Ya, I am still trying to play catch up reading all the updates. I don’t know what changes were made to cloaking, but they needed to do something about it. People used to just cloak alts in systems for days on end. Still, 3000 people is something like 9-15k accounts they lost from each of those changes. That is a heck of a message from the player base.
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Proof needed.
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People only care about player numbers if they can somehow use it to back their personal preferences in regards to game play changes. Even if it requires massive mental gymnastics for that to make any sort of sense, in their own mind.
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or perhaps it was three thousand accounts (since any verifiable server data would be based on account logins) and so only 600-1000 people? Or 3000 accounts run by one person. Or you know…maybe not even 3000 at all since lockdown has just lifted and summer is here. Peopel are desperate to see family and go outside.
Nothing like taking an unproven figure and just multiplying it by a factor of 3-5 and stating it like it means something.
I can’t agree with that, I started off as alpha clone and over time learned new things and how to skill for them. Skill training serves a couple of functions, it paces new players learning in terms of actually playing the game and at the same time keeps them from all jumping into Titans in the first day of two.
After being an alpha clone for quite a while I started to grasp how the game worked, what my options were and how I wanted to progress from where I was. Not long after that I switched to Omega and began seriously training for things I wanted to be able to do (cloaking, flying a Stiletto, and training for stealth bombers) and that training taught me far more about the mechanics of how Eve works on a fundamental level than any other thing inside or outside of the game. I eventually ended up with five paid accounts. I also made some fairly large mistakes, one being training for tech III cruisers, I simply wasn’t ready to fly a Loki, and I figured this out after spending nearly everything building one.
The recent monetization stuff is really getting on my nerves and has resulted in CCP earning, and I have to stress the word “earning” money from me. After watching CCP essentially attack their players during the last year and a half or more, and during a pandemic with nerfs that seem intended to make it easier to buy things than to actually bother working for them I dropped four of my accounts. Now they earn less because in my opinion they are no longer earning their keep. The last account is month to month and is training for one thing: killing.
Last November I decided I had had enough and would give them a chance to make positive changes and think about renewing if they did. They did not and in fact accelerated the pace and severity of their nerfing.
If they nerf this last account in any way they will have lost 100% of their income from me.
I’m perfectly happy to play as an alpha clone, it will save me a lot of money, and I have a huge heap of stuff that I won’t be able use. Honestly being Omega always made me feel like I was cheating, but some stuff was irresistible like cloaking.
EDIT: I guess this is more of an example of how to lower player retention more than anything, I should be thinking of ways to increase it but I’m just a bit burnt at this point after figuring out and posting things like how to counter afk cloaking, and how to stop and kill people in fast aligning nullified ships and then watching CCP blow it with bad mechanics and nerfs.
I’m done, they are on their own for now.
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Yep. Did the exact same. I had 3 Omega accounts which I terminated last year and kept one active. I still have a bunch of Alpha accounts but I gave CCP a few months to impress me with content and reasonable mechanics tweeking and they didn’t impress me so I’m not even paying Omega for any account now. I’ll fly as an Alpha until CCP brings fun back to EVE or until the servers are shut down.
I honestly dont think CCP can win here. Damned if they do damned if they dont.
On one hand you have someone who has been in the game for 15 years and resents having things nerfed because they feel they have earned those skills etc.
On the other you have a 15 day noob who wont stick around if it seems like he has to spend 15 years in the game to compete/contribute. Bad starter corps make this worse by insisting they fly speciifc things.
So how do you make them stick around when they pop into a wormhole and get nuked by a ship that is going to take them months to skill into…let along fit adequately. Its an imbalance which in many other games can be overcome quickly by the grind… In EVE you just have to queue the skills up and wait.
The way i see it is that is that todays CCP are making decisions and taking all the heat for fundamental mistakes that the CCP of old (that everyone worships) made in setting up the skilling system. In a game this old you cannot expect to retain a large amount of new players when the perception is that the deck is stacked against them. With skills linked to time (not time in game) they simply see no way to catch up. On the face of it many look at a player with 15 years of skills and say why should i bother because even after 15 years they will still be 15 years ahead of me. This is why games with grinding and skill caps are much more accessible.
