Well from the outcome the accuracy is not that great. It’s probably down to a lack of data. It won’t help that I use Grammarly so some of what I type is just whatever it wants.
Yeah I agree, though I’d say both are factors because it’ll be down to relative wealth. Losing a 50m ship when you have billions in the wallet is less of an issue than losing a 50m ship when you have 10m in the wallet and are new enough to take a long time to grind it back up.
There definitely are other reasons for low retention but if the developers are saying that they have data that this is part of the problem then I accept that.
How many of those are there? I put it to you that assuming people are complaining because of major loss events is as unreliable as assuming new players are leaving due to ganking.
Is that because you didn’t accept it when anyone who wasn’t in the ganking community said who their main was? In what way can it be measured objectively? What is the unique, defining trait of a main? What evidence is there that shows you are your main and you aren’t also any of the other posters in these threads?
I think it’s something that can’t ever really be proven without CCP enforcing a one-person, one-posting-character rule, and that arguments about it are really just there to distract from the topic at hand. That’s why I said before that I’ve never seen someone making good-faith arguments and also calling someone an alt, it’s always someone with no arguments doing it.
An innate general sense of giving people the benefit of the doubt and treating them like honest human beings even when I disagree with them, as they establish repeated patterns of communication, participation, and general manner of conducting themselves distinctly from others.
I am also willing to revoke giving people the benefit of the doubt.
Thank you for asking how I form my opinions, I hope it satisfies your curiosity.
Let’s be honest here: some people would like to see your mains or your record. And other people would simply like to see which corp to wardec, which group of players to harass, who to gank - because some people are of the mindset that if you disagree with them or trash their arguments, then driving you out of the game with endless harassment is a valid response.
I’ve been posting on various characters since… I think maybe 2006 would be the earliest. And I can assure you that anyone who posts strong opinions unfavorable to the ganking crowd for long enough, will face in-game harassment.
I am 100% against harassment. I don’t believe all players of a particular playstyle – and only that playstyle – are “the harassers”. It can happen anywhere there is social interaction.
I do believe people wish to express viewpoints without repurcussions. However, it usually means the opposite: they are free to harass the rest of the community and not face repurcussions, while the other community members cannot do the same without exposing themselves to risk of in-game repurcussions. This is not a constructive outcome for community building.
I share the sentiment. I’m not calling anyone I disagree with a sock puppet. I’m not saying you are, but there are a lot here doing that. It doesn’t matter to me if there are gankers here posting on multiple characters because whoever is posting doesn’t change the content of the posts.
This is the narrative pushed because it sounds so good on paper, but it fails to consider any psychological aspects of player resilience that aren’t financial. There’s a lot more that goes into the decision to stay or quit than just the percentage of net worth lost in a non-consensual PvP event. The are additional factors to consider, which may be even more important than the financial factor, such as how jaded a player is with the game.
As I observed how players reacted while sitting in their corporations with my spy characters while killing them in wars, I noted that new players were less likely to quit after taking losses, even if they lost a significant amount of their net worth. The new player losing a 25-million-ISK cruiser with only 50 million in the bank would keep playing, while the older player who lost a 300-million-ISK battleship while having billions in the bank would stop logging in. I noted this repeatedly and consistently, which led me to believe that the force tying new players to the game (possibly driven by a sense of exploration, or the “new game” factor) is considerably stronger than the force tying older players to the game (e.g. habit), which seems to be easily counteracted by a sense of grudge or a persecution complex. This ties very well to what can be observed in Steam reviews of the game, in which new players mostly complain about non-PvP factors that made them quit and review the game negatively, while the rate of PvP complaints among players who show hundreds/thousands of hours of play time is quite high.
Yes, I agree there are a lot more factors to it than just the value of the loss. Even with the loss, I think the loss value itself is indirect as it will be the effort involved in recovering from it rather than the value in itself.
How jaded a player is with the game is a factor but so is how much the player wants to be here. I’ve tried a lot of MMOs and a lot of the time it’s easier to push me away early on than it is once I’ve gotten into a game. EVE is already quite an expensive MMO if you want to sub, and has a steep learning curve, so I can see how having a relatively large loss early on could be a factor in a decision to play something else. That’s why I can understand that from the developer’s perspective it’s not productive to have existing players attacking new players for no gain as it adds one more barrier.
It’s a niche game so I would think most negative reviews are about gameplay tastes than anything else.
