While i agree with the rest of your post and in general this here as well, you have to consider that most if not all major null alliances have rules in place that forbid you from taking part in the forums with your main character that is in the alliance.
There are many valid reasons for this…politics and opinions as a perceived uttering from the alliance…espionage…befriending and manipulation…accidental secret dropping…activity tracking…intel gathering…war escalations because of perceived alliance utterings…
They really have a huge variety of reasons for this in place, so you have to use an alt if you want to participate in the forums anyway and hide the identity of your main.
I was in a major nullsec alliance and there was no such rule. TEST in fact encouraged forum participation (albeit on that other offical EVE forum, by the name of Reddit). First I hear of it anyway. I know most if not all nullsec corps/alliances want you to keep your killboard mostly green, but forum participation hasn’t been a problem (that I know of).
Likewise…I’ve never been told don’t go on the forum with a corp alt. What I have been told is don’t blab about corp secrets, and don’t bring the corp into disrepute…both of which are reasonable. But nobody’s ever said I can’t express my own views…and I wouldn’t want to be part of a corp that did demand that.
That’s a factor that hardly anyone mentions…yet it is one of the most important ones. It is likely a greater factor in how many individual people are playing than multiboxing.
People wrongly assume that 30,000 concurrency means something like 30,000 people are playing EVE altogether. But really it is 30,000 at any one time. In fact it could be a completely different 30,000 at 6pm to the 30,000 playing at midnight.
Because very few log in 24/7…that means the true number of people ‘playing EVE’ is likely considerably larger than the concurrency number. If the average player logs in for 3 hours ( which is what Google says ), and concurrency remained at 30,000 all day, that would mean the true number of people ‘playing EVE’ would be more like 240,000…and at any one time you only have 1/8th of them online.
So not only is the ‘number of players’ almost certainly far larger than the concurrency, but the length of time people log in for considerably affects the concurrency. You could, for example, have twice the concurrency with the exact same ‘number of players’ all logging in for twice as long.
This is something that all the ranting about multiboxing completely fails to take into account. Those people love to try to whittle the ‘number of players’ down by giving wildly high multiboxer numbers. Uta Asmai is particularly guilty of that. But the true number of players is almost certainly a factor of 4 or 5 larger than the concurrency in the first place.
EVE probably sees well in excess of 30k players that login and play every day. The real number could be as high as 3x or even 4x the concurrent number at any given time.
Very few players are going to play for hours and hours on end; some are just going to login to collect their daily rewards, set manufacturing, check on their orders, etc.
On the flip-side you might have botters and ISK scammers running various script-based actions for a good portion of the day.
I’d reckon there’s maybe 20-30, and of those probably fewer than 10 who multibox the whole ganking fleet themselves.
I guess one could search the last month of ganks on zkill and come up with a better estimate, but ganking is no longer profitable enough to support 100 regular gank fleets.
And out of that 20-30, probably half of them operate in Uedama and Caldari space… I think the “ganker menace” is really overrated.
With new players moving to Exordium they’re in a position to get poached by low/null/wormhole groups before they even have an opportunity to decide to move up to high-sec and get ganked.
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The current EVE player count is not bad for late summer. And contrary to popular belief, most of the players logged in are almost certainly not bots or multiboxers.
It would be interesting to know the total number of daily logins and time for the average player session.
If you’re not going to back this up with anything - it’s just conjecture. I have 5 accounts and today was the first time in a week that I did anything more than login to collect rewards from the previous event.
Not everyone multiboxes - and certainly not all of the time. While players may have several characters, some of these are Alphas and a lot of them can’t be logged in at the same time.
I guess just mentioning that shows the thin air plucking of numbers again. The sheer possibility of serially using your accounts or picking a subgroup or letting them lapse into alpha and only playing your main account and maybe having a holding account for a super or an alliance… is so far out, unimaginable for Uta.
If you have more than one account, you are by definition multiboxing them always at any time. Straight. For 8 hours or more at a minimum.
Would you prefer if I was disingenuous? Multiple accounts are a thing and have been for well over a decade. I don’t think they’re as much of a problem as they’re made out to be.
I was simply trying to illustrate that even those of us with multiple accounts don’t necessarily utilize them all of the time.
Further to this, I believe CCP stated at one point that the average player had 2.6 (?) characters. These were not all necessarily separate accounts and were probably a combination thereof.
“No one goes there nowadays, it’s too crowded.” — Yogi Berra
I think you forget the extensions of some of the numbers you toss about. You identify gankers by the fact that there are other players to gank.
If there was nobody to buy the ice there would be no point in botting the fields.
If the gankers are running multiple omega accts then somehow, somewhere, FC is getting paid.
Do we need to know how many players as in real people one per account are playing? Why?
I assume FC has a very educated guess and they do need to know that. Financials are released (or were when FC was owned by PA) and we could see that Eve was and probably is, making a profit, paying its bills and employees. When THAT stops being so is when I will start to worry.
People are nosey, like my neighbor. She has her curtains drawn shut all day, but I can see them move when she is peeking. When a friend stopped by chatting with me at the door, I saw her curtain move. I told him to pretend we were exchanging illegal materials. I flashed some cash at him and he shook his head no. I pretended to get frustrated and gave him a shove back.
Now most people would say, I am just being paranoid, but shortly after we went inside, a police cruiser coasted by very slow. Just like my old nosey neighbor lady, the people who want the number of players, half of them want to tell us the population is too low and the other half want to say the number is a lie.
It is an old variation on “The Game is Dying” topics in other game forums. You will know the game is dead the day you can’t login or find the website. Population has next to nothing to do with the game shutting down. Paying customers is the key to that event.
Did you attend the Fanfest? I am almost certain there was more than one person there? Unless they are letting the public in for free, I assume the convention in Iceland, would give you some idea about the population.
These are old numbers from 2022. So i would extrapolate that if you are playing EVE with an account number below 3, you are just plainly playing it subaverage, meaning you are playing it wrong.
