Letter to CCP

Communications Center General Discussion
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I do totally agree on that… they shouldnt train and teach 18 years old soldiers before sent to war too they can think if they shot and die they can revive their body just like in video games. .

I did not say make game easier.
I did not say prevent new players to die . Hold theirhand ect ect i personally showel hundreds of them them into PvP in first hour of their game play …and let them taste the glorious explotions and rush of fights

I have emphasize on natural cognitive processing of human being .

Value of knowing .

Every player will experience a lot of unexpected situations in EVE.

Loosing ship is first one . And visibly it pulls CCPs attention in data analysis… AS a one of cause of early stage retention problems , So they initiated that grief counselling work… which is lot of waste of time effort and source in my ayes …

You CANNOT claim that if so eone cant handle with one ship loss they shouldnt play eve or neither you cannot say they are not suitable for EvE

Real loss is not a common trait in many video games. Not something people very familiar . Not everybody is “gamer” i have help someone in the past eve was his first game … turn he grow into. PvP

I do agree CCP will not read.
Even they read possibly they dont understand it.
Even they do inderstand it. They will not appreciate it.
If they would…. They havent been keep making same mistakes again and again and row against all scientific research and facts …

About me .

Whatever i do in my life…
I never took my heart and my brain out and hang onto hook when im committed to enter
That bring me success, satisfaction, happiness and cheers always along with some hardships . But im content with irl
In game : I did raise the dead from ice ground when i have been leading … hit thousads of kills weekly … they want it they get it and they couldnt keep it alive .

I wont leave my brain out for a video game… and im not sory for this. I do what it takes.

I know EvE is on down fall… and i wrote up WHY .they can turn the sail stll. But yes. They think they know the best. Even its totall fiction with no science

Oh also i love the gif :slight_smile: thats me head diving all field against me lol

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I’m not sure how many of you know who @bluelysian is in Eve, but from this post, if you read it you will get an idea of her real life background. Those of you who do know what she does here don’t need me to tell you this stuff, but those who do not ought to, it will make things more clear I think.

Bluelysian teaches PvP to new people, not just a few here and there, lots, I don’t have the numbers to quote for you, but perhaps she can come up with them.
I wish that I was one of the people she found when I was new, it would have saved me a good deal of anger at being blown up when I was new.
Her corporations did more for the new player experience than the so called new player experience ever has, they did this by teaching people right from the begining of their time in Eve that surviving, dying, and killing are a fundamental part of life in Eve, and this one approach reduces that fury and depression of ones first second and even fiftieth death to an emotion that is nothing like what most new players experience. It takes what would in many cases be rather traumatic and turns it into what it is supposed to be, fun, and fun with a future. If someone starts Eve learning PvP they learn from the start that it’s all part of the game, they learn to fight, they learn to kill, and they learn to die in style and say “good fight” at the end of an engagement. They don’t feel like someone has crushed their accomplishments, they don’t hate the other player, and they don’t come on the forum ranting about how CCP needs to fix some mechanic or ban some group of people from doing what they do while playing. They build another ship and get back in the right.
I’ve been playing Eve for a bit over two years now (summer of 2019 if I remember correctly) and I spent far to much of that time being furious about things I didn’t understand or depressed because I had a huge amount of effort shot to ■■■■ in a few seconds. It’s not trauma in the real world sense, but it’s still brutal as far as videogames go, and it took me a long time to realize on my own that I was looking at things wrong. Most people would just quit, I don’t happen to be like that, I tend to get mad and try again, but if I had met Bluelysian when I was new I wouldn’t have gotten mad at all, I would have gotten even or died trying all while laughing at how hard me hands were shaking, how my heart felt like it was going to hammer it’s way out of my chest and… Well, you all know the feeling I think, it’s how you respond to it after the fact, if you are prepared like she teaches people to be it will be a rush of pure joy, if not? You might just end up pissed off an bitter.
Anyhow, that’s what she does in Eve, she’s not here holding your hand when you fall down, she’s teaching you that falling down doesn’t matter because there is nowhere to go but up.

