For some reason I’ve avoided this thread until now. I don’t know why, but most likely because the title of the thread to me, poses the wrong question/challenge. Here’s my TL;DR:
TL;DR:
It isn’t our role to get more people to play EVE. That’s CCP’s. But as a community, we can do a lot to help keep people once they find the game.
Longer response:
It’s CCP’s role to bring people to the game. It’s in their best interest to do so and they have marketing professionals to help with that.
However once they are here, we can do a lot to provide a community that they want to stay part of.
That’s the difficulty I have with a number of changes in recent years that have near eliminated some aspects of the game that gave EVE the reputation it has and the niche it fills, but that provided ways to weed out the truly toxic people.
It’s allowed scumbags to thrive and to do far more damage than highsec pvpers, or lowsec gate camps, or nullbear F1 monkeys, etc.
For example, take Naari Naarian. Claims to be a 2003 player, raising an Alliance of new players in highsec, yet he does nothing but scam those new players.
In less than a week for example, he sought donations of 7.25 Billion from a group of new players, to fund further expansion of his scam alliance and for secret projects that involve funding purchases for himself:
A Procurer BPO is 1.4 Billion, not 2 Billion.
I have heard he uses excess ISK from his scams to fund PLEX so he can play as an Omega, by continuously asking for donations from his new player corp/alliance members. No evidence of that yet, but it does go with the style of his play.
A 2003 player, can’t even fund 250 million for Corp expansion and needs to scam it from new players that don’t know any better.
He charges 1 Billion ISK non-refundable for members to take on certain roles and spams them to take them on whenever he can:
Instead of fixing up his own security, he instead threatens his new players with 250 million ISK fines for mining into cans:
And now, after making enemies of everyone in the forum through his inconsistent information and lies, he has himself wardecced.
Instead of being adult about that, he’s now kicking people, even the good people in his Corp after he let in several gankers and awoxers:
After promoting new players to move their stuff into his Raitaru (which he didn’t pay for but got through other Corp members), he’s now locked them away and forced those new players into using asset safety at 15% cost to them individually.
Many of these players don’t have the ISK to cover that at this point in their time in game.
And of course, he changed the Corporate tax rate to 100% (it’s changed back again now, but he just does these things for short periods of time when he knows it will advantage him):
New players don’t understand what this means. They don’t see that he is directly stealing from their time in game. They just see how hard it is to get into the game because they rat and mine and do the other things that new players do, and the person they think they are following, is stealing from them constantly.
How do we get more people to play? We get rid of scumbag liars like this.
We look after new players properly (no matter what their preferred playstyle, whether it’s highsec pvpers, industry, mining, ganking, whatever). We help them and teach them how to play the game.
Don’t act like Naari.
That alone is a good start.