EVE Online Retention

Communications Center General Discussion
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Greetings,

Quick Intro - I’m fairly new to the game. I remember when i was a teenager i always obsessed over wanting to play EVE Online but could never get a good enough computer to run it lol. Anyway, 17-18 years later i caught a glimpse of the name and here i am, addicted and loving it. I’m in the business of community development and operations.

The first thing i noticed with EVE is that i knew right off the bat retention was going to be a problem, meaning i was going to have to fight the want to give up because of plenty of things. Now, correct me if i’m wrong, but i do believe EVE Online should have a much larger player base than this, 18 years later and i notice some odd things that a high schooler would be like wtf? Now let’s go through them and the reason there important enough for me to type paragraphs about all of this.

1 ) So our navbar on the left of the game, takes some getting used to for sure and that’s the first thing that made me want to give up. In a world that is so in-depth as EVE the “home” navigation should be improved because when you get lost trying to do anything, you truly get lost and when you see a bunch of random buttons you just have to go through it’s enough to click that uninstall button.

I understand the tutorial and all of the that, but it’s 2021, and many people still skip tutorials to self learn which is a very vast group that can’t be ignored.

2 ) Corps/Guilds are becoming a thing again as of recent years it seems and thank god. With that said, customization within Corporations needs to be beefed up. Some basics we should be able to:

-Name our wallets.
-Name our divisions (maybe we can and i missed?)
-Re-order and STICK/SAVE rank names in our preferred order within Title Management areas.

Much more customization when it comes to titles/ranks anything that has a title for itself. Maybe just put restrictions on certain names to prevent public displayed sillyness?

3 ) I just had a miserable experience within the Rookie Help channel trying to get help. I probably missed a warning somewhere in the chat for asking for support or whatever, BUT the point is i was gagged because a moderators or whatever got frustrated and would rather gag then TALK. That right there boggled my mind. An official staff team needs to be formed not whatever freelance power mongler formation is going on now because it is a DETERRENT. And i say mongler because we all know how it is when we get a piece of online power over a small or large community. These people should be striving to figure out how to calm our frustration, and give us support. But because i was i missed a warning in the very active chat and continued asking, i was gagged for 30minutes. On top, i had 7 members message me apologizing for the mods actions and letting me know to not give up, offering me help (successful btw) and he’s been an issue we don’t know how to rid of him. How does this problem even exist, don’t put a freelance community in-charge of official in-game rookie help. It’s official whether you guys like it or not at this point.

Sounds like i’m just complaining but the point is retention, just like the title. It seems EVE has MANY things in place to push new players away and not too worried about keeping them. Newcomers were getting in trouble for asking the wrong way essentially. 100% counterproductive, no matter what disclaimer or cheap set of rules you put in place. The goal should be to improve the game and we want more players i’m sure.

I put Corps/Guilds included with retention because there’s a huge group who constantly are looking to expand their guild/clan/corporation to a game like EVE, that’s how i got here.

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You can name corporation wallets and hangar divisions :slight_smile: You need to go to the corporation window to do it.

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Thanks for that., i spent time looking for it and couldn’t find all day yesterday. So i will look again, just something i believe should be more centralized, but i do get the fun in have to hunting down our options as well…

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What you list are issues, but they’re not retention issues.

If you want to know what the true retention issues are, just read Steam reviews. From the looks of it, the #1 retention issue is the “pay-to-win pay wall” for jumping from Alpha to Omega (making me think that going F2P was a pretty bad decision overall, since most negative reviews focus on this specifically).

Another primary retention issue is the overall difficulty/confusion most new players experience, partly due to the UI, partly due to the lack of instant documentation, and partly due to information overload. It’s not like only the most intelligent, 2,000 IQ, ten-pack abs, PC Gaming Master Race gods like yours truly play this game; the game is going to capture the entire spectrum of people, including those who make up the half of all people in the world who are of below-average intelligence. And so, you get posts/reviews/rants like “it tells me to mine the asteroid and I’m targeting the station and trying to open its inventory but it tells me it’s too far away even though I traveled 43 jumps to get to the system the agent sent me to…whoever designed this is a retard…I’m uninstalling this pos!”