CCP knows all this already, they are likely aware that what she was doing led to more people staying in the game (proportionally) than their tutorials and tacky futile offers of Plex, and what they should have done in my opinion is make her and her crew the final career agent.
They squandered that opportunity.

If you, in your first week, began learning to fight, defend your self, escape and so on, how much better off would you be when all that bad stuff showed up on Dscan or on grid?
Just from a mental standpoint (meaning general cheerfulness) I would bet you would be a lot better off.

I still suck at PvP but I almost never run from a fight anymore, and I never get angry or depressed when I lose. It took far to long to get to that state on my own, and I know for a fact that most never did. They are off playing something else.

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Real loss is not happening in any video game, also not in EvE. The best thing you can do to new players is to take aside all this psycho BS and overemphasizing losing ships … ships and fits are ammo or replaceable tools. Teach players risk management 101, that’s all you need to handle it. This will help you handle RL better too likely.

Games and sports are all about losing and winning, with no stakes.

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CCP is hiring people to analyze player behavior in an effort to get them to stop quiting and it’s not working, Bluelysian was doing it for free and it was working. It was working better than all the crap they flung at new people and all she’s saying is that if you teach people correctly in the begining they have a much better chance of staying.

The thing is that there is a real sense of loss in Eve, it takes time and effort and thought to make things, having them taken away in whatever way it happens does generate a sense of loss more often than not, and some people don’t see it as something they should have to put up with. Yes it’s a videogame, but if you are playing some other game and your save file goes away after a few hundred hours rendering all of your effort and time moot, you, or at least most people would react.
In Eve you can fight back, most other games you’re just screwed.

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I took a screenshot of that post :slight_smile: in case you become sober and realise what you have just wrote and remove it .

Also say hi to pink elephants walking on your hands :)))))))

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lol good one!


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[ This post will be flagged by the “community” ]

@bluelysian

I respect you a lot. In my opinion, you are part of the very few players who have made EVE great. I think you’re the most dedicated EVE player that this game has ever had and will ever have.

That being said, and I’m sorry to say this, I think you are wasting your time trying to come up with ways to revive this game and move it forward, said job belonging to CCP, which they are doing horribly bad at.

From what I see and have come to understand, CCP has its hands tied by long-unresolved bad decisions, unresolved game issues and mechanics, and a third party about which you seem to have forgotten: Pearl Abyss ( abyss is correct, it’s the pit where games go to die ).

As mentioned before, CCP won’t read your letter and if by an accidental freak of nature they happen to stumble on it, they won’t take it seriously or into consideration.
When a phrase like “greed is good” goes around a game community and previously uttered by a Dev, it is plainly clear to me what PA/CCP’s objectives are: milk the game to the last drop and let it die by misrepresenting what the game is really about and profit from new players’ money for as long as those new players are under false impressions and before they quit, after having spent real money for Omega and PLEX of course.

I’m amazed that you are still trying to do this game any good after the horrible way CCP has treated you. In my eyes, whoever has had a hand in your in-game demise and subsequent treatment is a traitor and a coward, two things I despise infinitely and can never ever forgive.

I don’t know if you’ve taken up playing this game again under another account or not but if you are… why? I can understand the love of something that has been a big part of your life for a decade or more but there comes a time when calling it quits is not only healthy but also wise and totally reasonable.

If you are no longer playing the game ( which somehow I doubt ) the best thing would be to forsake these forum. They are virtually useless as a form of communication
to CCP and only serve the self-aggrandizement of vanitous liars and heartless jerks… a den of vipers enabled by a few disingenuous lapdogs calling themselves “ISD”.

Me? I only monitor these web pages once in a while now, just in case there is a thread such as this one, created by an (ex)player I admire and respect.

