It’s one thing to say “we don’t have sufficient data to quantify the relative effect of HS ganking on EVE”.
It’s quite another thing to say “Someone made a decent guesstimate based on their stats and some figuring, but I don’t like the result so I’m going to call it fallacious and irrelevant.”
Io Koval may have argued this in another thread, but it only recently came to my own attention, so I added it here.
Keep in mind that my own viewpoint is that ganking shouldn’t be removed from high-sec, nor should HS be made ‘safe’ for casuals. It would be pointless to play EVE rather than another game that does PVE better, if that were the case.
That said, CCP’s recent changes seem a little less “caving in to random HS carebear demands” and a little more data-based, when taking a look at long-term trends and numbers.
Putting your words in my mouth, with a dash of weaseling to aid in plausible deniability, is not a good look.
The jist of the counter-argument is this:
The guy computed a single statistic for himself as an individual.
There is no “correlation” here. This is a single statistic, and it takes different statistical events to draw a correlation, and there is only one category of statistical event in the guy’s analysis.
Aside: Recent advances in statistics have shown how to overcome some of the limitations of the Pearson correlation – which is what most people colloquially mean when they say “correlation” – but requires simulation.
We don’t know if the remaining 17% who stayed, did so because of being ganked.
We don’t know the counterfactual data:
Of the 17% who stayed, how many would have quit if they weren’t ganked (the counterfactual event)
Of the 83% who left, how many would have stayed if they weren’t ganked (the counterfactual event)
There is no way to generalize this single guy’s statistic into a statement about the game.
His sample size is simply too small.
With all the above, the hypothesis of “ganking causes newbies to leave the game” is woefully unsupported.
As I later argued in that other thread, what is supported by CCP Games’ own 2019 Friendship Machine presentation is the hypothesis that “newbies get retained by suffering a critical loss while having constructive support in the moment, which is often delivered by fleeting up and losing ships”. The “fleet up with strangers and lose ships together” aspect of that part I think was left uncontroversial.
What is controversial is this: It just so happens that another way of suffering a critical loss is by a gank loss. The constructive support that comes in the moment is either:
The newbies’ existing friend group; and/or,
The “Why Was I Ganked?” channel; or,
None
I’m not going to dive into 1 or 2. Instead I want to show that the common theme CCP identified between the uncontroversial “fleeting up and suffering a critical loss” and the controversial “getting ganked and suffering a critical loss” is having that social support in the critical moment. An MMO is a social game and getting newbies out of solitary confinement and socialized into “the game” is the retention mechanism.
The reason ganking is controversial is because people have opinions about “the social aspect of ganking”. Typically it is framed as: “it’s a binary view as either A) 100% salt farming and therefore an incredibly toxic experience that must be destroyed because it cannot deliver the above, or B) something that on balance is more positive than negative because ganking isn’t special – any kind of social interaction in Eve can be toxic and doesn’t even have to be PVP related.” I happen to be of the latter belief, so out of all the above points I tend to believe:
There is still no solid evidence that ganking is the cause of newbie retention problems, no matter what 1 guy pulls out of his ass; and
Eve is chock full of toxic interactions between players – ganking is not special in this regard – so rather than try to nuke every playstyle where griefing can occur (because the whole game would be delted), let newbies be exposed to the game as it is and don’t try to sell them a fake “happy world”.
Instead, work hard to get newbies exposed to good player social interactions ASAP so that when the critical loss happens, they get hooked.
Congrats, you pulled it out of me. I re-hashed it. Necro successful.
I think that was an excellent post and summary. I’m sorry you had to repeat it but I’m glad I didn’t miss it entirely by not reading the other thread.
I think all those points are valid, and again, I only use the numbers to identify that the issue likely deserves significant study on CCP’s part. Not to support any “pump it or dump it” binary conclusions.
Personally however I don’t think someone needs to be able to pass a T-test with his statistics before he can offer an opinion or draw a conclusion from his own experience.
That said, it would appear that CCP needs to be working on getting new players into a more socially cohesive group than “Rookie Help” channel. Also possibly making “Why Was I Ganked?” or a similar channel a bit more visible. Personally I don’t think having a GM show up and ask “I see you just got blown up, is there anything I can do to help?” is sufficient here.
I may poke around and see if there’s something sensible to suggest for earlier social interactivity. I’m sure CCP is eager to hear my thoughts on the matter!
my omega expired day 5 , i think i will give EVE a time
i have a lot of new frigs and destroyers but plex is to expensive , maybe in December i will not have the opportunity to play that much and make it worth it
to be frank the current discussions about PVP take a bit of my excitement about the game. think about the bhalgorn or crucifier navy issue , they are ships made FOR PVP , no good use in PVE
PVP is at least half of the game
about the topic , you never know if a dude you killed stop playing or he just live in HS doing PVE and don’t have any interaction that could be tracked
That is dumb Brett why would you want to waste your time thumb downing threads and comments that you do not want to read more of or what might not meet your expectations while visiting this fine Eve Online New Eden Community.
