Yes, EVE has many problems which causes customers to leave: most of them have a higher effect on retention than ship loss. Which is completely different than saying in regards to ship loss that: 1) it has NO effect on driving some people away and 2) ship loss PROMOTES retention. Occam’s razor leads us to think that people looking for adrenalin fixes take more risks. More risks leads to more loss. Since win or lose, those people get what they want with their ship loss, they are retained.
Now you can make the argument that those people NOT looking for an adrenal fix shouldn’t be in EVE, which appears to be sound one. However, saying that ship loss somehow a positive and rewarding experience (something everyone wants to experience again, so they stay in the game) for EVERYONE in the game, is too far a leap in logic. Not everyone responds to loss in the same way. Some people don’t like loss.
Sigh, I know, what they doing in EVE?
Also, exit surveys are notoriously fickle. While negative experiences are usually more “vocal” than positive ones (ratio of responses I thought was around 10:1-3), it depended “who” they were offering their opinion to. People offering opinions to neutral “judges” ( game stores, review sites, their friends, etc.) often actually replied at a higher percentage or gave more accurate responses than those reporting back directly to a company where they were dissatisfied with the product. Perhaps they felt that warning others was more productive than correcting others. Perhaps that their negative opinion wouldn’t be shared or made public? Maybe they didn’t want to spend anymore time on something they didn’t like. Who knows? What was the percentage of respondents to CCP’s inquires? 5%, 20%, 80%? Historically, those type of results are notoriously low.
So, more facts CCP. More interaction with your customers outside semi private channels or venues. Help us understand your game and your development direction. Give us some more tools to work with so that we can have more productive and accurate discussions. Confusion and misunderstanding isn’t content creation.
PS, have to add the obligatory “Not for changing or reducing current PvP mechanics in EVE; looking merely for a more accurate understanding of the game.”
Need to have a way to add that as a signature.
So if you have a problem with something your suggestion is not to solve it but to search and point at another one and cry ‘look here is a bigger problem’?
I think the issues are also in numbers, 80k and 1% from that killed illegally is just 800 peeps. Seems small number for a good dataset to claim anything, while the 5% only stays in the game actually from those 80k new players. So if even all those peeps who were ganked would be in the game, thats only 800 peeps.
What with the rest that was not interested enough in the game altogether despite not being ganked?
Is game so bad that they have to fuel the bad agressive nature of a human so it stays for longer to seek revenge? To then realize they would rather have to join gankers, because they cant make them go away, and killing them means nothing really?
Why nobody asks the important question here?
I guess? I mean if 99% of new players stop playing Eve because the UI is too confusing, CCP probably should focus on cleaning up the UI and explaining it better to new players.
PvP isn’t a problem for Eve - it is a feature. No doubt there are better and worse ways to expose new players to the reality of the game, and there are other balance issues that can make the game more or less fun for new entrants, but if your goal is increasing new player retention, you probably should first see where the problem areas are.
That is was the goal of Quant and Rise back then, and they established, without a doubt the completely plausible fact that there are so many things more problematic to new player retention than the “myth” as they called it that “griefers” drove true new players away. In fact, their data suggest that early exposure to non-consensual PvP might even serve as the “Magic Moment” as it was later called to make them long-term players.
But regardless of that, so many more basic and critical issues were identified that CCP has spent the last 5 years trying to fix the NPE. I won’t be surprised if we see another major revamp of this in 2021. Most new players were, and probably still are bored or confused out of the game than “griefed” out of it, and it is here that CCP has been, and should continue to spend their efforts.
Yet you’re asking CCP to act upon a problem that you imagine is relevant…
There always be THE problem for a specific player(type) and your work will never be complete if you only hear those people.
The problem for certain players, like yourself, is that people can kick your teeth in without asking for permission; in a game that’s always been marketed as an open world PvP sandbox.
Only the loudest voices aka nullbears are heard,this is the why this game has its problems.
This game has problems because CCP, in their infinite wisdom, have tried to attract players from more mainstream games that don’t allow the stuff that CCP does.
You should play another game that caters to what you want instead of trying to ruin a game that doesn’t cater to you, but does cater to those of us looking for something a little different from the bland fare of the mainstream.
You literally just copied my reply format from another post I made, changed the facts to opinions and posted it here. Here let me post the original and CORRECT content for you
" To the point, the hard part about retention in an MMO is that it requires KNOWLEDGABLE AF veterans taking an active roll in the community to essentially organize the playerbase. In Eve the most knowledgeable players are the PvPers because they typically understand both the PvE and PvP sides of the game and can provide insight from a broader perspective.
