You must know what you’re talking about. You said so yourself. 
Can you get to Zarzakh without logging in?
Well not even a month after and were back at lower than 30k max players , aka like 7 to 8k real people
What’s your excuses now lol
Clearly we had a boost from the move and most of them are dropping off now which shows just how little you know about the pop and why its the way it is , another month from now its gonna be even lower
The Holidays? 
It doesn’t matter how many players there are, what matters to CCP is their revenues. If 8K to 10K players generate as much as 30K players would why should they care?
And with the Whales alone there’s enough revenue to last another 10 years.
Then you have the occasional New Players who have no clue what they’re stepping in, they buy PLEX and the random Subscription before biomassing all confused of what just happened, that’s also fringe revenues every month.
And then you have the die-hards who will keep up their yearly Subscription just because. They don’t care if they’re having fun or not, they have invested into the game too long to let it go now.
All in all, CCP is sitting pretty for another 20 years… Unless they mess up so bad that there’s a massive exodus but Blackout proved otherwise because no matter what anyone says, EVE Online is a kickass game and there’s always going to be people who’ll want some more.
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One thing no one talks about or considers is deferred revenue, ie:
• How much revenue has been prepaid in the form of future Omega subscriptions that CCP is obligated to deliver
• The amount of PLEX in the system (not what’s just available on the market at any given time) that can be redeemed for Omega subscriptions
There is an associated cost to provide that service - even if it generates zero future revenue. I’m not talking about things like skill extractors/injectors, SKINS, cerebral accelerators or other vanity items available through the NES store - just straight Omega time.
< 24k concurrent players is not a good sign - especially since Summer is long over and one would think players are spending more time inside (we were well over 30k before Equinox). Equinox has basically cost anywhere from 6k-10k players (depending on your metrics).
I think 20 years is really optimistic - unless we see something released (EVE 2.0?) that really kickstarts a some renewed interest. Not suggesting it can’t happen - I just remember where technology/gaming was 20 years ago. I think there’s a better than even chance EVE lasts another 5 years. Beyond that, though…
Yes, that’s the Die-Hards I mentioned. And of course CCP is on the hook towards them.
I’m not so erudite about PLEX and the effect it can have on CCP, maybe @Gerard_Amatin can help with that, he’s awesome at complex issues.
I agree, yet my point was not so much how many players but how much revenue those players bring in.
It’s hard to evaluate the impact an expansion has on player numbers when CCP likes to keep everything close to the chest.
Anything we may mention would be pure speculation at best.
I do too… but I like to stay optimistic because I’m prone to depression 
That’s a tough question to answer. Did we lose 6-10k “dormant” players that weren’t contributing much, did we lose a lot of “active” players… did we lose any “whales”? In theory, more numbers are better - although I agree that we’d need to quantify quality vs. quantity here.
This sh** with Opportunities certainly doesn’t help…
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No it doesn’t. It’s a big foul-up judging by the number of negative replies. They really need to revert that decision pronto.
And they need to stop constantly nerfing things or soon there won’t be a game left to speak of.
Ashes of Creation now has their alpha servers open every weekend since November and last week it was open all week. It has a lot of EVE players, like a lot lot. Path of Exile 2 launches tomorrow and people have been preparing for that.
It’s typical of any gaming forum that the vast majority of posters don’t really know (and don’t even want to know) the actual facts or history of some game issue. Mostly they’re more interested in tweaking any conversation or datum towards whatever axe they’re currently grinding.
Occasionally you can find a few decent posters who are somewhat reliable in their statements, but even then it’s worth checking yourself on any particularly strong claims they make.
One of the things that’s interesting about EVE is the sheer amount of actual published data on the game. Old ‘Quarterly Economic Newsletters’ from back in the beginning, more recent Monthly Economic Reports (MERs), EVE Fanfest presentations and player analyses, actual corporate financial data releases, etc. It makes for some interesting data analysis sessions for anyone who cares to do a little googling.
Long story short: it never hurts to spend a couple minutes looking for original data on something, rather than accepting the opinion of someone with an axe to grind.
On the “player logins” arguments, a great resource is EVE-Offline.net . You can adjust time windows to see things like this:
which shows that player counts in the 50-60k range certainly happened on a lot more than a handful of occasions. And as to those numbers being ‘encouraged’ by CCP, well current login numbers are all extremely supported by free Alpha accounts, events, giveaways, and even free Omega time or Plex being handed out. (That sort of stuff essentially never happened ‘back in the day’, it’s all new initiatives to get players to log in.)
