighten.
It dropped because mining in delve in a rorq became end game content. The numbers have dropped more recently because of said rorq multiboxxers losing their safety bubble and rage quiting.
nah, but to be honest I’m going to bed now so alas, - if I’m wrong in my assessment then ccp hilmar will engage with community stop and reverse only 18k people being online now vs 45k - 60k a few years ago?
Naturally we should blame us wardeccers in Pirat! No but seriously we were chatting in TS last night about how we (Pirat) are now top 10 on Zkill only behind the mega blocs. We weren’t sure if we should be happy or if we should admit that it’s likely at least partially due to the declining PCU.
word in CCP “head” quarters is its holiday season thats why the drop in players didnt you get the memo 
it also holds up reports and other stuff like that.
You’re talking Euro prime time; it’s currently 7:40 PM Eastern time (which is about as prime as it gets for gaming during the work-week). 16,206 players online right now. Figure 4,000 of those are probably bots. 3,000 alphas. Maybe 9,000 actual paying players - if we’re lucky.
Regardless, it’s long been known that CCP only retains the workers who know how to sing the company song, talk the corporate talk, and praise management for the great job they are doing guiding EVE ‘into the future’.
Things can get pretty bad before reality breaks through that kind of bubble. Terminally bad.
Such an optimist
CCP is just a bit late with it’s game changing updates!
Do not mix up “Characters logged in” and “actual Players”
There was a Time you could broadcast your Inputs via Software like IsBoxer and so on, wich lead to 1 Person “playing” 20+ Accounts… with that last Rorqual-Nerf you maybe just lost the same kind of “log-ins”. wich is NOT as bad as you may think it is because the average of actual Players is quite likely the same and it would´nt effect your experience as much in terms of interaction with actual Players.
That blackout thingy is most likely caused by the fact that many Inteligence- and Notification-Tools wich are used by BOTS to warp out to get into safety rely havyly on the Local-Chat in Game.
Wich in fact was never a secret at all.
Without the Localchat seemingly Bots are easier to catch…
And btw. “Ragequits” are not so uncommon in EvE as you might think…
Game studios are expected to diversify, putting all your eggs in a single basket isn’t a sound business strategy, especially in a gaming market that just gets more and more competitive every year. From what I’ve read, Valkyrie and Gunjack have netted some profit for CCP. But there were perhaps errors with Whitewolf, Dust, and such, but that’s part of the risks in doing business.
Even WoW’s population continually declines. Can any game last forever, or at least decades? Maybe, maybe not, but the Simpsons series has managed to last over 30 years, and even tho EVE isn’t TV, gaming still falls under media entertainment, so the possibility exists EVE could be long lived if sound decisions are made.
We don’t know the terms of the buyout by PA, but if they got the first installment up front, that may have been 4-5 years extra budget on top of what they are already making. Hopefully CCP will use that constructively in updating and adding content to EVE, as well as diversifying wisely, only time will tell.
Say when??
It is the middle of August, the height of vacation season. People moving around for school, check back in Oct.
That could just be the loss of bots. There are so many in Null that the loss of them would have a huge effect on numbers.
It’s August. PCU won’t recover from the summer lull for another few weeks.
Yeah PCU has been trending downward the last few years. But I think we’re in for some real big surprises from CCP that will improve the long-term health of the game.
It’s better to have a healthy game and a stable PCU (with any small amount of growth) than a boom and bust.
*CPU, fixed it for you. EVE has no online players, it has online characters. Stop falling for that lie from CCP.
Also: It has been trending down for years now because CCP deliberately ruined EVE with macro transactions in addition to subscription as well as changes to ships that no one asked for (capital buff to be more “active” or Rorquals turned into super miners instead of super boosters as it were their role, among other things) that turned EVE more and more into a wasteland and turned away a lot of the players that made EVE great in the time before when EVE actually had between 45-62 thousand characters online. Naturally, some loss also happens because real life of the old player demographics demands sacrifices.
One can only hope more people unsubscribe and leave after CCP still refuses to fix things and instead incoherently screech and flail like a wounded animal.
Dont worry about bots in NS, they are now in HS:
Edited their names off. Names were random letters + game generated surname. Stuff like “agdd”, “rbb” or “nffe”.
… and half of those numbers are Goon/CODE. 25-man input-broadcast fleets. LOL!!
I cant wait till its all
Wouldn’t it be CCU then?
Anyway, I recently saw a presentation by CCP which contained a chart that showed the percentage of active accounts owned by individual players. Something like 85% of players had only a single account. It was a very steep slope - players with more than 3 accounts are in a very small minority.
I started the game in 2009. 2009 - 2015, a 6 year period, was the height of EVE Online’s popularity. Records were set. But now that time is over and we’ve fallen back to 2007-2008 levels. I have no idea why this is happening or if it’s even something to be concerned about - EVE has always been a niche game. There’s been a lot of changes, and I don’t think we can pin them to any single instance - Rorquals, skill point trading, skins, jump fatigue, etcetc. I think what we have to do is list all the changes and find where the data clusters.
Probably not. Input broadcasting would mean they’d be targeting the same asteroids. Even with Ventures that would leave a lot of dead cycle time, since asteroids in HiSec belts are usually small.
It’s funny. some EVE players are all doom & gloom over people leaving and then using it as an excuse or proof to further their own agenda. In the mean time CCP is going “lol, gtfo. Good riddance” while having all the stats.
I’m with CCP on this one: good riddance, we don’t need krabbers. We’re better off without lazy/terrible grinders who do nothing but muck up the economy and achieve nothing else.