I still play the game simply because I like it but I’m not invested in it anymore and am only on a month-to-month Omega status to enjoy the few perks it presents in order to milk the last drop of fun it still miraculously provides me with until the fun dies and I move on and invest my precious free time to a space game that does deserves it cough!Elite!cough!

I wish you a long and fruitful life and plenty of happiness and contentment.
Peace to you, friend.

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I’m not sure if you realize who she is or what she’s done in Eve. I’m guessing you don’t and are going on mostly just this post and her description of her background.
I made a post above explaining this to an extent, and if you scroll up you will see what I’m talking about.
She’s not saying that people need their hand held or that the loss of a ship causes an emotional breakdown in real life, she’s talking about how CCP is botching the new player experience and how they are hiring people to help them do it. (EDIT: she didn’t say that, I did.)
While they have been doing that she has been scooping up new people for years and teaching them the one thing that all Eve players need the most, the understanding that all loss in Eve is fixable, even the huge ones (which do cause a hell of a lot of emotion) and she’s doing it by teaching these brand-new people PvP.
She is the exact wrong person to suggest that they shouldn’t be doing this, especially in the case of Eve.
The real life stuff she’s referring to is her actual background of helping fix real life catastrophes, like massive ones. She knows what’s she’s doing and got right to the center of this games biggest problem, keeping people in the game by teaching them how to not think of loss as insurmountable. CCP on the other hand is hiring “experts” to analyze us and as near as I can tell either they hired a bunch of flaming fuckwits to do this analysis or they really really get off on making people unhappy.
In the time I’ve been playing Eve I have seen the tireless lifers in Rookie Help who answer the same questions day in and day out about things that CCP can’t be bothered to fix, a guy named Mike on the CSM who travels all over Eve giving new players help, advice and a new ship, and only one other person do as much for keeping people in the game, and that person is Bluelysian.
She teaches the core of Eve: PvP.

I’m sure there are others who I am unaware of, but those are the ones I know of and as I said before, she should be the final career agent.

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Again, if someone gets emotional from playing a video game, then video games aren’t for that person. Just like the players we’ve seen in the news over the years that kill themselves over losing their account in WoW. These types of people have issues that go far beyond video games…

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That’s not even slightly what she’s talking about.
And if videogames didn’t trigger emotions they would be like that thing you didn’t notice you lost under the refrigerator and never saw again. What would be the point?
Now that I think about it, what you just said defeats the purpose of the very existence of video games.

You should throw a victory party you have defeated the purpose.

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Video games are for entertainment, not to trigger emotions. She’s talking about “grief counseling” in video games, for Christ’s sake. If a video game affects you that damn much, then you have some serious issues…

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Define entertainment.
And no she’s not, she’s talking about how to avoid the things that cause low player retention.

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EVE appeals to a certain type of player. And the current generation of gamers that want hand-holding and to be spoon-fed are not it. That’s why there is low player retention. I could have saved her a few pages of typing…

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This.

When gaming or sport becomes professional - and the stakes become real rather than just bragging rights, then the nature of the activity changes altogether.

–Gadget likes to play (winning’s nice, too)

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You could save me a few pages of typing by reading the part where I specifically pointed out that she’s not advocating for hand holding, she is talking about how it’s not needed if people learn how to deal with how Eve is different from other games from day one. This is why I think that PvP should be part of the career agent missions. She filled that lack for a long time and did it very well. Handholding was not part of it, killing and dying and being classy about it was. So was recovering from loss and how to learn from mistakes and so on.

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Now that I agree with. Players just need to HTFU. I’ve lost plenty of ships over the years, learned from my mistakes, and 15 years later I’m still here…

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Can’t go completely there.

It’s normal to get emotional during games. Good games can drive an emotion, just like a good story is designed to.

It’s not normal to stay emotional for long AFTER the game, though.

