So yes, when I referred to it as “ganking makes people stay”, it’s because that’s the interpretation PvP players have been putting on it for 7 years now.
What CCP actually said, specifically, was that people assumed ganking drove people away, and so they looked at the data, and found that in a very specific subset of “ganks” looked at, that people who were ganked were “slightly” more likely to continue playing than people who died ‘legally’. Without any numbers, and with a fair bit of fuzziness in the words used.
They also don’t differentiate if a ‘legal’ death involved suspect baiting, which in the first 15 days of the game would count pretty similar to a gank, IMO.
I’ve definitely never seen anything from CCP stating this. Guess I just haven’t been paying attention.
No, that isn’t what they said, since “slightly more staying” implies “almost as many leaving as staying”. Which I’d call a significant number.
They do say that “people who don’t die at all are the most likely to leave the game” (in the first 15 days). But personally I’d say that less about ship loss or no ship loss, and more about “people who engage with the game early on to an extent they actually fly out and do things which may result in ship loss” vs. “people who end up doing almost nothing at all, don’t engage with the game, and don’t end up losing anything”.