I don’t really think “subjective” is the word here, although it’s certainly not hard (or even useable) data. That’s why I use the word “suggestive”.
The reason that Reddit thread caught my eye was because the OP was doing with his own kill list a review similar to what I attempted. Except that in his case, he knew which ones were ganks.
At any rate, the discussion is still ongoing in another location, although less heated atm. (Probably because our group is running a task force right now.)
The numbers just posted on our Discord, which I have neither checked nor verified and was simply told “I got these last week”, are:
HS Kills by Top 10 Safety. Gankers Last 90 days
Pilot
HS Kills
Total Kills ever
Apo Bong
111
1,421
Guard Cow
84
979
Cute Gank
84
808
Skillbunny
76
612
medium brain ideas
64
363
Chroepheohyi
58
182
Richart Bong
57
182
Shadow Tequilla
54
173
Aiko Danuja
53
16,798
Chess Sama
51
1,678
Total:
692
23,196
Top 5 Ganker Groups on my ‘red list’, :
CODE.: 392,150
Safety.: 58,542
R I O T: 53,031
Novus Ordo.: 27,256
Gimme Da Loot: 12,976
Total: 543,955
(The second table I’m guessing is “all kills ever” by that group, but haven’t checked.)
The player arguing these numbers is, as might be guessed, strongly against high-sec ganking and is using these and other numbers to ‘prove’ how many players have been driven away from the game by it.
While my own view is less drastic, it’s certainly true that every happy ganker leads to hundreds, or thousands, or even tens of thousands of much-less-happy gankees.
I thought people not being happy about their ships being blown up was the whole idea of the game. Everyone starts Eve on a level playing field. It is 100% down to people’s own choices whether they end up predator, prey, or anything else.
That was back 15 years ago, when MMOs were still being played by college kids who spent their youth in the 90s taking each other’s quarters playing Mortal Kombat and Marvel vs. Capcom 2 in seedy arcades, before they entered the workforce and started having to put in 90-hour weeks to be able to afford to pay $2,500 rent for their closet-sized studio apartments, and were replaced as a gamer demographic by smartphone-wielding boomers and the older Gen-Xers who created the entire concept of the “participation trophy.”
Ummm what? I’m trying to figure out who the bad guys are in your sentence. Cell phone boomers? Who are quite literally 75 years old now and probably not super influential in eve? Old gen Xers? Not even sure who that is. Kids from arcades 15 years ago? Who hurt you? I’m guessing every age group but yours?
In theory, yes. And it’s hard to get enough data to separate theory from practice in this case.
Practically speaking, most people’s mindset/wiring tends to lean towards the “resource gatherer / seek security” side. A substantially smaller proportion of people have significant streaks of “I’d rather destroy someone else and take their stuff than make my own”.
For some people, a game like EVE is the place where they can let that inner wolf out to howl. Or revel in schadenfreude or boosting their ego - or whatever it is they get from setting up a situation where they win a fight they were 99% likely to win regardless.
The problem is in the balance. If each wolf needs 30 or 50 or 100 sheep per month to keep playing, and the supply of sheep isn’t there, then you’ve got a long-term problem with your ecosystem.
And as much as I critique CCP for getting so many things wrong… this is a very difficult thing to get right. It’s why there are so few open-world non-consensual PvP MMOs out there. It’s an uphill battle against player demographics.
EVE’s niche is riding that “edge of tension” that constant (if usually low-level) risk everywhere provides. But that’s a pretty easy edge to fall off of, and CCP seems to have lost their own vision of how to make it work.
Destiny’s got this weird complex where they and a few others are the last of the great white hunters, on safari in the wilds of space and bravely gunning down the grazing herd animals. And everybody else are just lamer tryhards incapable of doing anything more than pushing “I Win, Pay Me Now” buttons.
The fact that virtually all the ‘hard-core’ gamers from 15 years ago are still out there gaming (just not in EVE), and all the “newer generations” they mock are out playing fast-moving shooters and full-PvP games rather than sneaking around space for hours trying to set up a sure-win ambush… seems to fly right over Destiny’s head.
Well, it’s no secret that over the years EVE has attracted some real oddballs who still cling to a situation that hasn’t existed for over a decade. Observe them in the wild while you still can - it’s not that much longer until they’re stuffed and mounted in a museum somewhere.
