Gerald
Some players can effectively avoid trouble. In general, new players can’t - they don’t know enough.
In a thread about retaining more new players, nothing that requires them to have significant knowledge of and experience in EVE is relevant.
Oh I thought the issue was that there is no way to avoid trouble, which is clearly not true.
You have a good point about new players, they don’t know yet how to avoid trouble. However, new players can learn how to avoid trouble. Either by experiencing trouble themselves or by asking around and reading up on hints.
Possibility of PVP is something that retains new EVE players, the only people who are scared off by the possibility of PVP are people who may not be playing the right game.
…it’s called learning. Wrapping a lot of bubble wrap around a new player to prevent bad things from happening to them teaches them absolutely F-ALL.
They have a ton of new player resources at their disposal and it’s THEIR responsibility to use those resources.
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Elena
The players who have been around for so long were once new.
They were retained.
Their input is valuable as examples of the concept “retaining new players,” because they are retained new players.
I am more curious about why they started and what got them to continue.
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Exactly!
I think player retention would be bigger if the new player tutorial let new players experience most aspects of EVE in a more controlled environment.
Let newbies create their first contract, let them intentionally fall for an NPC contract scam as part of a quest in order to lure that NPC to the system and catch him at a gate with a warp disruptor.
Teach newbies how ruthless EVE is from the start!
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We’ll get more people playing eve when capitals stop becoming the best answer to kill sub capital ships,when we no longer have timers on all these structures,when resources are spread over decently wide areas and can’t be farmed non stop 24/7,when game mechanics stop encouraging afk play … so NEVER
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I started because I saw an article of EVE in a gaming magazine there was also a CD and a code for an extended trial in that magazine when I got it,all this was back in 2006,I began mining and doing some missions mostly clueless it took me days to realize I could leave my starting system I attacked another new player after investing alot of time in making my first ship buying meta 4 mods which were expensive and got instantly blown up by Concord.These are the 2 major things from my start that I remember.
To answer that, quite simply what kept me in the game for roughly a decade was player interaction in general. It did not need to be PvP in general, but interacting with people in one form or another is what kept me going this long.
And I have only quit the game, becuase ccp over the years added mechanics that either reduced the need to work together with people by making things more convenient (or easier to accomplish solo) and at the same time also reduced the options for people to run into each other and competing with each other.
To give you a few examples:
Example 1:
Back in the early days of eve I started out as a miner. I created my own little corp, recruited a couple of people and we have spend a few weeks pretty much just mining together. However due to how mining worked back in those days, you were forced to work as a team to make it half way efficient.
Some people were mining, some people were flying haulers to grab stuff from the cans the miners were jetcanning. While the base mechanic behind mining did not change at all, working together as a team made it a lot more enjoyable.
Compare that to today where there is no interaction between players needed and also barely any input you need to make. You target a few rocks and pretty much afk mine and have to watch netflix or whatever to get not totally bored while doing so.
If a part of the game is reduced that much in interactivity that you need to do other sings on the side, there is a serious issue. First of all it´s not very engaging and secondly that is one reason why ganking miners is so easy, because they simply do not pay any attention and I can not even blame them for it as these days it´s as interesting as just staring on your screen while you run a windows update.
Example 2:
After a quite long time of mining I finally had my first battleship together (a domininx) and thx god had the sense to not fly it before I could insure it. With my new big tanky ship and lot´s of high slots for miners at my disposal I went into low sec… was chewing on some rocks there, when a wild scorpion apeared and destroyed me.
The fight gave me a huge adrenalin rush and despite not standing a chance I had fun and after that decided to start training for a scorpion myself and became a low sec pirate myself. Following that I had the most fun I could have over several years, just living in low sec either hunting in short proximity to my homebase and for a large part also blocking supply lines of bigger alliances that had to pass through our territory.
Then at some point ccp decided to add jump freighters to the game, which totally killed low sec for me. While carriers already existed they were not enough to simply bypass low sec. With the JFs added to the game CCP gave alliances exactly that option. As a result people would not fly through low sec anymore with loot pinatas. Before JFs were a thing we also regularly had people running from 0.0 to high sec solo or in small groups to resupply themselves with non capital ships which again gave us low sec pirates plenty of targets.
But not only activity in low sec died because of JFs, at the same time ccp made things a lot more convenient for alliances and removed the need for alliances to run coordinated supply runs with freighter groups escorted by fleets, which sometimes (even if not too often) ended up in fights as well. Still keeping your supply lines clear was a group effort.
Gate camps also have been attacked a lot more often before JFs were added, as the alliances had more incentive to break camps at entry points into low and nullsec, as they could not just bypass them.
That single addition to the game took away so much player interaction. Now I am going to admit that I was not a big fan of freighter runs myself back in the days (I had some short breaks from low sec piracy and joined null sec alliances myself), but at the end of the day life back then was more challenging and a lot more interesting than nowadays, where you just give a shopping list to your JF pilots, hand them some cash and sit around waiting for something interesting to happen.