I’ve “rage” quit after a bad night, bad luck, or bad decision in a game and just left to go out for a pint.
But I was also right back in after a night of sleep and a chance to review what went wrong with a clear head.

–Mellow Gadget (sometimes)

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It is not an accident that CCP hired folks like CCP Ghost. Games HAVE become a dynamic interactive experiment in psychology. To use the tools within that discipline only makes sense.

and what is wrong with Dr Peterson? I happen to like his stuff.

m

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Now we are getting somewhere!

I agree that Eve isn’t for everyone, but I do think that a lot more people would play it if they got past a few things. First off it’s not for people who want everything now. But that’s sort of beside the point aside from eliminating a lot of people who either don’t have the time, or need instant gratification.

Eve has a few things that kill off new players, I have a nice short list of what I think are the main ones (because they are the ones that could have stopped me).

The UI. It’s a ■■■■■■■■■■■.
Boredom. Far to many people end up mining and find it dull as hell.
PvP. Not just because of getting ganked, but because like the UI, the rules are a ■■■■■■■■■■■.

So Bluelysian was bypassing all three of those problems by grabbing new players in their first hours days or weeks and teaching them how to not get bored, how to use the UI because what she was teaching uses the most important parts of it and that helps with the rest, and she did this by teaching them how PvP works. Everything from how to shoot someone, how to defend against them shooting back, to fitting and so on.
Even if they were someone who later on discovered that they liked mining they were far better prepared for being able to do it and to tell the inevitable gankers “good fight” instead of having a meltdown over it if they failed to kill the gankers. Most people just sit there thinking “oh crap”.

CCP has a word for the point where someone stays in Eve or quits, I forget what that word is at the moment, but there’s a moment, and getting killed is one of them, where people go either way. Stay or quit.

As things are now the new player experience is… I can’t use that series of words, the ISD will go incandescent with rage…
Let’s just say “lackluster”.
It’s friggin boring as hell, doesn’t teach you much of what you need to know, and it fails completely the instant you deviate from it’s plan. Last time I did it (a few months ago) you had to file a support ticket to resume the tutorial if you did so much as dock your ship. That, that one thing all by it self is proof that someone isn’t thinking and that someone else let them do it.

PvP in Eve has some problems, the biggest being that it’s not mentioned in any meaningful way when you start off. Then there are the rules (I hate them) and they are a huge deterrent from learning PvP on your own. And then there’s the most insidious problem, the implication that highsec is safe when it’s not.

CCP does nothing whatsoever about this stuff so people wind up mining get sick of it and leave. Some, I would say a lot less, get ganked and leave. And the last one, the UI, almost got rid of me, it gives me eye strain, it’s inconsistent, and in many areas something that should take one click takes a bunch of
them. Also something that only needs one window often has several. Add a messed up UI to an outlandish learning curve and there’s a problem.

The main thing though is what Bluelysian was doing was preparing people not only to get past that stuff but for what comes after, the realization that this isn’t a game you just win, you are in it for the long haul and aren’t just developing a few things that let you do other things or advancing from level one to level three, you are developing your character with the expectation that in five or ten years you might still be here. In Eve, at the very least you need to be able to fight back and take a loss if you lose the fight.
She laid the foundation for all that by cutting through the crap that’s in the way.

It’s not the new players fault that Eve has these walls, but it makes it take a very different mindset to get past them on your own. I’m my case I got pissed and decided there was no way I was going to be stopped by this stuff and so I’m still here. I have brought a lot of other people into Eve who I know personally and who I also know would be good at it, they all quit very quickly with I think three exceptions. Actually two… I forget, it’s late and I’m still typing. It’s a good thing you aren’t getting me to have another drink, I would be on the floor.

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Good luck with any of that given the current crop of gamers. They have grown accustomed to Fortnite, mobile games, and have exactly zero patience. Like I said, EVE requires a certain type of player, and the current generation is not it. Unfortunately, CCP would have to massively dumb down the game to maintain any sort of player retention.

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