Back in 2010-12, 90% or more of those @50k logins would have been paid subscriptions. I’d be very surprised these days if even half the accounts logged in at any given time were paid subs. So maybe 12-15k paid logins tops (by my estimate). More like 10k, tbh.
It’s still a far cry from being ‘dead’, but it does show just how much CCP needs the free Alpha accounts and giveaways to keep the numbers propped up.
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Smells of desperation to me. If feels like the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing at CCP. On one hand they’re trying to get players to log in but on the other hand they’re trying to disgust them. That’s not very productive and makes one wonder how many chiefs versus how many indians there are at CCP.
CCP has never been good at making sensible and logical decisions. They’re most certainly not alone in that but in this case it’s probably more about stubbornness than anything else.
Having said that, EVE is one of those tryhard games which will forever have a battle between the no hand holding tryhards and the beta cck participation trophy crowd which CCP, somehow, wants to appease to both at the same time. And that’s just going to clash and send out mixed signals.
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That isn’t very wise, they are playing with a lot of people’s livelihood. The players are eager to participate and pay for the opportunity to, I don’t see what’s so damn difficult to please a player base while attracting new players at the same time. There’s enough content to please everybody if they stop being so damned tight-fisted.
Id say at least half the online numbers are multiboxed alts. I myself have 5 accounts and I use 3 at a time usually. I’m not heavily abusing it like some people do with 10+ accounts all doing the same thing mind you. Each one has a reason I created them so as to not take away training from the main. I needed a toon to manufacture with but I didn’t wanna take away from the combat training on the main so I made a new account and toon for that. I wanted a market alt for trading without worry about orders or taxes so I made a new account and toon for that for the same reason. Etc etc.
@RGC_Godfather There’s something inherently wrong with a video game that makes players feel that they need to play with several characters at the time.
I can certainly agree to that but that’s always been eves learning curve. You can’t expect to be able to do everything the game provides on one character quickly or the game gets boring. Look at WoW for an example. You can have a complete maxed character in a month and be bored waiting months for the next expansion. The player count for that game bounces crazy between expansion.
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I don’t think the game would get boring but that depends on who we’re talking about.
I have never played WoW so I can’t speak of it.
Games that spoon feed everything to the player base quickly usually die out fast. At least from my experience. A game that is slow placed and makes you work for everything is usually the better option. I can agree that maybe Eve is taking that to an extreme and that they should possibly take a look at that and dial it down a little. But overall I don’t personally have a massive problem with it. It can seem like a lot for a newer player coming in seeing these massively long skill times compared to players who have been playing for the better part of a decade who already have all of those skills trained. They just can’t compete with those people.
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That’s the problem. New players get discouraged and quit and seasoned players say “you don’t have to compete with us” Of course they have to! new players get assailed by more experienced players, how are they supposed to feel, grateful?? NO, they would simply leave.
The seasoned players have a hundred-and-one responses to that but none of them are pertinent. How do I know? Look at the players number!
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This is true - though the number is likely somewhat less than you write - , but the most persuasive response I’ve encountered is the one which recognises that veterans were new players once, themselves. If they managed to stay the course and prosper, perhaps others will do so, too.
Of course veterans also quit, and die, so there must always be new generations of players (or at least, potential players) ready to replace them.
As you seem to realise, without stating it outright, if the gap between the generations grows to be too large, the game will probably be an unsustainable enterprise.
Perhaps worrying about low player numbers indicates a fear that the game will be ‘taken away’, rather than reflecting a direct concern about, for example, ganking, multiboxing, etc.
Many people who won’t own to fear will readily - and firmly - declare (with much hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth) that they only wish to ‘help the newbies’, or CCP, or whatever. Such people do exist, but so also do charlatans and hypocrites.
I multibox rather modestly but I have no objection whatever to others doing whatever they wish with their time and money. I couldn’t care less about player numbers - it’s CCP’s concern, but then, I don’t fear the game’s demise.
The majority of actual new players give up way before they ever get compete with other players and/or get blown up. Competition is only an issue for newbies who (still) think in terms of “end game” and “grinding to max level to raid”, while that is understandable for them (as most MMO’s work that way) it’s a failure of the game itself and older players, who try to help them, to turn that around.
So very often older players… “help” newbies by showing off their cool T2/T3 ships going “look at how awesome this is and it’s so much more powerful”, they’re not really actually helping newbies at all. Part of that is due to a lack of understanding themselves, part of that is an inability to actually explain things, convey ideas and help newbies.