Yes and getting worse all the time. I came back to see how much and can tell you. I won’t be back. Been playing this game on and off for 15 years. Like everything else it has turned to crap for the many because off the loud few. just logged off and counted at least 100 folks in my local or 2 multiboxers.
2 Likes
Can I have your stuff?
1 Like
@Bane_Brightheart So you logged into the forums for the first time ever to announce to everyone who doesn’t know you that you won’t be playing? Nothing egotistical about that.
1 Like
I am here to declare to nobody in particular, that I’d like to log in today. And tomorrow, preferably, as well.
3 Likes
“my feet got so hot and sweaty”
“now I need to dock up and cool off”
“It is the Capsuleer who thinks what they think and does what they do”
When all else looks to be have failed try and just make the best of what we currently have without asking for reassurance each time if whether EVE ONLINE is still the hot game to play right now!
Just dock up and cool those itchy feet!
Mom’s spaghetti
1 Like
Yes I believe so.
I started playing a decade ago, and have been back and forth intermittently. Like a lot of vets, I am familiar with the old days, the good times, all the rest of it. Maybe more relevant, I played WWIIOL for a decade before it (to all intents and purposes) became a shell of a game.
The thing that has died in EVE is the confidence of CCP to make fundamental changes to gameplay., and the hope of the playerbase is now extinguished. I saw it in WWIIOL, where all of the thought that we’d one day be flying Lancaster bombers, or rolling tank convoys through North Africa were replaced with placeholder features or cosmetic changes. Proposed graphical improvements just never materialised, and over a period of about 5 years, the game went from being one of the biggest and best MMO’s around, to being almost bankrupt, as players just dropped away and saw no reason to stay.
CCP dare not take any risks at all, because as it stands, the player base hangs on a knife-edge, and CCP are afraid to make any changes that are significant, if they even have the capability to do so anymore, in case they see a mass exodus.
I suspect (although this is only my opinion) that CCP’s parent company have placed EVE into a sort of ‘managed decline’, where no significantly risky game development is done, and as much revenue as possible is extracted before people slowly abandon the game, a long, slow death spiral in which millions of $ still finds it’s way from us to them. That’s why we see a focus on in game purchases, skins, completely meaningless things that have no impact on core gameplay.
When I started, I found a game that was flawed, but intriguing. It was clearly still in development, and that in itself made me keep playing, because if something has that potential, you will overlook a host of flaws, in the hope that they will at some stage be addressed.
In my first few years I played, there were significant and obvious changes to how the game functioned, basic stuff like how we hacked containers, significant numbers of new ships, new mechanics, new structures, things like that. It felt like a game that the developers were not just tweaking around the edges, but one that could at any moment add something that would give you an entirely new way to play. When they would say ‘our next focus is on exploration’, you would get a little excited, and even though the changes were often quite cosmetic, they were also usually enough to reinforce that one day, it would get to the promised land.
But now it is the opposite. CCP are rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic (as alluded to in that fantastic Reddit post). They have tried to make changes without exerting time and effort into development, and the focus on cosmetic, economic or other less developer intensive changes.
For example, I have long campaigned for a change to FW. For me, the very fundamentals of it needed to change in order to make the combat meaningful, fun, ‘warlike’ as opposed to something that individuals took part in, and where the method of matching willing participants was both organic (patrolling systems for example) but would encourage people to gather together and fight, lose ships, and come back again.
But the changes they have proposed are more of the same, rebadged. People still, fundamentally, will go into as many empty plexes and farm LP, because that is the most efficient way to make money. The actual gameplay, for example how you have fun in the game, is an afterthought. They’ve added border systems, but what is that in practice? Changing the rewards in the database to give +25% in a certain system. It’s quite obvious that at no stage did they consider a more meaningful change that incentivised people to play in a ‘warfare’ style, it is just more solo plexing.
The above could apply in principle to every change made over the last 5 years. A focus on cosmetic changes, not fundamentals. Even the Trigs are not a core gameplay change for most players.
EVE has failed to be what it could have been, but that never mattered when there was hope. Now that is gone, there is no reason to invest the time and energy into the game that there once was. I’m 39 now, I have a child, I have my own company (software development) that take up most of my time, but I still manage to play ED to try and get my space kicks when I have a small amount of free time. I’ve unsubbed all my accounts and it would take a lot to resub.
In the past, that downtime, however small, was spent in EVE, but unless CCP take a more exciting approach to EVE and give people hope of real change, real innovation, then yes, it is dying, and it is clear that they are ok with that.
3 Likes
Lose Yourself in RP is how to win at Eve
1 Like
Scarcity happened, so you’re wrong.
Anything Triglavian and Edencom, the whole of Pochven space and abyssals.
Talk about a dead game.
Other than a brief spell of activity between March and May 2018…you’ve had precious little activity since 2016 anyway. I don’t think 3 months of activity in 6 years really qualifies you for anyone noticing if you go.
3 Likes
Scarcity happened when? Years ago, and what was it? An attempt to manipulate the economics by changing values, not new ways to interact or core changes to gameplay that might enact those changes. They just went into the db and set the values lower on a bunch of stuff.
The Trigs? Pochven? What are they in terms of core functionality for most users? They don’t have a positive impact on gameplay for all but a few people in the grand scheme of things. Career paths like explo, industry, mining, the bounty system, any kind of core changes to those things that most players engage with? None, or at least none positive, given their inability to make the bounty system work.
