I love jiggle physics! Almost as good as jifflebob mechanics! To the depths of the Pearl Abyss Cash shop we shall go! Tally-Ho!!!
Well, CCP doesn’t have trouble with people coming to EVE. Hilmar stated they’re getting 10,000 new players each week (that’s HALF A MILLION new players a year) but most of them no longer are playing after 30 days.
Last thing we sort-of-kinda-more-or-less-guessed was that retention after 30 days was around 7%, that was after the NPE icnluded the drifter battle but before the agency and redirecting to career agents.
Of course we see things differently. CCP strives to help players find the right way to becoming involved and remove roadblocks from that road, whereas I would suggest to follow players to the places they go and wonder why they decide to quit from those places instead of stay in EVE.
CCP thinks new players will forage and find the right way to food and water. I think of players like seeds growing right where they land and if it’s a inhospitable place they wane and die. Think Herders vs Farmers. 
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Best diagnose I saw last few years:
Translation for readers with special needs:
CCP and dinosaurs-players pushing new players to places where today gamers do not want to be 
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Eve looks really cool, and the art team are making it look better and better all the time. It’s bound to continually attract anyone interested in space. For many years to come.
This issue, as we all know, is retainment. We are now told, courtesy of CCP Ghost that we need to get new players into a fleet asap…
It would appear that it’s acctualy only a small percentage of players that stay. So let us not ask why wont they, rather, why would they?
It is a game stacked in the favour of bullying and intimidation. Joy at other people loss. Set in a dark unforgiving place full of lies, subterfuge and contradiction. CCP try and force you into gangs while simultaneously we should trust no one, with CCP endorsing trust as one of the most important commodities yet it’s not something you can gauge in game.
What you realize in the first 30 days is that everything that looks enticing is cock blocked by some band of bell ends and/or lack of appropriate skill points.
On top of this, we must pay real life cash or grind ingame for the privilege, and worse, our most valuble possession (It is not possible to get more peeps) our time. We are expected to pay a company in advance with both of these for many years in order to grow our character.
It survives predominantly on a core fan base that tries at every turn to hamper CCP’s attempts at instigating the changes required to make eve appeal to a larger audience.
So you can either stay as a solo player and try and survive against backdrop of hate, join a gang and just become another bell end, or ■■■■ off. With the later being the preffered option from the aforementioned core player base.
It will always have a low population player base, The only reasons I play and love this game, and have done for over 5 years, is because I have a lot of disposable income and I’m mental. Oh and I like space ships.
Let’s face it, we are all nuts. How do you sell that? …Got social or mental health issues, excess time or want to throw your money away? Join us.
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Again, so much this.
“Friends keep you playing” (a point I’ve made before, to which the dinosaurs replied ‘don’t need Facebook to play hur hur dur!’) mixed with “Trust no one, it’s all scammers and gankers”, mixed with “we have zero social tools in place to encourage teaming up or finding people, other than to say ‘GF!’ to the guy who ganked you and maybe he’ll turn out to be nice” pretty much sums up the schizophrenic disconnect of the EVE game design.
They are trying to keep and retain players, while having a base game design that actively drives people off. This graphic has been a known and accepted part of EVE for far too long:
Except it’s not really an issue of ‘the learning curve’ (which, face it, isn’t really that hard)… it’s the entire game design/NPE/play experience.
EVE needs a basic re-design of the intro process, the ways player interact, and the challenges to present to them. Unfortunately, this cannot happen while CCP spends literally tens of millions of dollars per year on programmers, designers and ‘R&D’ and wastes them turning out a couple balance tweaks, a couple buggy, crappy events that everyone hated, a couple giveaways, and some new ship skins.
Because having a big chunk of monthly subs, pre-paid, does not encourage excellence. It encourages complacency and fear of change.
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let’s not take that out of context. I have accepted the risks as many of us have, that is why we are still here. I merely allude to the visage to someone outside looking in.
A big problem with new players is, that they often lack patience. I once had a newbee that wanted his big bad Stratios now without learning the core mechanics first. I think the sorting mechanism that is the beginning stage of Eve as it is now is good the way it is. You get an overall patient community that is pretty nice and mature with only the occasional brat. Throwing more things at new players wluld just allow older players to exploit that by making new characters, if it is worthwhile and then the gap hasn’t changed or it widened even. Those that DO want to invest time in learning Eve meanwhile get rewarded right now with a nice community with many newbro-friendly corps that teach new players and a nice road to ascend to the ranks of the veterans and do the teaching yourself. I think the new player friendlieness is as high as it ever was. Heck, you get 4 times as much SP in the beginning compared to the last decade. That is a heck of a headstart in my opinion. So to conclude my argument, CCP shouldn’t change the sorting mechanism that is the sorting of players during their beginning stage.
