Are you forgetting the investments CCP Games made with Eve Player Sub cash in world of vampires, dust and other projects that were cash down the pan per se that might otherwise have been spent on eve development. The overall longevity and success of Eve can’t be denied - but the absolute wastefulness and neglect over the last 5 years + of the senior management team and the powers that be have brought the community playerbase to the point we are - not changes in the gaming market - CCP have taken what was a niche community and tried to dilute that niche to milk more coin - at face value the milk being yielded is going sour.
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Dust was not a loss. It just didn’t turn a significant net profit.
Attempting new products is not wasteful, it’s sensible.
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I was not suggesting that they bare no blame, but as you spoke of 10 years of gaming and the decline in players you got to take into account the gaming market as a whole.
All of the early MMOs have seen mass drops in players including some of the biggest like WoW. Players always seem to point the finger at the company that runs them but in the last 10 years the gaming market has grown, what, 300%? 500%? I’m just tossing out numbers here, I’m probably way off and it’s way more then I can imagine. Especially if you include smart phone, and tablet games.
I play Eve off and on and I hope it can continue for another decade. As a company even if it turns out to be a bad choice has to try something to stay alive. Even in a niche game as you call it, do they really want to risk taking the chance enough players will stay due to that niche? Or maybe try new things or copy other successful ideas other games use to keep things going?
Or maybe they do want it to die and are just sitting on an auto pilot money machine till it does. Last I played they were kicking out parts of the invasion at a time. Seems like they still care to me.
I’m just checking for now seeing how things are going. Game was hanging around 20k give or take last I played so sounds like it’s fine for now.
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Expanding their portfolio was a good idea. Having all their eggs in one basket is a big gamble and nothing lasts forever.
But i agree there was some very bad decisions made when it came to dust and vampires just never seemed to make it past the drawing board. Add on the bad decisions made with eve and ccp have seemingly pinned themselves into a corner where they can’t even make changes for the long term health of the game because the short term shock is too damaging.
That’s why players are blaming the management. The playerbase has been telling them that taking away the core selling point of eve is a bad idea, but they did it anyways, to chase more coin. And they told them that dust on a console was a bad idea, but they did it anyways, surprise surprise, to chase more coin.
DUST514 was actually a good idea and the implementation of it was fine, CCP should have just added it to Eve Online instead of releasing it through PS3 Console. They could have easily made it accessible through ‘The Door’ in the Captains Quarters. That would have increased player log-in numbers into Eve and also encourage shooter type game players to try flying spaceships in Eve.
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omg splitting hairs over semantics doesn’t change the fact that the bleeding has stopped. I for one have a recent history of being against some of the changes CCP is doing. However, I still have enough love in my heart for New Eden to see some good in it all.
Is this a thread about the number of players going down or are we into semantics to keep our narrative going?
Her response is to be expected. You criticized her post as not aging well. I think the jury is still out.
Uh, dude, the difference between ‘average’ login numbers and ‘peak’ login numbers isn’t ‘splitting hairs over semantics’. They’re two completely different sets of numbers, that are currently 10,000 and more apart. The current average is 2/3 of the current peak. That’s not ‘hairsplitting’.
Your post was also completely bollixed in that it tried to point out that this thread has been wrong for the majority of it’s existence, and was therefore ‘misleading’ - when it was your post that was wrong.
One year ago, peak numbers were 40k, and average numbers were 30k. Since then, we’ve had almost all the Chinese players migrate here (Serenity is not a valid play option atm), and we’re still only running at peaks of 30k and average of 20k. That’s a loss of 1/3 of the active player base in a year.
At the moment, we are indeed recovering slowly from the August low point. However we are not quite back to even the ‘summer slump’ low numbers of June yet. I’m not reading anything into these numbers here, just pointing out the facts.
The overall trend of bleeding and declining players has not stopped. The recent gushing wound has closed, and is in the process of recovering, but isn’t quite there yet. CCP still has a fair way to go before they are trending positive or even stablizing player numbers.
Perhaps they can manage something for the winter season more creative than “Hey, log in for free stuff!”.
Curious… what do you all think would be a breaking point in average players for the game to be unplayable?
I been messing around on world of warships and currently the server is at 3137. Near 8000 during more peak times. Plenty of action at all levels of play with those numbers.
Now I understand it’s no mass universe like Eve with a complex market, but it can help put things into perspective to what an average online game can run off of.
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My wild guess is that somewhere between 5-10k there will be problems with the market, especially T2. Once you can’t reliably get materials for T2 industry, it will be a lot harder to play the game.
Depends on what section of the market you are looking at. Under 15K and you are likely to start seeing dead space and faction mods start sharply dropping off in terms of availability more and more since that section is pretty dependent upon enough people hitting the slot machine lever for the rarer pieces to get paid out. Which would start ripple effects across the market as people start slotting the next best option.
I would agree ( probably closer to the 5k ). Only solution for Eve beyond that point would be to add a bunch of pve. Both in solo type game modes and in the market.
They could just add fleets of highsec mining bots - the game wouldn’t change at all.
They should record the spam in Jita so that they can play it in a loop once the scammers unsub.
without knowing if it’s alts or real players and how many active accounts there is and also knowing the average age of our players, well, ya blowing smoke up your own arseholes.
those nice graphs on EVE offline, they’re nothing but pretty pictures without CCPs in house data, good luck getting that.
We have entered into the westerosi seasonal cycle where the summer dip is continuous for several years.
I concur.
This right here. Dust 514 essentially could have played the role of granting avatar-based gameplay. Heck, it still could.
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VR 
Unfortunately too many players feel that any avatar based game play is a distraction from the real game which is internet spaceships.
They brought up their objections when Incarna was originally being developed.
Personally I think this game could have had both, but CCP was trying to do too much far too quickly.
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