It has nothing to do with the ~6800 accounts banned for RMT and Botting.
Nothing at all.
Even the login numbers are not affected because Bots never really login 
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Yup ~6800 + summer = the sky is not falling. Plus the quality of gaming has increased, the massive resources those parasites produced devalued everyones effort.
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I think if CCP doubled the resources allocated in getting rid of RMT and bots, it would do a lot more for the game than anything else staff could do.
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So assuming CCP has over 200k subscribers - 6800 is 3% of the player base. We can drive the idea that botters are to blame and everyone who leaves is weak, or we can accept the unfathomable possibility that in their effort to rid their business of problems of automation abuse, they are causing significant collatoral damage.
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You are aware that Blackout has nothing to do with bots, aren’t you?
It is about rebalancing null. because the reward side of the scales has an elephant sitting on it at the moment.
In the article linked above, CCP says they used blackouts as one of the tools to stop botters and other “illicit behaviors”:
“We can see by looking at the graph below that a combination of the blackout as well as a renewed focus on hammering these kinds of illicit behaviors into the ground have had a massive impact on the amount of ISK being poured into the economy of New Eden by suspected botters.”
The bots used local to dock up and avoid conflict iirc.
Didn’t rampant botting kill the Chinese EVE server? They basically thought you were “stupid” if you weren’t also cheating.
Edit: here’s the link again: https://www.eveonline.com/article/pxf0x3/monthly-security-report-august-2019
Yes they are seeing how the bots reacted to Blackout. They do not say they did the blackout for bots.
But if they did then that makes the blackout even more worthwhile.
Bots have to go.
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I think the assumption that all these stats changes are due to bots is somewhat naïve and also not backed up by data or historical behaviour.
In July of 2018, CCP announced they had banned over 18,000 bots/hackers/RMTers in the previous 5 months. That was proportionately a much higher percentage of active accounts at that time than the current ban wave, and more even than the total online numbers are currently. That 18,000+ ban had very little effect on the various stats we’ve been looking at (kills, jumps, trades, player count etc.).
CCP has also previously had ban-waves of 6,000 and higher, those also did not affect the numbers like we have seen in the past few months.
I have to assume that the decline in NPC kills and other numbers is as much due to actual Null players and alliances cutting back their activity as it is due to ‘bot reduction’.
I personally have no issue or agenda with the blackout, or the bans, or null sec players playing/not playing. (Well, other than my usual “CCP could be doing/should be doing more effective changes than whatever this latest attempt is” agenda.)
Just tossing the point out for comparison.
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Good.
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The more that leave null for a period of time, the easier it is for CCP to do a proper rebalance.
CCP needs to ask its self, can the BEST WH Space give these rewards, if the answer is NO, Null needs an axe.
And just do that so Null is not as dangerous as WH space, well with asset safety, its not and then just cull all the rewards to below those in WH space.
Simple fix to restore the balance.
The extra bonus is those players only make up 12-20% of the EvE population. They just whine so much you think they are 50%.
More than 50% of EvE live in Hi-sec and have never used the forums.
I hope you’re not talking about a server reset, where everyone starts from 0 again. I’d probably never play the game again in that case. It’s one thing to lose all my stuff cuz I was stupid or another player got me, but to lose everything cuz CCP decided to restart? No. I doubt that would ever happen, no one would ever trust the company again.
Man, I’m not denying that EVE’s on a steady decline,
but I’m at least not making any ■■■■ up.
I’m not crying “EVE IS DYING OMG” and I’m not crying “EVE ISN’T DYING OMG”, I just really don’t like all these people who keep screaming WOLF about some specific thing when it’s pretty ■■■■■■■ obvious that there is no wolf because of that one specific thing!
Adam4EVE graphs indicate that the game isn’t doing much worse than it did before the blackout. The only significant change in activity was NPC kills, which dropped by five million per day. The fact that the rest of the graphs show no significant change means that these people didn’t ■■■■■■■ matter.
Now feel free to go and check my posts. I’m not ■■■■■■■ denying that the game’s declining and we all can agree and or disagree on the reasons why it’s declining, but when you come up with ■■■■■■■■ I will simply call you (general you, not you you) out for it.
From my personal perspective CCP is doing what all these other, past wannabe MMOs were doing. They’re trying to save their butts after dumbing down (in relative terms) their games too hard to cater to ■■■■■■■ farmers with easy money, who don’t really give a ■■■■ about the game, while the actual players who actually care about the product leave out of sheer disgust. Farmers simply aren’t a good long term strategy.
Seriously, in my personal opinion CCP is going to ■■■■ it up even as there’s just no indication that they’re actually knowing what they’re doing. They plan on implementing some rookie council or whatever they called it, to help people beyond initial losses! It’s a good idea in theory, when you believe that your customers are a bunch of crybabies and idiots, which means that in practise the long term outcome of such a “council” is going to be negative.
In my experience, its worse than that.