Now personally i love the skilling system in eve. But i can see how its a problem for other new players (i still class myself as new after 13 months in game). In other games if you take a few weeks out for family reasons or whatever. Thats a few weeks that other players in game are catching up by grinding. In eve it makes no difference because if omega is all paid up you just stack up the skill queue and earn those skills while you deal with life. Nobody can catch up ever.
So we can all bash CCP all we want about nerfing and monetising things. And sure its not down out of the goodness of their hearts. They want to make money. But ultimately nerfing 15 year players starts to level the playing field. And offering skill points for money gives ne players “a choice” about whether they want to pay to catch up a little. And i emphasise choice. Both of these things, regardless of how i personally feel about them, help with retaining new players.
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A new player can be in a Catalyst on day one, killing veterans on day one.
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I almost agree with that but there’s a problem. The nerfs are affecting older players far less than newer players. I’m around two years old in Eve and this stuff stared pretty early on in my history. In many cases these changes have slammed me backwards so hard recovering has been a mater of totally changing what I’m doing. The problem there is I liked a lot of what I was doing and had planned, and don’t much like what I’m doing now (which is far less as I don’t see a real future anymore).
As far as catching up with older players goes, let’s take combat as an example. I’m already training almost nothing but level five skills in relation to this, everything from CPU and powergrid to tanking and overheating, I’m training almost all gunnery, missile, and electronics/ecm and targeting stuff, and while it’s a long wait for a massive pile of level five skills I’m doing REALLY well in relation to where I was not that long ago. I seriously suck at PvP but not because of skill training, someone good at PvP with my skill levels could be an absolute horror to get in a fight with. The reason I suck is that my adrenaline goes berserk and I make lots of mistakes, and I still lack the experience to look at a potential opponent and make a reasonable judgment as to whether my ship could take theirs.
My very first character has lots of skills I don’t need because I didn’t know what it was doing, got curious about stuff, or was told “you need to train this” by people who wanted something from me. And that brings us to bad corporations sucking up new players and spitting them back out when they don’t need them any more. That needs to stop and the only way I can think of to do it is to ban recruiters and people of over a certain age from Rookie helpchat. This last part is seriously problematic because it’s the older players helping the most there, blocking them would destroy Rookie Help. On the other hand, these are known people, they do help, and could be granted an exception or something. I’m inclined to think that instancing rookie help might be a good idea just to reduce the flood of text in it, but that’s fraught with its own problems.
When I was very new I got sucked into a good corporation with some really bad people in it, I wasn’t alone, but I was the only survivor in the timeframe I was in that corporation who still plays Eve, the others quit long ago. What pisses me off aside from the fact that I still miss them, is that this could happen in the first place. None of us knew what we were getting into and we were all shocked at the abuse we got from the bad ones (all of whom have been playing Eve from the begining) the good people, the ones who recruited us, tried to mitigate the damage but simply couldn’t do so, and these were (and are) really great people. It also put them in a bad position, anger old friends or keep the new people and help them advance. Not a great set of options.
That’s true, I wish I had known that when I was a day or two old!
Now that I do however… Well, we shall see what happens.
Sure. And chickens have teeth.
Just because it happened a couple of times by accident doesn’t mean it’s a norm.
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If you mate those chickens together, then you increase the chance of teething chickens becoming more of a thing rather than waiting for the random mutation.
Similarly, start teaching and stop waiting for new players to ‘get it’.
–Helpful Gadget
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… you might get a shark.
I’ve never been able to get chickens to mate. All I end up with are a lot of eggs.
Wrong.
If you want to grind to have more sp CCP has this in the game and keeps making it ever easier:
Grind ISK and buy injectors, accelerators, implants, etc. Do the skilling sprees, get the login rewards. No real world $ required.
The diminishing returns on injectors is a mechanic akin to needing more XP as you grind to higher levels in other games.
In any case grind as much as you want and get as much sp as you want. CCP is not stopping you. Only your lack of creativity is stopping you.
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–Gadget can too…
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Humm no. I’m a very bad teacher. I have no patience and a short fuse for repeating things I already said.
That’s because you got Egg-Chickens. You got ripped off, you should’ve got Chicken-Chickens and they would’ve delivered chickens instead of eggs.
I should have bought the magic beans instead.
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reread my post. saying I’m wrong and then basically repeating back the point i was making in a different way is kinda just…meh