@DeMichael_Crimson mentioned revenge earlier. Who do you think teaches that PvP interested newbro how to get his revenge? Mission runners? lol. And the $9000 question. Why are we so focused on trying to keep newbro A from losing a ship when we should be focusing on retaining newbro B (the PvPer) who didn’t quit when he lost his first ship?
Why aren’t the PvPers building a community and training newbros anymore? Because we have no ways to support each other. We can’t use logistics, or remote support, as a matter of fact, we don’t even fleet with each other anymore. What are we going to do with a newbro? You think a newbro is going to have fun flying around solo? It’s not like I can logi him either if he gets an engagement. So what now. He sits on a gate in a wardec corp? That’s boring af. Suicide ganks in a fleet for lulz and no money? Not gonna really progress his character much that way.
High-sec baiting/can-flipping/suspect play has traditionally been the entry-level PvP content. If all it takes is a corporation and a community to retain a PvP player then we should be allowing suspects to once again fleet up by unrestricting the use of remote support."
I don’t think it’s rational to conclude that PvP discourages new players. Is it possible that more new players are turned off by boring safety mechanics, and dangerous PvP risks are what keep most paying customers interested?
So, uh, if the prevailing sentiment is “that is bad” then why would we do it? The assortment of carebears on the forum love real-world analogies, so here’s one for you: we don’t do studies to figure out things like “exactly how much radiation will kill a human” because that would be harmful, so why would we intentionally do that to EVE? Also, it’s your job to show that it wouldn’t be bad, as you are making the claim.
I think carrying this quote further doubles its irony because I believe empowering CONCORD and empowering players are mutually exclusive. The more powerful the NPC police, the harder it is for real people to do anything that matters as a police force.
Even if people really do want the power to protect themselves, you know they wouldn’t use it because they already have that power and argue that having to use good judgement in deciding where to field their expensive bling is hurting player retention. Sarcasm: It’s not their fault for making bad decisions. It’s your fault for taking advantage of their bad decisions.
Highsec conspires to relegate players to the most boring and empty of tasks unless they have a padded bank account, and people argue that they have to do these things to get the money. How about we make fun content cheaper instead. To wit, I have a few suggestions to empower players as well.
Tell CONCORD to step off a bit to give players more time to get a meaningful kill. This is obviously a win for gankers in the purely objective sense, but it makes gankers more viable as content. Cheap content.
Remove structure requirements to ally in a wardec. Only two parties need a structure for wardec mechanics to work. I prefer removing the requirements entirely, but at least let people ally on the cheap.
Scale wardec costs to the size of the aggressing force. A small band of casual terrorists should not be spending weeks grinding to afford a short period mayhem. Such a group makes a good target (content!) for player law enforcement.
Make wardec immunity intermittent at best. Abusing wardec immunity is so common that it is considered normal and finding a way to engage in combat in spite of that is thought to be the exploit. Reverse course, and make everyone vulnerable to some degree to drive home the point it’s the other way around.
Tell FacPo to take a hike and never come back, or vastly increase the delay in their response to make lingering in reach of vigilante justice viable. Criminals in space are free content and they can’t be there with NPCs harassing them.
I best stop before this becomes a rant, but these would be the ideas I imagine people would actually be exploring if they wanted to exercise their power to change things for themselves. I haven’t thought about or discussed these suggestions enough to say they are great, or even good, ideas but they do imply the person suggesting them would actually be willing to do something themselves instead of letting robots do all their work. *humph*
I rarely go anywhere near High-Sec except when logging in my Jita character. I’ve dealt with plenty of new players. I’m happy to have helped save them from the boredom that is High-Sec.
@Olamm Given that the game, with its rules of engagement and mechanics in hisec (which have become a bit stricter in hisec), has existed for 17+ years, what is OP’s opinion on the expectations, resolve and creativity of new players trying out EvE ? And what about their understanding of the Eve universe, that learning how to survive is an integral part of the learning curve ?
I’m on the fence. I read these forums and rarely contribute, because all I ever see are sweeping generalisations from both sides. The idea that Eve doesn’t have a problem with ganking is ludicrous, but equally, there is no immediate solution that seems workable without offending a bunch of people on these forums who seem to believe that this is anything other than a replacement for real gameplay mechanics around piracy and combat.
I think a point that the OP makes that is reasonable, is that the person being ganked suffers way more than the person ganking. There is almost no real penalty for people who choose to play this way apart from a loss of a throwaway ship (which by definition is calculated to realise a profit) and a loss of security status, which most will simply work around in various ways.
There are more important things missing in Eve that drive new players away, but Ganking as a concept highlights something fundamentally broken in Eve.
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