That isnt you SamuraiJack, or is it now? 
Close. I remember him. He was more down near K9 (I think) area. That outpost went up a couple months after the first ones.
Hm - i dont dare say the name Cyvok now - that would be too simple. But its good to see other wrinkled faces still roaming about in any case 
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Citidels and carebears are killing this game, the risk adverse will always whine the loudest, it’s a pvp game and should always be focused on such… Social corps and being in a npc corp for longer than a month you experience nothing of the game this making the main goal of the game pointless…
Pvp is for everyone, and if your a carbear your pvping without knowing it… Market is pvp based.
Ahh, the indoctrination worked well on this one.
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He isn’t wrong though.
Players aren’t sticking around for farmville in space. They run the content and when they are finished levelling up their raven they leave.
Trying to create more content for them hasn’t worked. Drifters. Trigs, Abyss. Resource wars. Pve events. Orcas.
Making them safer hasn’t worked. Wardec nerfs. Ganking nerfs.
They still leave.
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They also dont stick around for constant death or being broke either. Most people stay for social reasons like relations with others however those are formed
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They are though.
There is nothing to support the claim that players don’t stick around for ‘constant death’ except anecdotal evidence from carebears. Instead players that are killed illegally are sticking around longer.
Sure forming relationships with other players is a big help at retaining them. But more players form relationships in pvp environments than pve. In fact the opposite is common in pve. Players try to find ways to do pve on their own. Even isolate themselves in their own corps.
Its time to step outside the cage and see the bigger picture.
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You may be more right than you realise.
I myself was pushing for more interesting pve 5 years ago or so. But when i did i thought it would take a couple years, i thought it would be ‘quick wins’. Not the 5-6 years we’ve seen. I knew back then that any pve that ccp made would be like pve in any game. It would be clocked and farmed by players in no time. So there wasn’t much value in spending so much effort on it and trying to keep pve players endlessly appeased. They always move on to the next game after a while.
I also didn’t expect them to gut hi-sec pvp at the same time.
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Everybody moves. Rivers flow. Time passes. But eventually people come back to see what changed.
The thing with seeing bigger picture is also about how the game could be seen from outside to potential player and what that player expects from space game with spaceships and avatars. Player that probably already tried WoW, Star Trek, GTA Online, WoT or other multiplayer, but also single player games. Maybe heard about Star Citizen and wonders if he could play something similar for free right now. There are players that doesnt play fantasy genre exclusively, or Sci-fi. Players try new things all the time.
Whats hopefull, the shape of game is still being decided, even after all those years. 
Whats worse can be better.
They only need to keep the good things intact.
More misinterpreted data you’ve never understood. Repeating it every chance you get won’t make it true.
There is also nothing to prove that players ‘stick around’ for the PvP. PvP is a minority activity in EVE, always has been. The ‘PvP wannabe’ players freaked out when Crimewatch came along and ‘forced’ them to have ‘criminal’ flags that allowed players other than their weak target to PvP them.
Most of the PvPers in EVE have never been about PvP… they’ve been about trying to make themselves feel badass by winning easy fights, and validate their importance by getting another person upset.
The PvP died because it was mostly designed for crap PvPers who were catering to their own emotional issues. The PvE died because it was never good in the first place. EVE is dying (slowly but surely) because CCP never learned how to design actually decent game mechanics that support the way they want the game to work.
It’s not about ganking, it’s not about ‘nerfs to PvP’, it’s not about “today’s players just don’t have the balls of the players from the good ol’ days”, it’s not even about needing better or more PvE… it’s about poor game design eventually wrecking the game once all the flaws become too much to ignore.
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But from amount of ratting done right now, I think its more alive than ever.
Lots of explorers too.
Abot PvP part I agree, but its like that in every game. Relatively small number of players are good PvPers that want to PvP equally good players, the rest is just happy getting easy kills, not challenge that can overwhelm and they would have to adapt instead of rage quitting.
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Yeah, you know why everyone pvp’s…and all their mental inadequacies. 
You guys are missing ‘the big picture’ as you would put it.
Grouping together to do pve is ok for an hour or two, but after that it gets boring. You are repeating the same actions in the same ships over and over again. It’s fine as means to an end (making money). But it is not engaging after a while. In any game. Clearly.
Grouping together to hunt other players is a whole different kettle of fish. It’s much less repetitive. Using the same tactics will actually end up getting you killed. Not paying attention will get you killed. Multi-boxing too much will get you killed. Your opponent is far more aware than any npc, they can spot you coming and adapt to counter you. It is hard to describe how much more everyone is involved when it comes to pvp.
Google ‘pvp shakes’ and see how often eve online comes up.
It’s just telling that the people knocking it with knee jerk reactions and making all the claims without supporting evidence are the ones who don’t do it themselves…
Get away from the mentality of ‘good pvp’. Read the 8 rules of eve again.
As far as player engagement and retention goes. It works! And then some.
Sorry, but stating your opinion again for the n’th time doesn’t make it a fact. As for ‘supporting evidence’ I can’t recall you hardly ever coming out with anything but stating your own opinions endlessly. Feel free to toss in anything factual you’ve got here on how the PvP in EVE helps retain players.
Yes, PvP is more interesting and engaging than the PvE in EVE (in most cases). That said, it’s never been interesting or engaging enough in EVE to equate to much more than a sideline activity some people do. I suspect PI probably has as many people participating as PvP does.
People normally get ‘pvp shakes’ not because it’s an exciting or thrilling activity, but because there is a risk of meaningful loss. People are programmed to get hyper when they are in a situation where a significant loss may occur. That doesn’t mean the PvP is interesting, well designed, or even fun. It only means something more than a ‘respawn’ is at risk. (People even get combat-shakes in games where the primary ‘loss’ effect is a respawn, btw - it’s not that significant a thing.)
