When you look at the population starting of 34k and then you factor in the “niche” value of this game, a 2.9% increase in population is better than a negative value.
And again, seeing as the game has grown by a factor of 13% or about 4k players over a 10 year spread. Which is better than a Roth IRA which is about 8% over a 10 year. Or even better than the US population growth of 0.7% over a year.
So again, 3% increase in a year is a decent increase.
Of course it is. PvE is a huge part of EVE.
I don’t need a graph to want to jump off a bridge
Oh look, this guy must be new to EVE forums of any kind because he thinks ‘facts’ and ‘well reasoned analysis’ of things actually means something 
The “EVE is dying, just look at the PCU!” crowd falls into two catagories IMO:
The majority are “Doomsayers” who, like real life doomsayers, try to predict the end of things so they won’t be caught off guard when the end comes. Bascially, they are having an anxiety response at the notion of all their ‘hard work’ and ‘investment’ in the game going away so they raise the alarm of “EVE is Dying” hoping that CCP will some how shore up the game, thus protecting their emotional stake in it.
And then there are the fewer but imo more contemptible “opportunistic manipulators” ,ie those people who try to use the idea that EVE is dying to gain support (with other players, and with CCP) for their usually self-centered ideas for the game, basically saying “omg people are leaving EVE, quick CCP, you better do the thing that I have been coincidentally complaining loudly and frequently about for the last several years before it too late!!!”
It would be funny to watch if it weren’t kind of sad lol.
Eve is not dying, however Eve is in decline ‘at the moment’, as can be seen from LouHodo’s list of player/account logins since 2003 and this is for a number of reasons, most of which have already been mentioned.
If you look at that set of data you see that between 2003 and 2010 the player/account numbers increased from 6,000 to 47,000 and then dropped slightly before climbing to its max at 48,000. However since then and up until last year there has been a drop to 33,000, a reduction of almost one third, before the trend started to move upward again. Unfortunately for us all any set of figures can be shown to prove almost anything if explained and manipulated in a set or certain way.
Take myself for example, I am one player but enjoyed EVE enough to have 13 characters spread over six accounts (none of which are cyno toons) and would regularly have 3 or 4 of those accounts logged in at any one time. So do I contribute to the ‘player’ count or the ‘account’ count or both.
As it happens CCP’s attempt to apply a funnel to my sandbox by adding the events to the upper right corner of the character selection screen has meant that I have not logged in since the day after they decided to implement that change. This attempt to manipulate and direct my game play means that I will probably not be logging in again anytime soon. Are CCP bothered, I do not think so as the income I no longer bring into the game will be offset by the newcomers who click the links on youtube or various other websites to give the game a go.
With regards to whether EVE is failing to be an appealing sandbox, that all depends on each individual player and each players style of game play, some will thoroughly enjoy it, I know I did, and some will hate it but that is the same for all games whether virtual or real.
Whether friend or foe fly safe.
The argument Cade presented is that there are software limitations that restrict what you can do, not just in EVE but any game. Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen even, “what you can do” must be coded by the developers previously.
Your idea of “pure sandbox” exists only in pen-and-paper, Dungeons and Dragons type games, where the game master has no restriction and can truly let the players do whatever the hell they want. For computer games, you have to disregard the “computer” restrictions when considering what is and is not a sandbox. For EVE, the limitations below do NOT make the game less of a sandbox:
If you discount the computer/software limitations, EVE is just about as sandbox as a game can be. WoW is themepark but not at the end of the spectrum, you still have some freedom in that game. If you want a true themepark game, Dungeon Siege would be the definition of it; the progression is completely linear with no forks in the decisions or even in the direction you walk through the areas.
When you have a big epic battle your participating the first downside is time delay, you can work around it somehow, not really pleasing.
After that comes everything is breaking, you can’t click stuff, the UI is not responding, targets are being locked but it’s not completing the cycle.
Than whoever in charge of CCP time delay management starts to reduce time delay while you can clearly hear everyone on comms that everything is breaking. (it does that all the time)
Not sure if it correlates with each other but anyway everything is breaking.
I can go on and on about everything in eve online which is not done right or wrong or not appealing, and I can mention everything which is done right in eve online.
But in the end if you stack those 2 list which each other, the list which has everything wrong will be the winner, and that’s why people stay away from this game or leave the game.
People are looking for fun but they rather seek it elsewere
Good sandbox have:
Yes, I get that, I’m saying that this thinking is inherently flawed.
It’s both divorced from the realities of existing games and game design but also something of a “No True Scotsman” argument, but in this case by your definition there is no such thing as a “Pure Sandbox” game. There’s no way to design a game without restrictions on what can be done in it, that’s called life and would require a basically 100% accurate simulation of the world.
In game terms a sandbox is simply a game that doesn’t railroad the player from one area to another and leaves all the actual decision making up to the player on what to do and how to play.
Any game is, by definition, a series of rules and rules by definition are restrictions.
I would disagree with your comment stating that EVE is not appealing. However, with that being said, the main point of contention would be the fact that you can die so easily, and everything is lost upon dying (speaking of ships/cargohold/T3C cases: SP)
I’m not stating EVE is unappealing. I get that the question can be read incorrectly though and people might think it is meant to be derision. The question is meant to be thought of in more objective ‘academic’ terms really.
