How to get more people to play eve online?
I love the real life feel and harshness of in-game Eve Online markets and finance. I really enjoy the trade aspect of this game and its skills + margin.
I really hope that we can get more people to play this game! Would be even more fun of more items being bought and sold, exchanging hands + more ganking and combat!
Gotta have more product awareness. Too many folks that had heard of EVE Online 10 years ago don’t know that it’s even still alive. Too many youngins haven’t really heard enough of EVE to be interested. Any advertising done will need to at least give folks a look into EVE so that they can see how different it is from the umpteen trillion other online places that they can subscribe or ‘trial’ instead.
Those days have gone…If it weren’t for all the players with gobs of isk, I doubt there would be a player base at all.
Someone needs to stroke their victimization complex.
Getting more people into EVE would probably be something like 2 Expansions per year and continuous development on their contents. Also more things to do in space as opposed to only with other people or in fleets. More people would probably also come in or back if CCP could actually develop properly even the smallest things like 100% loot drops.
Okay umm bro youre a weirdo.
I simply brought up ganking of its fun to have more people and lifeblood, of ships floating around and various player activities happening. I do not pvp or gank people, so don’t be an idiot. I meant its fun to have ganking happening around you, or i enjoy and don’t mind being ganked.
Better than the alternative of a dying game and ghost town of no players in space.
Running advertisements is the usual way companies try to attract more customers.
PA, what do you think? It’s been a long time since I’ve seen an EVE ad.
Okay here is a very foreign concept - lower the price tags on everything and all of a sudden, people can buy stuff and the hunter - prey relationships is fixed.
Its not about getting more people to play, but getting more players to stay.
Actually CCP’s own data shows we get thousands of people interested in EVE every week, but we lose 70% of them before they’ve spent even a couple hours in the game.
So I think the key to getting more people in would be to do some serious research on:
Addressing those questions alone would probably add 500 new players per week to EVE.
Of course, keeping those 500 after the first few hours would require a little more work.
its very simple the turn off is
Skills training at life speed - low income within the first month
takes too long to train into a decent or T2 ship and the cost only to turn it into salvage is the killer
We all know how to make isk and yeah inject skills if you got access to daddies credit card but for a game that takes years to play is whats turning 70% off nothing else the facts are there ccp know this and there is totally nothing they can do about it other then entice with free give stuff as there answer.
I think a lot of people go into this game thinking it is like World of Warcraft or some first person shooter most people can’t get beyond the user interface it overwhelms them, then there are others that like to be overwhelmed they find it immersive it’s personality’s that are the dividing line of Eve online some people want something more than a game and other’s don’t, some people want simplicity. This will change only in time when people stop comparing a video game to an MMORPG.
The game is actually INCREDIBLY unfun.
I’ve watched friends playing the game for the first time, and they’re lost, confused, and they’re not hooked by anything. The starting tutorial is like 10 minutes of slowboating to loot “survivors” from “wrecks” that you never do anything with afterwards.
None of my friends had the patience to get through the hour long tutorial, slowboating around with nothing but an Afterburner, lock/orbit/firing each rat and getting no feedback other than just some number pop ups.
The game is not a fun game. The fun comes when you create your own story and your own goals and start working towards it. But the game itself is not a fun game. It’s not fun mechanically, it’s not engaging, fitting ships is exceedingly complex with 99.99% of the choices being WRONG. etc. etc. etc.
I agree with your assessment. In the long run, the game is closer to a strategy game than an action game, and the satisfaction players get from it is probably more like a chess or ‘go’ game than from a typical MMORPG.
This is partially an expectation-management issue: people hear about EVE and maybe see some of the videos (something like EVE: Retribution Trailer ) and think they are going to be playing X-Wing vs Tie Fighter Meets Civ4: The Space MMO!
Then they meet barrier after barrier between their expectations and the reality. Keep in mind though that we aren’t losing the most players before they complete the hour-long tutorial… we’re losing half of them before they even log in to the game.
I’ve asked several people to try out EVE over the years, and 3 this year alone.
