Seriously are people messed up in the head about this stuff or something?
Does McDonald’s say “stop blaming our food for the drop in business, it’s really because our customers don’t bring enough of their friends in to eat with them. Lazy damn customers!”
And the fact that “new players are seen as something to be attacked, exploited and profited from” isn’t a ‘player’ problem, it’s because that’s exactly what EVE was developed and marketed towards. You can’t blame players for the fundamental game design and CCP’s marketing.
In case you missed the massive discussion a couple years back about the NPE experience, EVE loses over 80% of it’s potential new players within the first few days of play, most of those within the first few hours. How are ‘players’ supposed to counter that?
If you check the “ISK delta” in the MERs, large numbers of veteran players are leaving the game on a constant basis. This is not an issue of “oh it’s the players fault for not mentoring new players”. And if mentoring new players was the issue, then it’s up to CCP to make that process interesting for existing players - by changes to corporate structure, or mentor awards, or other cooperative gameplay enhancements.
This is also wrong. On one hand, I’m fine with multi-boxing, in the sense of “hey if some guy wants to pay for and play 10 accounts, fine by me.” That’s more money for CCP and I don’t care about that style of competition (personal opinion).
However, it is bad for the game in several other senses. It gives new players who find out about it the notion that they’ll never be competitive unless they devote much more money and time than they do to other games. (Whether this perception is true is another question, but it absolutely does affect it.)
It also means that more and more players don’t need to interact with many other players in order to accomplish their goals, because they’ve got everything covered with their multi-accounts.
It means EVE has less of a social network to generate referrals, because instead of 22,000 subscribed players online we’ve got a mix 10,000 players with 12,000 multi-alts, bots and alphas. (example numbers, I have no data on the ratios) So the game “looks” much healthier than it is but is generating nowhere near the contacts it would with less alts.
Finally, it also means that with a much higher level of multi-accounts than other games, when a single player gets frustrated with the game and quits, they’re more likely to take more than one paid sub out of the game with them. This means attrition has an outsized impact on CCP income.
Put all those factors together with the substantial drops in player count, you’ve got a recipe for a game that could easily hit a tipping point and cause a mass drop in subs/income the next time CCP majorly screws up. And past history shows, if there’s one thing CCP can pull off successfully… it’s a major screwup.
At this point, EVE desperately needs all the multi-accounts it can get just in order to survive. But the blame for that is on CCP for pushing EVE in that direction for over a decade now, simply because it was the easiest way to boost income.