And of course, the final (alleged) retention issue is the “griefers” constantly and repeatedly blowing up three-minute-old players while fornicating themselves and making donkey noises. This of course isn’t true, but is still in the top three “issues” quoted in reviews by people who have played the game for 27 minutes before deleting it, having never experienced “the peeveepees” themselves, but quoting it as their primary reason for quitting (despite not even having interacted with any other players during their limited play time) because they read something about it on some penny-rag news regurgitator and it stuck.

But yes, we all miss the old sidebar that was colorful and had really intuitive icons.

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Hey, a non-ragey, non-whiney post that’s actually pretty well thought out while admitting to limited experience. Good on you OP.

Some thoughts on your thoughts.

I know the tutorial is a little daunting, hours worth of daunting. The urge to skip is strong, as a newer player I would not recommend it. (skipping it, that is) I’m biased, of course, because when I started it was pretty much ‘here’s a ship, good luck.’ for the new player experience. The tutorial saves you lots of pain in the long run.

As far as retention goes… it fluctuates. EVE has always been a niche game that doesn’t appeal to everyone. A lot of folks simply can’t adapt to the ways it’s different from other MMO’s and end up quitting. That’s okay, operating as intended. The thing is that people who end up truly loving EVE have a hard time giving it up permanently. Breaks happen, but there’s a LOT of players who’ve stuck with it for years, or over a decade.

It’s just not for everyone, and that’s no judgement of their character or taste, just a matter of fact.

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had 7 members message me apologizing for the mods actions and letting me know to not give up

This is what EVE is, CCP trying to kill the game but players say “NO, you will not kill it!” :joy:

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new players are annoying , thats why CCP and the old players made a pact to scare them out after they bought a plex or two , got to have that economy running , win win …

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Who awakened you from your slumber, and do you require a beer?

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Blame Smitty. I know I will.
I’d say something about spending a year on a mountaintop meditating, but that’d be untrue and dishonest.
Beer sounds lovely.

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You know its a genuine new player because he is talking about the actual issues plaguing this game for actual new players and not the usual “we bleed players because people shoot other people in a spaceship shooting game”.

Welcome OP!! If you have any questions about the game, just ask away on the forums, we are happy to help here.

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ah…hmm…yeah…

Well…welcome!

Sure, EvE has plenty of issues, certainly, but it has been going for 17 years anyway…

What do you LIKE about EvE?

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Good way to put it, operating as intended. I just fear so much potential is being pushed away with both my above topics (not the corp one). It’s very good to know though it seems intentions are to keep the playerbase a mediocre size to prevent heavy constant updates which makes sense.

Does that pact really make sense for a game you want to keep playing? Again, i’m fairly new and grasping on to the fact i don’t think they want to house as many players as WoW for clear positive reasons.

Very good point as well, that’s why i was surprised to see at this age lol, but also shocked there were not a ton more players.

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i like it
me and my fwends

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Well, he “might” be right. I survived the purge. EVE lost a lot of players. Maybe CCP does want to keep the numbers small and pick their wallets?

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Does CCP communicate on these forums often?

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Not very often. The forum beats them up pretty hard so they don’t post much. Reddit servers their purpose more I guess.

You missed the days when the Dev’s posted a lot more. Or flew around in indestructible ships and you could fly with them and show in person what the problems we were having were.

Players complain about downtimes. You new players will never know the loyalty of the bitter old vets for putting up with hours long down time. You became a bitter old vet when you could brag about suffering through the 2 day downtime. We busted CCP’s ass over that one but it it brought us closer to the Dev’s when we were at least honest with each other.

The game died when the Dev’s lost their love for it.

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yah but time in inexorable
the times change, the players change, the devs change

eFi0l0w

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Ew, gross. :rofl:

That does not take away from what I said. :wink:

I can only speak for myself, but I was willing to put up with a lot of mistakes from CCP simply because they admitted they screwed up. (in not so many words)

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naaaa
HOT AF