The answer is so simple as it is hard to swallow for some guys…
Less pvp…
Patience is not the real problem but if you got shot out of your ship multiple times and have NOTHING you can do against because there is no safe spot from that crap i -as a newbie- would ask myself if the provider is trying to fool me and i would simply go to another game that gives me protection from beeing unwillingly killed by guys that are protected under the strange ccp agenda of “pvp anywhere”…
THIS is the truth about noob loss and not what ccp want you to believe…the simple fact that they are unwilling to change an outdated agenda that drives away all those “impatient” players of today…
But as some here say…“this game is not for you” right?
Well i have to say that this game is for less and less people and this number will be the only one that grows in 2019 if no 180° turnaround is made…maybe facing the reality would help here?
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This would not be beneficial to the game at all dude. Less nonconsensual pvp sure. But the economy and many play choices depend on loss. Like it or not, it’s core to eve and has to be.
I see a CCP that tries very hard to balance a lot of factors and has only made the game better over the time I have played. They continue to do so. Eve is not a finished masterpiece, it’s a work in progress.
you say “lack patience”, I say “dispassionate” People will put no end of effort into something they are passionate about.
An angler would say, “eve has great bait, but a ■■■■ line”
I had many friends quit because they were expecting a space life, not just ships. They were expecting to walk around through ships, stations and artificial landscapes, socialize gamble and make shady deals in dark corridors and generally do more than just fly a ship.
Also the default UI is absolutely trash and I am reminded of how great my setup is whenever I install eve on a new device before I copy my settings over.
I think on Reddit someone mentioned a floating camera that would show a close up of the ship you’re targeting and have selected. I think things like this, with on/off toggles of course, would keep people in it. Even zoomed in the distance between ships just makes everything look small and insignificant.
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I can’t even get my friends to try it, they will look at it and say “ooooh”,“ahhhhh” and “wooow” but when I explain it, I get “■■■■ that” and they go play gta, red dead or cod…
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Traco, Erebus
I doubt you disagree on the right amount of PvP - it just needs to be “moved around” a little:
Initial setup for new players in EVE is far too hard (excluding those who are “boosted” by rich friends, and the tiny minority who get into a rich but honest Corp).
It would help a lot of they had a “PvP on/off” switch, but of course this couldn’t be used everywhere: perhaps it could be done via a section of highSec or a “higher-than-highsec” zone. Such zones shouldn’t be profitable enough to attract blitzers and bits of course - newbie friendly also means newbie income levels.
Along with “PvP off”, there also needs to be a restriction on the ships that can harvest mission spaces intended for newish players, regardless of where they are located. All the good newbie-accessible ones are blitzed by people in ships that are unthinkably expensive for beginners.
CCP might as well surround people mining in frigates by hundreds of bots (I’m sure CODE would oblige (lol) so they never get a chance to mine a full 'roid.
Show a new player that the resource- and ISK-gathering parts of the game are rigged against them and the smart ones will leave immediately. In 2019. there is no reason to wait a year before you gain parity with the average player. Nor, for that matter, in 2009, but EVE was relatively a lot cooler then.
Back to PvP:
Everywhere other than a “newbie zone”, more PvP is better. e.g. highSec freighter ganking for profit, much easier for small groups to profit from nullSec PvP. e.g. a 10 or 20-player team should be able to (very) profitably raid a zone “owned” by a huge and powerful enemy.
I add to the “more PvP possibilities” list, but I think it’s all been said. Weirdly enough, it’s something even some bittervets see clearly.
Back to new players: there are a lot of other problems than being unable to avoid PvP and stupid stuff like CODE extortion. But "PvP on/off "in a zone that’s not too profitable, and isn’t profitable at all for non-newbies, would be a good, low-impact start.
A note for moderators (and probably a “fuse” for the life of this post /lol):
This will probably be my last constructive post on an EVE forum. I actually regret writing it already, because the other two I’ve written were both incorrectly moderated into irrelevance (for an example take a look at “Corporation & Alliance Discussion”.
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Eve is wanting in the abilty to demonstrate to a single player that investing in your character and developing personal individual incentives is applicable and worth the expenditure. Despite the fact that even though solo play is portrayed as unappealing there is a solid and rewarding meta gameplay to it.