Ccp making changes that affected innocent players but Improved the game would be acceptable.
But ccp makes changes that screw over players thay werent the problem and also leave the game in a worse state for everyone…
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After seeing pronouncements of EvE demise for years and continuing on even today I continue to be amazed at the loyalty of EvE’s core player base and further convinced it will likely live on until PA pulls the plug for lack of profitability which seems a ways off even if this decline continues. I do however see EVE in a boil down to its most ardent core.
So how did we get here? War Dec’rs? Goons? PvP’rs? Miners? Ultimately we as players propose, suggest, discuss and or complain about items and mechanics. CCP Devs pull the trigger on inclusion, exclusion or removal from game. If I am not mistaken, CCP Hilmar is the last of the original team that created EvE. While critical to the continuance of EvE, he is only one part of the original expanding sandbox vision that would become EVE Online.
CCP Hilmar and CCP Falcon want to see a darker more conflicted game where risk vs reward is dramatically redefined. CCP Hilmar indicated he wants the game tension to be so great as to actually need stress medication to play it. So with the blackout in place and Triglavian Invasion well underway with plans to introduce regional resource scarcity and a vision to expand the Blackout to LowSec it is clear that darker PVP is the development focus going forward.
Many have suggested ‘If you don’t like it, find another game’. Many are doing exactly that. Now we are seeing the result. Reduced online presence and no projected roadmap on the updates page. Quarterly updates have diminished in scope scale and breadth. The latest release was primarily looks, feel and sound along with fitting warnings, cyno restrictions, 3 minute max to Warp, quality of life issues and several more. While these are appreciated updates to the game [maybe not the cyno], they are insignificant when compared to the first major Rorqual update, Player owned Structures, Player owned Stargates and Triglavian Space. I did see and DL the EVE Portal 2019 app. While a significant extension of EVE it is not a furtherance of the game.
While we hear talk of big updates, none are on the roadmap, there is no visible plan. Meanwhile the number of MMO space based games is growing with aggressive updates along with a growing number of mobile games and addins for existing games. We are even seeing some cult classics get new life.
For me EvE is in a very sweet spot. I really have some great opportunities now in some very quiet space. For me, the game is very playable. I am actually grateful for the current state of the game. I expect to remain with EVE for some time to come even if development focuses inward on fixes, QOL, & Look/Feel only. I do hope CCP and PA have some nice surprises for us “Coming Soon”
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The plan IS all about initial losses. Take a look at this PCGamer article / explanation - I think it will be very helpful.
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Intentional mislead, or on purpose?
It is not about the 200k subscribers, it is about the logged in numbers and these 6800 come right off the top because bots were always there, 24x7x365.
This IS WHAT HAPPENED to the numbers, good riddance to them.
Right now there are 20,298 online, add those 6800 and you get ~27k which is a good number for this time of day.
CCP finally stuck it to the bots and everyone is acting like the sky is falling.
Should be celebrating.
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I agree that people saying that these difference in numbers is just the difference in the number of bot accounts banned are naive.
I live in null sec and basically people have stopped ratting with carriers and supers. Even living inside a big super umbrella, the recent cyno changes makes protection tougher. It’s also hard to be super vigilant all the time while krabbing, and there is no traffic control like wormholers have… since you can just roll the holes. You can look at the map and see the ADMs falling all over the place. Even Delve doesn’t have the levels of ADMs that it used to. Since the cyno changes, a lot of titans died in Delve and all over nullsec.
Also the average for the past week is now 16k players… already 4k less concurrent players since the OP started the thread 
A lot of people from null went to wormhole space or lowsec. Some even went to highsec to just afk orca mine on a moon belt. The risk/reward just isn’t there in nullsec. With blackout and cyno changes, blops gangs are still overpowered, and massive bomber fleets are nigh unstoppable. And even going for some PvP roams, it’s tough to even find a fight solo since almost no one roams solo anymore, and even if you roam in a small gang, all the systems you go to are pretty much deserted or everyone is docked.
So basically outside of statops and sov defense fleets, there is a lot less opportunity for PvP as a solo/small roamer.
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It makes me wonder if CCP plays their own game? Try it after work. Even the folks interested in strat ops and participating in important things like defense timers are not really enjoying this new era. The idea of the blackout itself seems half baked like they were trying to accomplish something but didn’t know how.
What its done is revealed a company that seems to care little about the impact their changes have had on pilots when they made their hardcore more time intensive.
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The problem with this solution, and it is brought up constantly, is that it will completely destroy the free market. The market would need to be run by CCP and they would have to artificially destroy items on the market to allow anything to have any value.
Games like WoW can make this happen by things like soul-binding equipment, limiting storage space, and making mobs that are too high or too low in level be effectively worthless to kill. Right now I am playing WoW Classic and these limitations are game breakingly painful.
Your insurance idea it extremely faulty as it leads to insurance fraud unless the price of ships were to become fixed. We had it before and they stopped it.