One stopped right at the “Sign up and register” EveOnline.com page. He just said there wasn’t anything there to interest him. (Not sure what he expected, really)
Another stopped when the EVE download manager finished downloading, said 'Copying to desktop, copying files, setup complete, click launcher icon". He clicked launcher icon, got a “Boing! Error shared library XXblahblahJY2 not found” popup that went away before he even finished reading it. That was it for that one.
The third said “okay, I’ll try it, get back to you”. (He’s not close enough for me to be present when he plays.) A couple weeks later we were chatting and he said “Yeah, tried it, cancelled the tutorial after 10 minutes because it was a waste of time, tried a couple career agents, boring, went to look for something to fight, took too long. Maybe I’ll give it a go next time I’m between games.”
I’m not saying these are ‘typical’ responses to the EVE startup process, or that other games do these things better, or that these players were or weren’t the ‘right type’ of player for EVE. Just that if we’re losing thousands of players a week before they even finish the tutorial, then some fine tuning in those first few steps would probably have the biggest impact.
CCP has said something like 20k people a week (or month?) try eve for the FIRST time, every one of those cycles. Even if that’s a month, if you could get HALF to stay, over 6 months, just iamgine what would happen.
It’s not that people are not picking it up. It’s that they’re not staying.
To be fair, eve is HARD–it’s a damn hard game to get into and understant. I know some one who just a week ago tried it for the first time–they waited 2 years to come off deployment to try it, and they got about 3 hours in and realize that it’s HARD. They have not logged in since.
The UI in other games is more simple, it’s more intuitive. As eve players we all know what a little triangle, or three little lines do–opens BIG doors. For a new player, those things are so small and insignificant, that they cant even find them. SO MUCH of the game is locked behind those options too.
I think a lot of it is due to the obscurity of things like that, the difficulty of it, the fact that you cant really warp to places without having a lock on it…
I started in 2004, i came from the only other space MMO at the time, Earth and Beyond… and it was AMAZING. I remember coming here and … being really mad i couldnt FLY my ship, in EnB we had simple controls, but we could fly it, and it make sense to do so. We could also warp anywhere we wanted without needing a destination, and that felt amazing. Ofcourse, space was much smaller, so heading off the beaten path could land you in a heated pocket of rats… in eve you’d find empty space. There was COLOR–bright, beautiful colors–the ‘darkness’ of eve really turns a lot of people off RIGHT AWAY. I get that it’s the theme of the game, but it’s just another reason not to stay tbh.
So eve is not like that, it’s not … a fantastic, fantasy journey like that. It’s cold. Empty. Dark. It’s PvP and … your encounters happen in limited places.
So between the obscure stuff (like, just having a GOOD out of the box overview setup would fix a TON of early problems) being locked away in 35 different places, space not being ‘fantasy’ enough to ‘find your own adventure’ … it’s just …
Not a game for everyone.
I DO think that CCP could take steps to make it better.
Like the trigvalian pockets, those should be things that… at lvl 1 or 2, you could just hit warp, and in a few seconds, pop into one of those pockets, get rid of the ‘gate’ feeling for that, make it feel like you’re going to a place in space, something you could warp to… a kind of ‘fantasy’ magic a space mmo needs.
First of all, better tutorial. Make Aura more vocal, more engaging. Blue window with dry text is far from being effective in a videogame.
More customizable tooltips. Whatever there is is not enough. You shouldnt have to litter your screen with atribute windows everytime you want to remind yourself of basic stats. Especially when you’re starting to learn the game. Lack of tooltips on some atributes within information window is also an issue. Forcing new players to browse the web for basic info is no good.
Make overview more eye-catching with more customization options including dynamic windows and artwork. Players would do the rest for you. Also add more options for better ergonomy of the UI and HUD in settings. For instance, why on earth can’t I change HUD size without rescaling the UI ?!
That’s it, going to bed now.
O7
I would quit the game if CCP intentionally interfered with the price of a player driven market like this. CCP has no place in fiddling with these markets outside of tangential impact on PLEX and only PLEX.
My stuff is saved from your sheer inability to comprehend words on a screen. 
Not blowing up new players with Trigs might help lol Wait! What? 30% retention rate? yea sure lmao Lies…
Trying to retain new players and keeping the game going in the way that many seem to like it is diametrically opposed.
It is unfortunate that so many are willing to ride it down in flames just to keep things from returning to more like they were at launch.