I do like it when people argue that they are somehow making good changes, and doing them right. They’re doing a bad job of implementing bad ideas, and the drop in players is huge as a result. There are people complaining that markets are now dangerously unable to supply capsuleers, and that demand has dropped off a cliff anyway.
But let me ask you the most basic of questions: What is their roadmap? Because I don’t see anything signposted for the long haul, no macro level aims for the game, no excitement, just a slow, managed decline.
1 Like
“Thing I personally don’t care fore never happened and don’t … add to the game”.
Ok.
This is also a lore-based game as well as an MMO. CCP has made this clear in fanfest. Not everyone will ever be in pochven but, it’s a nice in-between WH space and NS.
Literally CCP has said there is no roadmap. It’s all lore/story driven development now. CCP has posted a short map for FW/small changes. There will never be a huge, long roadmap game. Why don’t you actually do some research? It’s not hard to find this.
Yes combined with mining balance pass and indy rework it was an attempt to drain the stockpiles of minerals people had.
Why don’t you look at things as complementary to each other and not just in their own little boxes and see that this is an MMO, CCP needs to keep creating content. Pochven is there for new content if CCP chooses to roll with it more. Right now they are focused on FW.
1 Like
Our sun is dying too, don’t worry about it.
2 Likes
I am not suggesting that Poch was a bad idea, I am saying that when it is the only meaningful thing to have taken serious development time over the last 4-5 years, we should question whether that is intentional or a result of incompetence, lack of ability etc. You say that we should look at it alongside… what? Very little, if anything has meaningfully changed in the last 5 years that required the millions of man hours CCP has had at their disposal throughout that time.
Saying that this is a lore or story driven game simply isn’t true for a lot of players, but more importantly, the game is not some finished product where they can just ignore the core mechanics. They haven’t got a working bounty system, so to say that they’re essentially going to work within the confines of the game, technically speaking, and not address any fundamentals ever again, is just weird.
And also
This wasn’t always the case though. Updates used to be signposted well ahead of time, with more longer term visions set out at FF etc.
That is the reason that people are less enthusiastic about fighting through the current malaise, or paying more money, because there doesn’t seem to be a longer term thing to grasp hold of as a reason to keep going.
Again, it is not about one player. You can’t deny that the game’s playerbase is rapidly declining to rates unseen in 15-16 years, so if you’re going to be facetious, fine, but you’re in a dwindling bunch of people willing to keep paying CCP money to deliver some COOL HALLOWEEN SKINS MAN!
2 Likes
I’m dying one day at a time.
I agree the non/short term roadmaps CCP has put out seems to be the angle they are taking. Yes! it’s not what other big typical games are. CCP wants to go this route then so be it. I personally wonder what they will do next after the FW change myself. It’s obvious CCP wants to stretch out content. It’s good for them, they are not pressured to keep creating content we chew through in about a month or less? That’s how I view this.
So I live with it. Alright new hanger interior, new UI, new FW mechanics, (lame) new navy ships. What will CCP do next? What empire will start the next chain of events? We don’t know. There can be arguments made for having a long-term development map or stay ambiguous as possible.
Well for me it’s the FW rework and the increased tension between the empires. I keep a close eye on it while I aid concord in defeating Sansha’s endless incursions with fellow capsuleers. 
It’s a matter of perceptions, values, and expectations a gamer holds for a game. Certainty people can be careless about empire war and some lame graphics update!
Well, CCP is bent on this and we gotta live with it if we play EVE. Been evident since the trig war. Contrast EVE vs Star Trek Online were STO is a complete carnival game with a lot of separate components.
I think he meant to say that he has ED…
I think you missed the bit about having a newborn baby mate, I WISH I had ED…
Well… I mean you do, but the point of the discussion is why CCP are hemorrhaging players! I realise from reading your posts that you’re invested in the story and all this stuff, and that’s cool, I am happy for you. I used to love that EVE married up the lore with the gameplay, or at least that the long term aim was to do so.
My point would be that the latter has now not been the case for some time, and those of us who have hung around for years hoping that an update would come along that just suggested CCP had vision, and ambition, and a desire to make EVE more exciting. Lots of players used to talk about the possibilities of what could be done in the EVE universe, planetary landings, direct player control of ships during combat, the ability to walk around ships, even leave ships (Dust was an attempt at it) and other things that now seem far fetched or impossible.
And the point was that while most of those things were not essential, they highlighted the hope that players had about the way the game could potentially grow into something greater than it already was. Now, there’s no hope of anything, just this constant tinkering with database values and small cosmetic improvements and changes to the exterior, but no fundamental big plans. No vision.
So like I said, I’m happy for you, but people are leaving, and catering to the forums here is like survivor bias. It’s exactly why WWIIOL failed, because instead of listening to players leaving, they listened to the players who would put up with anything.
2 Likes
If CCP listened to “players leaving,” today’s EVE would be an instanced cooperative PvE dungeon grinder with no subscription but gacha loot boxes with pay-to-win exclusive items inside. Everyone would be able to turn off being attacked by other players with a toggle, and ships wouldn’t be destroyed when lost, but would respawn in your home station for a token ISK cost.
So basically like the new Chinese EVE server that’s coming out soon.