I did make some comments in my post that are subjective though that have led to some derailing of the point of the thread. Regardless of those comments the point of the thread is to promote some objective analysis by EVE’s intelligent playerbase.
It leaves things pretty open ended in regards to any and all facets of EVE’s current design (or that was my intention). What is it doing right? What is it doing wrong? What could be improved and how?
Academics that are completely divorced from reality is called fiction and while there’s certainly value in fiction that value is not in the analytical side of things.
Eve is better described as a love letter to the military and related simulation games of the late 1980’s and early to mid-1990’s. They were complex beyond belief, required manuals in the 100’s of pages, had keyboard overlays because almost all the keys did something, and were quite vast in what was available to do in them despite the hardware limitations of the era. The programmers dreamed big and pushed the hardware to the limit.
As as a fan of those old sims, from my perspective it looks like someone took the code from several, attached it to a database, then said “what if we let other people interact with each other…” Eve’s heart is in a past era where the limit was pushed not necessarily to sell millions of units, but to see if it could be done. That’s probably why I enjoy it so much and why I am so glad I was introduced to it a few years ago.
Per the original question, the status of Eve as a niche game and why it doesn’t appeal to mainstream players is precisely because of its nature and the evolution of games since the time of those sims.
If I go buy a PC game tomorrow, I’m more or less guaranteed that:
1: It will work with a controller with a limited set of buttons and/or a touchscreen.
2: Needed documentation is handled by a simple diagram in the box or the game.
3: Gameplay concepts are covered by in-game tutorials or steady progression and in some cases the tutorials can be accessed from in-game menus for later reference.
4: With persistence I can reach the end goal or accomplish a satisfactory outcome without unexpected resistance, barring the occasional bug or crash. Progress can usually be measured each session.
Remove any one of these, or rely too much on the persistence of point 4, and you lose most of the mainstream interest as current mainstream players likely did not have to suffer the indignity of finding the keyboard overlay or the piece of paper or part of the manual that had the code to get past the copy protection on the diskette in order to even play, let alone figure out the command line. That required patience, something which in casual modern gamers is mostly lacking.
I don’t see Eve making the evolutionary leap from Bethesda’s '89 Terminator to Fallout 4 to attract the casuals. It would require too many trade-offs to map everything to just a controller, provide a structured narrative and play-through tutorial to introduce all mechanics and their activities, and provide sufficient direction to help those who normally don’t live in the narratives of their own mind along the path while still catering to those with the initiative to make their own stories within the rules.
As such, Eve will likely remain a niche game for a very specific type of gamer, and as long as it does well at that, it will do fine.
In the law world, that’s considered an illegal loaded question, like “When did you stop beating your wife?” We know it’s a sandbox, but did it stop being appealing? Also, if that happened another question of “When?” Anyway, to answer the question, “It stops being appealing if/when you have enough ISK that you don’t know what to do them, or if/when you don’t care how bad your KB looks [that never really happens BTW, but one might embrace his own suck and move on], or if/when you stopped going out looking for new and unknown (therefore dangerous) adventures.”
IMO, it’s a great sandbox, and a huge one. If I ever wanted to quit being lazy, I could find plenty of strange and random characters who’d get me into good, bad, or pointless adventures, most often leading toward being asploded. But strangely fun nonetheless. 
Graphs usually have a datastory, like what each login actually means.
As a single person who logs in with multiple accounts. What if one day I just used one account. Or another I login with five.
Also there have been permanent bans of group botting accounts. Do we need those?
Also graphs usually look wierd towards the end and have a sharp drop off, as all the data is not yet included in the graph. So you should discount some data at the Imediate end of th graph, like 24 hours in this case.
So why are we looking at a graph, which may or may not show actual players (depending a random of multiple logins per person), to enjoy EVE?
Is it now graphs online?
For a start people get put off being told how to play. Which CCP does. So EVE is not a sandbox, it’s probably more like a kitty litter tray.
CCP wants everyone to ReCruiT a fRieNd, like that advert they have out now. Your average gang of young professional neighbours and friends who love a bit of light hearted fun, you know the normal EVE player type.
Then you all get together in gangs and gang up on other smaller gangs for hilarious adventures. When you get really carried away with the spreadsheeted risk management then obviously the biggest gangs are the most fun, and that’s when CCP approves your choice of sandbox playstyle. Until the tidi hits and the node goes down, but that’s just the price we have to pay for the fun of being told how to play in CCP’s sandbox.
Being able to create stuff is the whole point of sand, you can shape it. But methinks the CCP prefers to keep that fun for themselves. We get to play with the stuff they made in the sandbox, and we have to be in groups, because their cunning plan to grow the game’s profits, in a stumbling ham-fisted amateur newbie marketing way, but let’s ignore that because we all know that CCP means well.
11 MONTHS LATER
Are y’all trying to go for the oldest necro’ed post world record or what?
–Gadget looks for a cleric
If some game made you feeling varying degrees suffering,then congratulations for you find out a enjoyable game.We feeling live by suffering everyday,no?
Yo! You were gone! Welcome back!
This post does not need to be resurrected. I am going to go ahead and lock it.