Local Comms Blackout - Discussion Thread - Part Deux!

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2850

What % of the DROP in logins would you imagine is caused by WOW Classic?
I’m serious, would it be 1% or 50% or, I ask because 2018 barely reached the 5 year period average and so far 2019 hasn’t reached it since January.

NB; The meaningless numbers are those tossed out by Hilmar with nothing but his word (not worth a pinch of salt) to back them up.

IMO if WOW Classic has taken away even a small enough percentage of the Eve players base to affect logins - CCP really is doing something horribly wrong.

You really don’t usually view these forums do you, or have you been away sooo long you have forgotten - Everyone can say as they choose when it comes to personal views. Trolling is as much a part of Eve as is shooting NPC’s or ganking highsec miners.
It really isn’t my fault if you don’t understand sarcasm, it is even less my fault if you don’t appreciate it. That’s ok. In a month or two when you get bored with Eve, you’ll leave again and you can forget all about me and what a horrible person i am.

I now you WILL leave again - Simply because Eve is a dark horrible place to live and play where people lie, steal, use sarcasm and are generally pretty nasty to each other, you not understanding this will continue to put your foot in it misinterpret what others say or do, get butt hurt, just like now and leave again.

I don’t want your stuff, I have more than enough of my own.,.

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2851

Well, let’s unpack this a bit.

First, there’s no reason to believe Hilmar wasn’t telling the truth when he said “this [June/July][1]'s MAU is the highest we have seen in five years”. But that’s actually kind of a careful statement. He’s not saying ‘this month we have the highest MAU we’ve seen in five years’. That’d be patently false. After all, we can see just from the PCU counts—more on that in a sec—that Nov 2016 was a hell of a lot more active. What he was saying was ‘we have the highest [June/July] MAU we’ve seen in five years’. Which is a very different thing.

There’s also the issue that PCU and MAU are completely different measurements. Monthly Active Users (MAU) doesn’t tell you anything about how many are online at a given time. PCU doesn’t tell you how many users were active during the month (but can give you an idea about relative activity level). When we look at EVE-Offline, we’re looking at Concurrent Users (and, by extension, PCU), but not DAU/MAU. For example, if you’ve got 100,000 users, and 500 of them login every minute on the 00:00, for exactly 45 seconds, and none of them login twice, then you’re going to need all of 200 minutes—3h 20m—to hit a DAU/MAU of 100,000, but your PCU will never exceed 500. So we’re looking at two completely different measurements there.

The other thing with MAU, though, is something Carneros (the voice in the TiS interview who clarified just what MAU/DAU means) said a few days later on… I think it was Open Comms, or maybe Push to Talk, which was along the lines of ‘If you switch from talking about Concurrent Users to MAU, you’ve already got a problem’. Carneros knows what he’s talking about. He’s a game developer, and he’s been at this a while. He’s worked on games like EQ and (gasp!) EVE Online, as CCP Zinfandel. And he’s right. Because MAU has 2 problems. #1: It’s not representative of actual user interactivity… ie: you can’t look at it and say ‘this means X people were on at any given moment and out doing things’. It just means they registered as ‘active users’ in the company’s metric, because #2: just what constitutes an ‘active user’ for MAU/DAU is entirely defined by the company.

There’s no industry standard. There’s no reference that says ‘they have to undock to count’ or ‘they have to login for at least 10 minutes’ or ‘they have to get past the character select screen’. It could even mean ‘they weren’t actually logged into the game, but they logged into the web services like the forums or account management, so they actively used their account[2]’. There’s literally no way to have any idea what it means for their activity. Now, I think it’d be pretty damned daft if CCP was using forum activity to count toward DAU/MAU, but we don’t know, and we can’t know, which is part of why ‘if you switch from talking about Concurrent Users[3] to MAU, you’ve already got a problem’.

Third, WoW Classic… that’s a deflection, and a smokescreen. Sure, there’s a new competitor in the form of a nostalgia play by the 800lb gorilla in the MMO world. So what? There’s always competition. That’s the very heart of the issue! EVE will always have to compete for attention against every single other thing you could be doing. It doesn’t matter what the literal complete list of other things the entire world can offer for your time contains, EVE has to make a credible case of ‘you will get better return on your time here’.

That’s what it has to do, WoW Classic or no WoW Classic. It’s not like WoW Classic is some major upheaval nobody could have seen coming. Everyone’s known it was coming. Any impact it has would have had to have been more or less baked into expectations in the first place, and any planned ‘chaos’ changes would always have had to have in mind ‘WoW Classic is about to come out’. So saying ‘user numbers could be affected by the release of WoW Classic’ is kinda like saying ‘user numbers could be affected by it being summer’. Sure, that’s true… but it’s also meaningless, because that was always going to be the case.

And yes, concurrent user numbers are facts, whether or not WoW Classic exists. Remember: the biggest problem with HS wardecs wasn’t ‘oh no, the children’, it was ‘people log out for a week and go do something else… then they don’t have a reason to come back’.

It takes about 7-10 days to get into a new habitual pattern of behavior. That’s it. If WoW Classic is enough to break people of the EVE habit, then EVE’s got a problem. And the problem isn’t WoW Classic, it’s how well EVE incentivizes playing EVE. Because it means there isn’t anything they feel is worth coming back to.

