your playing games, the average players online is 22k for the last 36 hours.
65% of that population is unque playerbase (and its probably less than that).
The average online for the entire history of Eve is 37,000 Almost double of what the current average of 22,000 is.
As i said, Almost half o the population of eve is gone. Get over yourselves and stop trying to paint this delusional lie that “eve is not dying or declining, its the same”, Buts its not true.
Stable for half of the previous population? Place any spin on it you’d like the games population has significantly dropped and will continue to do so.
All bodies require a specific set of population growth to sustain themselves. Societies in the world today are dying as a result of this simple important fact, eve is no exception to this. If a game does not grow, it dies.
“Stable” is used as a word to say psychologically imply the game is not losing population. The truth is, you are either gaining or losing as no game sits at an exact number for prolong persons of time (much less sort ones). Any designer, developer, or marketing specialist knows this.
36 hours is not a valid sample. And it’s clearly a cherry picked sample. And is still not even close to half. Its 60%. And the all time average is not a useful number for trends either.
Source required for playerbase stats ever having been related to concurrent log ins.
The last 4 years the average has been stable. That’s a pretty stable trend in most people’s books. And no growth is not required to survive. That’s an utter myth you are making up on the spot.
Muhahahaha, what you have in math? C-- 
What part of 37,000 Concurrent logins over the entire history of eve do vs today, 22k do you not get? Can you explain to me why the drop from 37000 on life time to 22k is a “stable rate”?
The game is dying and no amount of bs “no its not” from you or your alts will change that, bud.
Stable as in the numbers have been basically the same for close to,four years now.
I don’t know how you ignore that when your next claim is that the population will continue to drop. It hasn’t been dropping for three years.
And then you move the goalposts again by talking about growth.
Regardless, what is your point? If it’s just “this game sucks, blah blah blah” then quit playing and go ■■■■ up some other forums. I’m tired of the constant negativity.
Very Professional of you.
The population actually has not been exactly stable over the last 5 years, much less 4, however this is not the point. The point is half the population of the game has been lost and we are not doing anything to regrow that population. This is not actually an attempt at being negative, just being realistic to point out the “trend” the game has been going into since incarna has been down hill and some serious changes to the design philosophy itself needs to be changed.
big moves need to be taken to fix the game. The point i was making is that sitting here with our fingers in our ears just saying “everything is fine” is a state of delusion.
Its actually not quiet that simple. Yes mining and similar things are contributing to it, but the major issue is actually related to diplomacy and corporations and alliances.
this is not the place for that, but these for starters.
and
https://forums.eveonline.com/t/skill-point-changes/141826/6
It is very well known that Alexander the Great resolved the gordic knot !
So, your argument is that alliances are stagnating the game, and that it’s too hard to get into certain ship types and that’s making people quit before getting there?
ftfy…
Since you want to persue this here i will assume you are allowing off topic discussion (ish).
A game is a complex system with complex mechanics to it. The most important parts of this are the blood, and the heart. The population (blood) needs to flow through a game in an unrestricted way. Eve is in a state of existence that the blood is told to go here or there, and the result of that is part of the game no receiving the nourishment it needs. In this case, those parts of the game are the many corporations trying to rise up and make something new.
In all cases the blood needs the heart, and the heart needs nourishment from the blood just as it carries that nourishment to the rest of the body.
Imagine you have two situations, the first is that which is an industrialized product called population / players. They follow exactly what power block A says, or they have to go to power block B and do the same. In both cases the requirements are basically the same (for example, mandatory cta, no mining during pvp ops, etc ). If they reject both they return to high sec to get reject access to parts of their game relative and desired for their progression level.
The second situation is many entities, with different levels, requirements same content access, but different requirements, personality, and levels of development in that. You hae many options to branch out and find a place that fits you well and are not forced into this industrialized homogenized factory like style of game play (ie you dont play eve to make power block a rich you play to make your corp rich (there is psychology behind this that is extremely important to the game, and these points so please take this with great emphasis).
In essence the game is being played like the above. Power block vs power block, but its all a false dichotomy because in both cases you do the same thing, you just have a different set o text aside your name.
Thus, as a result of the lack of choice, the availibity of personality types in combination to access, you have no desire for heart (corps) to pump the players in a direction, and no energy (life force) in the players for them to carry through the body (engaging in new exciting, inspiring concepts).
Thing of the many entities in eve that existed over the years that did new, exciting things. From bombing people suddenly on gates and unique styles of pvp tactics (like forsaken empire had). Even bob implemented many styles of combat over its existence . These things, these forms expression are all but fazed out of the game. The only one i have really seen after 2010 was red frog (shout out to you guys for a great idea!).