Now I could give you more examples of how CCP added things or made changes that made the game less interesting and sucked the life out of the game, but I guess those 2 examples should be enough to paint a picture of how EvE changed. At the same time I hope that gets my point across of why I stayed in the game in the first place and why I left it after playing it daily for 12 years.
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Anomalies non stop and after the new fighters and rorquals hugely inflated nullsec income.
Before these you’d go out and scan for DED sites or belt rat for isk or mine in the normal belts for ore in a barge
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Sitting Bull
Plausible, but not convincing. it doesn’t match what we see in these forums.
Most vet posters are relentlessly negative towards any suggestions for improvement, and only a small proportion provide constructive input. The “bittervet narative” makes it hard to tell of people have just been trapped in an echo chamber, or they’re genuinely deluded and destuctive, but unfortunately in forum terms it makes no practical difference.
If the majority of vets have anything constructive to contribute it’s long past time they change their behavior.
Note that there are some significant exceptions to baseline vet behavior:
- There’s a minority (perhaps 10 or 15 in the last month or so) who are actively looking for solutions to the new player retention issues, and of course they contribute a lot due to their EVE experience.
- There are a similar number of “neutrals” who don’t want much change, but still contribute. Even an argument for not making improvements is useful it’s it’s rational and constructive.
Runa
You’re just looping on the standard reactionary arguments. They may have been true once, or EVE may have been growing fast enough to hide the truth. Either way, it’s long past time to stop pretending the “old EVE” is in good shape.
I don’¨t think EVE it actually dying BTW, but even CCP is openly concerned about new player retention.
The lazy old “swim or sink”" approach is no longer fit for purpose.
CCP has always been concerned with about new player retention…moot point. OR link to something recent to back-up your claim.
How is EVE in “bad shape” as you eluded to…again, data would be lovely.
I’m really sorry this is a hard game for you and new players but stop being lazy and asking for the easy button to be made even bigger. If you don’t like it then there are other SP games or even a few space based ones that are WAY easier…please go and enjoy them.
ps. “old EVE” doesn’t exist and hasen’t for a long time…you wouldn’t have lasted 2 minutes back then…It has changed a lot but somehow it’s still not enough.
More and more I think old EVE existed partly because the playerbase hadn’t grown in skills or knowledge at that time.
Bottom line we knew little had bad skills rather awful ships yet we enjoyed exploring and when we found others on our journey we usually tried to kill each other
I think this is a fairly key issue. When there was a lot of ‘we’re all figuring this out together, and we’re all struggling to get bigger faster’, then the game seemed more open, more dangerous, more ‘fair’ even when it was less safe.
EVE’s growth charts show the typical, grow while young, level off as people master the game and consolidate their gains, then dev starts to cater to the ‘end game, give me more because I’m a big player, screw the new guys they should struggle like we did’ crowd. Then it starts to decline, fairly rapidly since about 2014 actually… so 5 years of decline now. All Alphas did was ‘stop the bleeding’ of player numbers.
Anyone starting today is doing so knowing they are 10 or more years behind the curve, that other players can casually swat them out of the sky without blinking, that the ‘skill training’ mechanic means they either spend 2-3 years or tons of RL $$ just getting into a moderately effective build, and being told everywhere “EVE is just spreadsheets in space, scammers and gankers”, or “Just go to Null and join and alliance and farm ISK til you’re rich”.
It’s just not the same game, not the same environment, not the same game market any more. If we’re going to improve player numbers (new players and old… ‘more people playing’ isn’t just newbies), then CCP needs to stop being glacially slow at doing anything new, and shake up the foundations of the game so that EVE gets interesting again.
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The funny and interesting thing here is that “to have a safe(pvp free) haven for pve in high” is always translated into “all pvp will be forbidden”…
As if there is no low and 0.0 existing…
But pvp is not so easy there right…there are ships that actually SHOOT BACK and not just unarmed miners and indus…so the lack of easy kills is the main reason for most denies of a pvp free high…
Sometimes it IS this easy…for some people “real pvp” is only if the target does not shoot back…
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staged PVE was already rejected by pvp due to the DEMAND of having the entrance scanable and after it those arena crap like dung…
PVP thinks they OWN eve and ANY content that is not in their reach is outrageous to them so they DEMAND to get a grip on it…
EVE is a pvp game… you might not be playing the right game for you if you assume otherwise.
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There’s a denial coming…
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Maybe…but If you have a staged pve content in an concealed area pvp should not get its fingers on it…never…
But this is exactly what happend and this is not healthy for a non pvp population at all…if you don’t get this or don’t want to understand this i’m sorry about this but this is the reality…
The PvE area is completely unreachable while you’re busy fighting NPCs. You just need to worry about PVP when you fly outside that area. If you don’t want to be surprised at the exit, either ask some friends to keep an eye on the exit, pay someone to do so if you don’t have friends nearby or use an alt. Just don’t make the mistake of saying that CCP made an unhealthy decision by giving PVE players more reward and a risk to encourage more PVP in this sandbox, because that’s all this game is about: players flying in space and interaction.
There are a lot of games on the market where there is no player interaction. It seems you should take a look at one of those.