What’s not productive is focusing on an issue that affects maybe 1-3% of the new player population, and ignoring the issues that affect the remaining 95%, minus the 2% or so that actually stick with the game over the long-term. Only a tiny fraction of new players experiences non-consensual high-sec PvP events, but “boring gameplay” and confusion are experienced by the grand majority. CCP could in theory address other issues with the game and have 1/3 of that 95% stay in the game longer, and they would still end up with more players even if the amount of new players quitting because of non-consensual high-sec PvP rises by 1,000%.
This is why, as I said before, I believe that CCP’s slate of anti-gank changes is for the benefit of their carebear cash cows, and not for the benefit of new players dying at the hands of veterans.
Anyway, this is a pointless discussion. The game has already fundamentally changed, and it’s not coming back to the way it was before, but it’s still going to continue bleeding players because no one is happy with it anyway.
That was pretty much the point of the thread. I was not clear enough in the OP, but the ‘Perspective’ referred to in the title is “Ganking and PVP relative to EVE’s other issues”.
I have trouble grasping how so much much argument can center around carebears vs. gankers and players in a bloody sandbox saying “Your playstyle is bad and should be nerfed”. Especially when EVE has problems to deal with that are ten times more significant.
Yes, high-sec PvP is an issue. Yes, it can and should be made better and more interesting, for both sides of the equation. (And yes, that’s really hard to do but is in fact possible.)
But no, it’s not the bugbear in the closet, it isn’t what’s making or breaking EVE, and CCP has bigger fish to fry.
Thank you for being open and honest and responding to my question in the spirit in which it was asked. It’s very refreshing.
I hear you on that.
And the waiting about. That’s why I only do gang ganks once in a great while. Just to mix things up. But that waiting. It’s the same reason why I don’t like roaming.
It’s interesting that this sort of thing goes into “ego boosting”
Consider this. Sometimes it’s fun playing the bad guy. Give people someone to fight against. Some of my best ganking moments was when high seccers decided to put an end to my butt and actively sought to accomplish that! It was so much fun. (I was RPing and an environmental terrorist at the time, for the added flavor)
For you, that might be easy. But for me, handling a single account is about all I can do. Everyone is different. Playing an alt simultaneously I turn into a mess. This is why I don’t play button mashing fighting games. It’s too complicated.
I don’t see what honesty has to do with the avatar/toon/character I choose to post with on the forum. The words would be the same as any other character I’d have or don’t have.
The arguments stay the same and more importantly the counterarguments.
There’s seems to be this notion that EVE has PvP player and PvE players who do nothing else than what’s in those respective categories. As if a PvPer who also PvEs doesn’t exist. It’s all so polarized to the point of caricature and those who mock reinforce that image.
I think some people don’t like to debate without having a sense of who the person is because it throws them off-guard, wanting to discuss the person instead of the topic.
The difference is, a lot of posters here will say things like “ I also pvp all the time” and “ I have done a lot of ganking myself” and then have to follow it up with “ well, not on this character, it was on another character that you don’t know about” which is the forum equivalent of my ‘my girlfriend goes to another high school, you don’t know her’. If someone has done ganking and thinks it too easy, then post on the character that has done it so you have credibility. I have no credibility on how hard ganking is because I have never once killed someone in hi sec, which you can tell just by looking in the character I post with. See how easy that is?
This sounds great in theory if everyone was a logical robot.
In practice, anonymous places like 4chan (and spinoffs) are anything but eloquent, candid, constructive, and enlightened debate.
There’s also a sort of naiveness to the idea. It is trivially falsifiable. There is a world of difference between the words “This community sucks and I’m going to ban everyone” if it were said by:
Me, someone with no power to act on those words, vs
An ISD, someone with power to act on those words
The only entities that can’t tell the difference in meaning of those words uttered by these very different people are non-human robots.
It is possible to both analyze ideas with rigor and debate in meritous sincerity, and have credible, honest, non-anonymized participation by community members. They are not mutually exclusive, and thousands of years of human society have actually primed us to use psychological shortcuts like identity to help move conversations along. Otherwise, things get repetitive and/or stagnant as words have to be smithed to excruciating levels of detail just to make sure all Anons (past, present, and future – so have fun revisiting them) are on the same page.
When you reach that conclusion, they usually cry about you insulting them, and then they sulk for a day or two before returning on their new sockpuppet.
I only know the 4chan image of the frog. More than than it goes over my head. But this isn’t 4chan, it’s EVE forum with full moderation.
I understand that. The first statement isn’t true because you are powerless to act on it. Does that mean your forum membership should get terminated for posting it? It reminds me of the meme:
“Honey, come eat now”
" Hold on, someone’s wrong on the Internet"
It’s a terrible waste of time but, eh, it’s not my time at least.
It’s a forum, not a presidential debate. Who cares if any Anon is on the same page?