Outside of joining with other people, it will always be outweighed by a core design that forces and rewards negative interpersonal reactions. CCP’s lack of acknowledgement and support for NPC corp activities (CAS rules) and always pushing the “join a player corp”, “you will have more fun in a corp” narrative only serves to enforce that.
Just as an example off the top of my head, gta V has a passive mode, there is a timer involved and a few other factors, when in passive mode you can not be attacked but you can not access any of your offensive materiel. This would not work in eve, a way would be found to exploit it for sure.
“Never give up, never surrender !” 
A lot of the games that have been released in the last year or so and/or Eve will be competing with over the next couple of years do get people playing together whether PVP or coop/PVE pretty early on and it is a feature that people want for instance The Division 2, Anthem (even if that game wasn’t well received) an so on.
It is something I’ve been saying for awhile if Eve wants to keep people they need to take onboard some lessons from games like City of Heroes where people from fairly early on could play out mission arcs with friends or random groups if they wished (not in the somewhat adhoc way it works in Eve with few actual coop mission arcs, etc.) and while some prefer to play solo and do their own thing a lot like to learn the ropes playing as a team.
Stuff like raids are/were all the rage for a reason and if CCP doesn’t embrace that they will continue to have high interest but poor retention of newer players.
To be fair I’ve not played the game in a few years now, let alone gone through the new player experience again, so it might be better than I think it is on those lines but from talking to people IRL or on other forums who’ve tried the game as a new player within recent months it doesn’t seem like it.
EDIT: I don’t think a lack of “PVP OFF” is actually putting off the bulk of players despite some portraying it that way mainly I think for other reasons though you do get some who just want to do a bit of industry, etc. and build up their own thing unmolested - things like forcing people who want to wardec to have a presence that can be attacked (i.e. having to have a POS or station in highsec) and some kind of similar mechanic for other forms of non-consensual PVP in highsec i.e. the ability to gank coming with some kind of consequences beyond just an often meaningless killright would probably help a lot there.
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Core sectors
(1.0-0.9)
100% Empire controlled all good stuff all wealth best chicks all dank food money and influence is concentrated there a paradise…for them.You are citizen there first pod pilot 2nd safety setting green to all mandatory
ore to mine
craptanium
yousucktanium
versus environment
L1/2 missions
scout incursions
t1 abyssal
lame drifter fleets
lame FOB rats
No structure ownership no dank isk you don’t own you are being own by empires.
PVP
Duels
If you got Wardeced you cant run here for protection you are valid target.
Kill right activation.
Industrial sectors
(0.8-0.6)
Basically current HS difference being L3 is max for missions T3 max for abyssal almostcraptanium for ore etc
Border sectors
(0.5-0.4)
These sectors provide border zone between lawless empire and secure empire space.
L4-5 can be found on both side of border t5 abyssal yes uroboros incursions yes
Drifter and FOB rats crazy mad
Leetanium can be mined here in humble amount
(0.5) mandatory yellow settings,can flipping yes.
(0.4) Concord on gates and only on gates they don’t run to help anyone being mauled in the belt or anywhere else in system they protect traffic of gate when you hit warp you aren’t their problem any more.System wide Cyno like in incursion affected areas 0.4 is sub cap play area you can capital blob via gate but cant cyno in/out so that capable sub cap fleet can ignore you completely but you can still e pen stranglers and unsuspecting “it a trap” pilots.
****CCP lore team can shape size of any area thru stories as they see fit(larger border zone deeper in high sec or deeper in true low sec)
****Players could shape zones with their actions
****compensate all “lost” systems to Core sectors to industrial sectors and Border sectors to low sec so this change don’t take current amount of systems away.
Think this is better way of security states spread that will accommodate larger amount of ppl playing without necessary taking anything away from current game.
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I don’t think opening up Jove space is really going to add much, in terms of player retention. I have been playing MMO’s since the days of MUD’s (text based MMOs). Adding new areas with tougher enemies and grosser loot adds a short term boost, but ultimately the market gets flooded with the new stuff and players go back to their usual patterns. In the end, like so many other MMO’s the game just degrades into an arms race and only veteran players can survive in the new areas anyway.
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PvP isn’t so much the problem as players attitude towards it. Killing someone for profit (piracy), is just another income stream. However players don’t really fight over resources, it seems like a vast majority just want to pad their kill boards or ruin game play for others that they know can’t defend themselves. I don’t know if this can be fixed with a game mechanic, but it is a reality.
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Foorget that impatience BS …
For 15$ per month today whole ccp would have to praise every new player.
No more 2004… Today impatience argument only goes in F2P games,
Please tell Foxbolt Sol said Hi. 