You also make the typical mistake that because someone who owns literally dozens of characters is posting on one of them, that they don’t and have never PvPed on any of them. If that’s your assumption I’d have to say your own zkillboard says you’re a crap PvPer who’s had a tiny amount of PvP experience spread across the last 10 years, none of it very recent. And many of the ‘argue for PvP’ crowd have even worse zkillboards. (Take a look at Salt Foambreaker, for instance)
Try responding to people’s points, with actual facts, rather than using your opinions as gospel and making ad hominem attacks, and your arguments will go over a lot better.
Should PvP be more common, more interesting, more engaging and more supported in EVE? Certainly. Should EVE do a better job of directing players into the PvP activities and teaching them that ships are replaceable tools? Obviously. Does EVE do these things? No.
If CCP wants EVE to attract and retain players based on its’ PvP model, they need to make significant changes so that PvP is more interesting to more players. Not just the weaksauce wannabes who need to hunt easy targets in safe space to get their jollies.
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Are you saying this is a lie?
Can you show something that says otherwise?
What about the wardec nerfs that were made to stop their ‘stark’ effects on player retention? That worked didn’t it!
Funny how you focus on me and not this:
You always so biased?
If ccp nerfed level4 missions such that they paid 1isk a day, how much would people partake in that?
Yeah repeated nerfs to pvp have had an effect on it’s participation. Maybe we should stop nerfing it.
Uh huh. So you’re saying you’re a regular wardeccer are you? Do you suicide gank? What hi-sec pvp do you do? Are you part of the:
How about you @Nana_Skalski? You have emotional issues? Or are you:
Or how about you @WorstPilotEver? You must be a solo pvp guru right?
Sure, I made an ‘assumption’. What a typical mistake of mine. 
I am, but when it comes to your opinions, it’s important to know they don’t come from a position of experience. Like people who say gankers are sociopaths. You don’t understand the otherside of the coin at all.
Wow you’re right.
I’d hate to do something like this:
Let me repeat your quote to put things back into context:
I allowed myself to extend your statement. The proven parts officially followed up by CCP themselves is that retention was almost exclusively tied to players engaging with others - no matter if pve, pvp or whatever. It is the interaction with actual players in any form of corporation that showed the highest form of ‘sticking around’ not a specific part of the gameplay.
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If you don’t feel the problem high sec wannabe PvPers had with Crimewatch was the flag timers, feel free to elucidate any other ‘nerf’ to PvP you care to, in detail. Rather than making vague references to nerf after nerf.
You often take the position that ‘frequent nerfs to PvP have cost the game players’ (which it has, though the question is about extent and whether the same changes retained other players), and that ‘more PvP will keep more players around’ and that ‘PvP is good for socializing’. You state these opinions, but rarely have a shred of data to back them up.
You often misinterpret the 2015 “our brief study has shown no evidence that illegal ganks drive players away, but rather a very slight tendency to stick around” as showing “ganks in high sec PvP retains players”. The actual summary of that data from any meaningful statistical analysis (given the terms they use to describe it) would be “over the span of this small study, illegal ganking in high sec did not show a conclusive effect in either direction”.
I’ve PvPed, I find it boring. I get no kick out of attacking weaker targets, I have zero interest in another player’s ‘salt’, I don’t need to prop up my ego by pretending I’m a badass in a video game for killing weaker players. Thus, the only challenge PvP in EVE presents to me is going up against reasonably fair competition in a test of skill and builds, and that almost never happens in EVE. As people often say, if you’re in a fair fight in EVE, you both did something wrong. I’m also completely uninterested in TiDi pissing matches over whose alliance is the big boy.
So yes, certainly for me in particular, EVE is not interesting for PvP, and likely never will be. For PvP I go to games that are actually designed to make PvP interesting and easily accessible. That doesn’t prevent me from spending a dozen years reading EVE forums and blogs and newsposts and watching what happens in the game.
You also keep trying to build the case that the “wardec nerfs” were bad for retention or at least ineffective. There are many other factors applying to retention over the same period of time, not least of which is simply the increased ISK cost per wardec. Some metrics CCP has shown are up, others are down. It’s obviously still a work in progress, and IMO was never a huge factor in overall player retention anyway. While the previous effects of wardecs may well have been ‘stark’ on the people typically wardecced against, I doubt that was ever a very significant percentage of the player base.
To put it another way, the current wardec system hasn’t really helped much. But then, the player trends of the past 10 years show that none of the previous wardec systems were any good for player retention either.
I don’t find your position overly ‘wrong’, per se, just that it is usually misdirected and poorly focused in a way that won’t help EVE improve and move forward. I also find your emphasis on high sec ganking to be weaksauce and lame. And generally you have too few facts to support your positions.
“Going back to PvP the way it was” won’t fix EVE, it was always poorly designed. “Making PvP work better and be more interesting in EVE” is certainly something I could get behind. “Bring back the good ol’ days” isn’t.
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My first kill was a Titan. Check killboard.
And now more seriously. I dont like PvP in EVE because its too much micromanagement and I am bad at this. I like the PvP games where you have to plan tactically and where reaction times and positioning are important, but where you have not too many levers to push in the encounter itself. In EVE I always forget something and even in Gila I cant really kill anything because there is just too many things going on and I cant remember them all.
Maybe with a lot of practice I would be good at solo pvp, but for now I am skilled in evading fights more than anything, what really goes nicely with my prime activity in EVE- PvE.
Thats my oppinion, as much as its worth.
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