Yes, indeed. I for one appreciate OP’s care in carrying the torch over from the old forum to the new. We’re an easily distracted crew, we could have easily forgotten and the EVE is Dying thread and left it behind.
Also, a gratuitous Eve in 2003 image I stole from the internet. I can’t quite make out what it’s about, maybe a ship docking at a station? But pretty cool, eh?
It’s an Amarr newbie frigate approaching a stargate to jump.
Well, it’s had a great run from 2008 to 2015. Not a single dip below 16K players. Now, three times since 2015 and it’s happening more and more, testing the floor.
I think the problem is quite simple, EVE is too expensive.
I mean the subscription and what it takes to buy stuff with PLEX is outrageous, and I am not even mentioning rich countries where salaries are high. It’s a luxury game, the CHANEL of video gaming. So for this price you expect more than what we get and racking in bigger and bigger structures costing billions of isk is not going to solve it.
For me, the experience has been good so far. PvP is very easy to find but hard to master. But Making isk is just not worth the time, so I PLEX with Real money. There is no other realistic way to move forward in this game at this point other than PLEXING your account. This is the issue and very few players accept to do that.
Expensive product means less but wealthier customers, but maybe more loyal?
Then why did player counts used to be much higher when it was just as expensive?
Because there was no game alternative then. Eve was innovative and simple, blowing up space ships in a MMO was new, mechanics were simple, ships were unbalanced and you could kickass, it was fun. The context was different, average skill points was low, progression possibilities were high.
Players want new stuff which is directed to them as solo players, affordable to them, they don’t want to be a number in a coalition and follow doctrines ! Players are not interested in stuff directed to Coalitions and Alliances, the new stuff ccp is creating is targeted to an extremely low amount of players, and the others, the majority… well after a while they simply dont play anymore.
It’s hard for me not to notice the new low’s for player counts as well - and it has me seriously concerned for Eve. It’s like going to your favorite bar and noticing it’s empty. Makes one feel like you should be going somewhere else too.
The biggest problem is that CCP has nothing new planned until refineries → and then has given players ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to look forward to after that.
The person that was responsible for Eve direction decided to stop telling us the direction after she got promoted?!
I hope it’s not because Eve direction became all about maximizing transactional revenue.
Unfortunately, this isn’t unique to Eve.
Actually, this is an interesting point you raise. I see EVE as a generation game, it was founded under and played by a cohort generation. But that generation is waning and if EVE does not win players over in the next generation, well it’s in trouble.
Well, creating a new character in EVE has always been free, and those numbers tell that currently the amount of new characters created is at the same level as 2014, and back then they were below 2013 and 2011.
So we can say that new character creation parallels the PCU graph in its own special way since it’s always seen an influx of trial/alpha characters and has had large spikes related to events.
So CCP can pitch that right now there’s 50% more new character creation than last year in the same dates… and that’s 30% less than during the 2011/2013 peaks.
Personally I feel that he development updates have long lost the ability to interest new players. 99% of them consist of fixes to stuff a new player deesn’t knows and content relevant only to veteran players.
Not to mention the disconnect between EVE and the reality of games out there; if you tell people that they’ll be able to own their own space station, they surely expect it to be something else than a glorified 3D screensaver…
a start, a middle and an end.
we’re somewhere about here >> middle<< 
Hehe its just the old Amarr rookie ship about to go through a stargate by the looks of it… also, i still miss the old Avatars as dated as they may have been they still had there own charm about them.
That old UI though XD
And when they spent most of their focus developing new content instead of balances and fixes to broken mechanics, the players complained about that instead.
it is a balancing act, and frankly I think they have gotten MUCH better at it. we have seen multiple fixes and balances in the past year and a half, some of them much needed making rorquals worth using some of them took far longer to implement than they should have nerfing rorquals again. but even then, it was still far faster than before. sure the svipul was OP for what, a year and a half? two years maybe. Compare that to the rifter which blew every other frigate out of the water for closer to 6 or 7 years.
Citadels are something that can be taken advantage of by even hour old characters in npc corps. sure they might not be able to anchor their own for a while, but that is no different than PoS’s except that they are much more accessible to the public. and they are doing away with the hellish coding behind the scenes, which has always been one of the biggest thorns in ccp’s side when it came to moving the game forward.
Yes the blood raider Sotiyo is high end content, but from day 1 they said that it was just a testing ground for their new NPC mechanics. something that they intend on rolling out over time to the rest of eve.
We have had a massively revamped NPE experience, which is a considerable improvement over the old one. and a million times better than “here’s a ship, click on things to do stuff, good luck” that we had back when I started.
Sure we might not have seen much in the way of new sub-cap hulls in a while. but frankly, there isn’t much room for new sub-caps. all of the roles are already filled, and then some. the last time they gave us a new one it ended up destroying the use of another one and they haven’t yet figured out how to fix Assault Frigates.
We have been getting a LOT of new content compared to the earlier years. and we have been getting much needed balance patches and updates. no, not every single one of those things is going to be relevant to the brand new player. but it still impacts the game as a whole. From a development side, things are in a better place now than they have ever been.
Eve dies from the five point palm exploding heart technique.
u bums will mull over Eve’s death for the next 30 years…
you are right
much thanks to CCP Fozzie for making it happen faster
CCP fixing things that are dont need to be fixing and dont fix stuff that is broken
Eve was hit by a vehemence shockwave charge jumping MMO-03 gate. It has limped on ever since. Got out in structure but still bleeding.
Like these new forums?
One thing CCP hasn’t got good at is touching existing content with as light a hand as possible unless absolutely necessary and often there has been (relatively) easy to avoid collateral damage when changes absolutely have to be made.
The vast bulk of people I know that have stopped playing both online and IRL that were long term players are pretty much split 50/50 between those who’ve got fed up with changes to content they were invested in (most of which have no intention to ever come back to the game) and those who’ve become bored with the game but will periodically resubscribe especially if there is a new content release. 9/10 of these people would have been relatively easy to retain as paying customers or at least semi-frequently revisiting the game.
m0o o7
97% of all internet statistics are made up on the spot
(/me nods seriously)