Breaking up the alliances into smaller alliances will help stop immortal entities (like goon, Legacy, etc) for existing forever. But more importantly they will instantly provide life to the game by having more targets to shoot at. How can you expect people to want to play eve when they have nothing but quiet corps full of alts to play with? the only ones that do not are the ones that have collected themselves into those large entities.
As for the topic of skill points
There is an important note to be made that should be brought up in a single question.
How quickly do people get tired of the game because of long training periods?The answer to this question (answered by testing or popular opinion) will tell us if for sure we should reduce hac requirement from cruiser 5 to cruiser 3/4.
This has a huge impact to retention rates.
It’s amazing that people still people something like this is true.
No, it won’t. They’ll just form coalitions like we see now outside of the game mechanics. There is no way to do what you claim will be a good thing (which I disagree with).
Skill injectors solved this problem.
Sorry, I just don’t see either of your solutions having any impact on retention.
Not if you implement the changes i mentioned (overview changes, diplomacy changes so that it (standings, docking privs, etc) is all automated, and you cant “allow access” to your structures or “set them blue for an hour”.
all of these “coalition fleets” are possible only because of the ability to temp set blue, and identify and distinguish temp allies on the overview. Remove the ability to directly set standings (By swapping it to something that takes weeks or months to fill) and and remove tag options from overview and all you get is a station with lots of nuets and a few blue and red guys.
Do you have evidence for that?
Why not just increase the subscription rate? This statement concerns me that you do not know what seriously wrong it is, and you are elected to speak for the community. This is a big issue, my friend.
Injectors and all of that do nothing but make ccp rich, they are in no way an effective means to “Catch up” the entire point of “Catch up” is not even needed if you simply just reduce the train times.
Injectors cause inflation, and will eventually (With some minor changes to alpha’s isk capabilities) make “free to play” become “impossible”.
It’s not in-game mechanics that create a coalition. It’s third party apps, websites, comms, and personal relationships. All this will do is create bottlenecks that annoy people but don’t fundamentally change behavior. There is no reason to tinker with one of the few things that has always worked in EVE.
As for the rest, I don’t know what else to tell you. The entire point of skill injectors was to remove the impediment of “Will I be too far behind to make a difference” that was one of the biggest barriers to getting new players to play the game. For what it’s worth, you are the only person I have ever seen making the claim that the length of training times is hurting player retention.
The things you’ve identified as problems aren’t really problems at all.
And none of it is remotely close to your original point, which was complaining about inflation, even though, as I originally noted, the CPI has been steady, which contradicts your point.
there are two aspects to game development, that which is mechanical (code related) and that which is psychological. In both cases you fight each with mechanical changes.
Waiting in a system for 4+ hours to fight is not “working”. Then we also get to t he point of where allances or coalitions have intentionally lagged out the server and we get back to the days of cans on the gate with 2394239423 ammo in it to cause people to crash, and then we continue to the fact that pvp is less consistent then it can be if these larger entities were broken up. We can then move on to mandatory pvp ops forced upon players that dont even want to pvp. there is a large list of problems with this system that can be changed to significantly improve the game. Sorry to say, while the blobs are interesting, they really dont offer much then hype.
This is by no means working.
I am sure someone at ccp on the design team is aware of the potential behind this, but even i they are not i can chalk it up to im a better designer then they are.
As i said if you wanted to allow players to catch up you’d just simply reduce the skill time, while a complete design pass would be better, you really can get away with simply removing level 5 as a prereq for anything, or by chaning the levels to be static.
Inflation is a problem, one easily solved with minor changes to the game. For example, but reducing respawn timers on belts from instant-ish to 1-2 hours, or reducing the rate it takes to complete belt, etc a few different ways to tackle this.
Have you ever been in a large alliance?
Oh, of course.
Because, of course, the reduced skill time would only apply to new players, not veterans.
/sigh
You’ve repeated over and over again that inflation is a problem, but ignored the fact that the main indicator of inflation - the CPI - isn’t showing massive inflation. So where are you getting this from?
I was Jr Hc of Ascn, and a Senior/Lead LC of many larger alliances. I have also been executor two alliances myself. Granted, I have been playing since June, 2003. I have also been in battles of 8600.
So are you saying then a vet who trained mining would not benefit from faster research of command ships?
The topic of statistics (metric data) is highly complex. Often people get things wrong even when they know what they are doing (mainly because they missing someone).
CPI and Inflation are not the same, Actually, Cpi is a means to calculate the growth of inflation.
We can clearly see inflation in the economy, from rising of prices for example, in plex from 150m to 1.8billion.
IT would be supreme ignorance to claim eve is not suffering sufficient levels of inflation, and very likely the sources of it has to deal with nullsec harvesting not having proper controls, and plexs.
From the first graph we can see the growth has been happening a long time, and seems to be consistent with current monthly reports.
