Mostly
Well, well, well…
New character creation is down by 30% compared to last year in the same dates. It still is quite above the numbers pre-F2P, but this is the stat I was keeping an eye on to check PCU vs it. Because, people playing for shorter logins lowers PCU, but new character creation doesn’t lies: that’s how many characters are being created. It ties directly to interest in the game, recruitment of new players and player opinion of future prospects.
And it’s down. Whether EVE is less interesting, is getting less new players or players are less confident that it will be worth having those characters in the future, this is a bad sign. Not a disaster yet; disaster will be when/if new character creation drops to below pre-F2P levels. But a bad sign nonetheless.
Tic; tac; tic; tac; november of 2021 is coming. 
And, to add to your list, highsec local being dead almost everywhere despite being full of people!
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Im back. Please message me in game
Why did you link the calculator in the left shortcut bar? Do you do a lot of trading?
Burn Alt creation.
No way there are 300 humans trying out this game every day.
Some poo came out cause I laughed so hard
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Well, Not so long ago we could see 50-60k concurrent players almost every day, now it’s down to 20-30k. So yeah, It’s kind of dying, very slowly.
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Those weren’t regular peaks. And they were very timezone concentrated. A lot of off peak times are pretty much the same as always
I don’t know how long you’ve been playing, but this game had it’s peak around 2012-2013, in the Incarna / Retribution days. Back then, USTZ prime time was reaching at least 50k every day of the week. The peak record is actually 65k in 2013.
The population as seen a steep decline in the last 5 years. The game has lost about half of it’s player base since 2013.
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The record peak was ccp telling everyone to log on every single character they could. Specifically to make a record. It wasn’t actually 65k people playing that day. I believe as soon as the peak was done it dropped back to about 40k from my memories of that day.
The 50k peaks were also often weekends only. Not a random Tuesday. And were very much peak based, not reliable through the whole day or even for a number of hours.
Numbers have dropped certainly, but it’s far less doom and gloom than using those peaks as your data point would indictate.
Edit. Looking at eve offline in the last month we’ve hit a peak of 38k or so. Phones aren’t good so cant check exact number. But a far cry from 20-30.
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It would be interesting to see two different stats, one for Omega, and one for Alpha; though.
General trend is still overall down - and will continue that way as Eve seems to be running out of “never played it” fresh blood TO pull from, while too many folks that have played it got tired of the frequent griefing (no, I do NOT agree with CCP’s uniquely limited definition of the term griefing) and moved on to something they enjoyed more (or at least hated less).
As long as CCP continues to hold with the “original Ultima Online” model that encourages griefing it will never grow OUT of being a small niche game, as it insists on driving away folks that want to BUILD in favor of giving the “I just wanna ■■■■ people over” types an easy playground.
Also, account count is meaningless since CCP doesn’t care how many accounts you create, where most MMOS limit you to at least some degree.
As far as I can tell, the ONLY reason Eve online players count didn’t keep dropping at the rate it was doing in 2012-2016 is the “free to play” model - and that isn’t quite counteracting the long-term drop in userbase entirely, it just slowed it down some - and the recent changes to “alpha clone” limits has just made the griefing issue worse.
Online count however includes folks multiboxing and botters - but that has always been the case, just seems to be a bit more common than it was 5 years back.
I’ve never FLOWN 20 at a time (that would almost HAVE to be a bot fleet) but I have multiboxed up to 6 at one time and have quite a few more than 20 total accounts (most of which are “leftovers” from when I was working alts for character sale profits).
15 years actually isn’t all THAT long in the MMO industry - Ultima Online is past 20 pushing 25 despite ancient mechanics and no upgrades of significance in a decade or more, for example, and Everquest is about a year behind and IS still getting updates on a regular basis - and has been GROWING the last few years after a long time of slow stagnation, to the point they had to add a ‘regular’ server fairly recently.
If eve dose not do something this X-mas to add, instead of take away. a lot of the older player’s that have 5 and 6 accounts or more will be shutting down and playing different games like they are now while waiting to see what eve is going to do… We are watching…
Millstrom Lowki
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MMOs overall are dying. But not for any particular reason… There are simply more choices out there.
Overall, the one thing that took an effective stab at Eve, were PVP games where you can customize your skills (“skill trees” for example) and gear, either with in-game monies you got from PVP or P2W/MT systems.
Yeah I hate gold ammo too, for the record.
What you have are games involving some form of combat vehicles - tanks, ships, planes, big walking metal things, etc. where you can be PVPing within an hour of installing and customizing, refining, and advancing as you go. This beats the pants of the “Eve way”, which is to wait, and grind, and wait, and grind some more, then wait, and grind, then lost hundreds of millions of ISK to dumb ship-loss tactics. That’s a huge drag.
Whatever could have been done to counter this, from the perspective of this game? Well were it up to me, I would have made Faction Warfare Great (the first time) by issuing specialized FW ships based on rank and performance with skills particular to this combat equipment as well. This would have let new players into faction ships, be PVPing from the start, and hone their skills on the way. And no, any such ships boarded by non-militia go into automatic self destruct (had to add that in because I could hear the “hurf blurf I’ll just do XYZ” crowd)
A similar thing I would have done for pirate factions as well. Pirates are in constant struggle against empires and each other. In addition to pirate-specific ships that you need faction and performance ratings to get, there would also be courier (drug smuggling) missions and even assasination missions. Someone who wanted to be a pirate could do that out of the box.
Even Sisters of Eve would have been such a faction players would get ships from in the same manner, but more for exploration purposes. Same thing: you try to give one away it blows up.
And finally, I would have NPC corporations declaring war on each other and offering SRP during war provided you lost your ship to whatever faction they happened to be at war with. Getting people, noobs and biitervets alike, fighting against and alongside each other without vitriol is always a good thing.
That’s what could have been done. Instead around the time the other games were picking up on skill trees and gear customization, people were still mission grinding in highec, getting up at 2AM to update their skill ques (those were the days), and saving their ISK, while nullsec corps were all “at least 50 million SP or GTFO”. The two things that made the goons what they were back then was they took noobs and had SRP.
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Eve is not dying, its just slowing down. But its “over the hill”. All online games go through a peak then down and settle or die off. The ones that settle at an adequate level keep going, the ones that don’t die out.
For example, I was looking at Everquest a couple days ago, it launched in 1999 as the 1st 3D MMORPG and still runs today. It has a new expansion coming out (or just came out) and some hotties were making a presentation. Too bad CCP doesn’t have any like that. You can check the videos on their website, the game itself is crap but the presentation they made is nice.
It will be a long time until Eve dies, hopefully. It will all depend on CCPs ability / inability to attract and retain new customers. The ones that so many people here hate and want out of the game.
50+ was quite regular, so your wrong.
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It’s pure comedy that people think comparing numbers from now and the game’s prime has any meaning. When the game was going strong, all the accounts were paid. If people had any clue how FTP games work they’d realize that these numbers won’t support jack ■■■■. Companies don’t sell out because things are going well…
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