BTW? EVE’s got a problem.

1 I don’t actually remember which month the interview was done in, and can’t be assed to go look it up and re-listen.
2 Hey, there’s the new mobile app, too, isn’t there? That’s right, folks, login to the mobile app to check to make sure the skill queue full of 60d+ skills is ticking away, or doublecheck that your 3-month long market orders haven’t expired, and you, too could be on the MAU, despite not logging in to the game at all during August!
3 Which are, after all, at least connections to the game server.

6 Likes
2852

Thanks for the explanation… It’s appreciated.

I don’t know much about all this information but read a bit of what the industry counts as logon. I even thought the simple exercise of opening the launcher, generates a blip somewhere.

I don’t want to put reason behind the mention of logins from CCP reps. I mean, no one asked about that specifically.

But when someone runs between the crowd and you hear a shout “thief!”, well, guess who’s guilty.
Of course no one would say out loud that things are not looking hot but there is no need to blatantly run around beating the truth. And there is a problem when it’s used to justify wrongdoing.

2853

@Mark_Marconi Contrary to Arrendis, I will call it for what it is: CCP lying and cooking numbers.

One of the first rules I have learned in my many years of gaming and dealing with devs: never trust what devs tell you unless they actually show proof and explain in detail their process and reasoning.

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2854

:joy:

Yeah, Aaron, there are no bots anymore in null now cause they were not able to adapt their scripts at all :roll_eyes:

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2855

Nah. There’s every reason to think Hilmar doesn’t need to lie there. The statement’s a very carefully crafted one, it comes up when he chooses—nobody asked about it—and… and this is important: it’s a metric. It may be a metric that players won’t understand and can’t verify, but it’s definitely a measured metric. And in an interview where he and Falcon pretty much throw the entire dev team under the bus for the last eight years of work? The last thing you want to do is to put yourself in a position where one pissed-off dev can quietly leak #s out to demonstrate that you’re full of crap. Doesn’t matter if the odds are 0.0000001% or lower, either. No CEO’s gonna leave their own rear swinging in the breeze like that.

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2856

Nobody asked about it…that is left to be determined. We dont have the unedited interview nor do we know what the TiS guys and CCP talked about before…And was CCP allowed to prep before the interview? questions remain…

2857

And that does not mean BO has anything to do with bots.

2858

CCP approached them for the interview, not the other way around.
Same with CCP Rise, he asked to be interviewed.

In both cases, CCP had plenty of time to prepare answers for exactly what they wanted players to know.

The fiction team at CCP probably had a very busy couple of weeks preparing answers to suit the trend CCP wanted the interviews to follow.
Credit where credit is due, only a very talented writer can spin “not so good” in to a positive.,.

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2859

Nah, DZ’s been doing a lot of other stuff. :stuck_out_tongue:

2860

Ok, my statement was slightly wrong. I’ll change it.

Local chat in null is a feature that is required to make a bot work effectively.

2861

I thought you sold all your stuff to plex your account for a couple of years?

2862

Yea, but for CCP to prepare their bs, TiS would have had to give them their questions ahead of time and probably would have also agreed to not call them out… And surprise, no tough questions, no follow up on CCP bs

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2863

The thing I am finding most difficult to understand in this thread is the apparent inability or unwillingness of people to accept that:

  • Numbers are dropping (check https://eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility for yourself and play with the time-periods to see the drop in average numbers)
  • Botting toons have just adapted (see the reddit posts previously linked paired with the fact there are so many other bottable activities in eve null-sec isn’t the only place botting occurs)

The questions I have for you are:

  • What do you think is going to happen if numbers keep declining at their current rate?
  • What happens when something as polarising and disenfranchising as the blackout occurs in other regions of space and the same type of exodus occurs?

I am also struggling as to why CCP can’t come out out say this is how long this will last for whether that’s forever or for a time period or what. I find this absolutely baffling given the level of upset this hairbrained idea has caused.

If I was a director of CCP corporation I would be calling for heads to roll, starting with the CEO.

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2864

They cant come out and say anything for a few reasons:

  • lack of balls
  • they know they screwed up big time but refuse to recognize their screw up and refuse to apologize
  • lack of balls
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2865

Thanks for the link.
it really show what i and a lot of others say.
The people leave game.
Lets wait what happen very soon if CCP stop giving login presents like skillpoints for free every day.

CCP cant ignore this anymore.
I hope they make the right decisions … soon :slight_smile:
I only have 8 days omega left

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2866

I sold enough to plex my accounts for a good while - After 15 years you accumulate a lot of assets

Don’t remember exacts but good old CCP Rise spent quite a bit of time saying “I can’t comment on that” and other such replies to many questions posed by the panel.

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2867

I think it’s just fantastic on Saturday night 23 thousand online CCP continue in the same spirit you will hurt a record less than 20 thousand on weekends, blackout is cool))

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2868

am i writing quite a lot of time. none of the CCP did not answer me
how much can you scoff at the players? you destroy the game. now the peak of the game and 24 thousand in all. - and earlier at that time there were 38-40 thousand players
your idiotic and bitchy blackout destroys the game. no respect for you. there is no pleasure from the game and from your changes.
turn around facing the players, not the ass. make a game for players and not share hysteria

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2869

they do not care. they don’t need players. they sold the game and want to destroy it

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