I played the game for 5 years with a single account and have had plenty of fun, sure a second account (Which I just finally got because it lets me easily plex both accounts and cyno stuff) does make some things easier, but to say that you dont have fun with a single account is completely wrong.
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Hello, another fairly new person here! I’ve been in EVE for about 3 months and I am shocked and almost embarrassed by the amount of time, energy, and dollars I have invested in the game. Every decision has been shrewd and an investment for the long term, which is of course a risk because I could easily get bored tomorrow and let all of my Omega time go to waste, but at this point I’ve been so intrigued and invested that I doubt it will fizzle out completely. EVE’s unique skill training system is also perfect because it means I can still continue to “progress” even if I get burned out for a while, and don’t have to choose between going all or nothing.
While I personally agree with @Nana_Skalski and others that the vague statistical correlation suggested by CCP is way too circumstantial for even the most amateur statistician to take it as more than one of hundreds of possibilities, the much more compelling and surprisingly under-utilized source of information about new players is… new players. A lot of people here seem to be speculating about new players as if we don’t actually exist, and certainly as if we could never possibly be found, let alone asked to speak for ourselves.
A lot of what I have to say has already been said by @Quantus_Sumerian. In fact, I have that same image (already outdated) saved on my desktop and I cross off each item in Photoshop as I accomplish it. I still have probably hundreds of hours left until I accomplish that basic checklist, let alone all of the other possibilities I have encountered that aren’t listed there or have been added since that version was made.
For me personally, EVE is just as enjoyable outside of the game as it is inside, and I think a lot of people need to accept that current-player counts aren’t everything. EVE already has one of the deepest and richest lore bases of any game I’ve yet encountered. The metagame is obviously massive and after hours of research I have barely scratched the surface. EVE has not just one but dozens of forums, blogs, and other communities that I can engage in without even being logged on to the game. There’s an entire massive game to be played in economics without ever undocking from Jita.
If EVE is supposed to be a simulacrum or social experiment, as both CCP and even some of its most die-hard veterans claim it to be, then clearly flying ships, earning money, gathering resources, and even training skills are secondary to the social elements, which can be engaged with by all players anywhere in the game, as well as while outside the game and even if you have never set foot in New Eden. While of course none of this would be allowed to exist without an amazing in-game experience, I don’t understand the fear expressed by some people at the idea that EVE can be (and in fact always has been) accessed and enjoyed by both die-hard gamers and those who only undock once a year.
You have it backwards. EVE mirrors the real world in the sense that the subset of old people who have so much money they don’t know what to do with it are bored senseless and complain about everything, while the new people would earnestly like to have a similar experience shared by the previous generation, adjusted to fit the needs of the current age, but are held back by the old people constantly whining, throwing wrenches into everything, and demanding that nothing changes. And when the system starts to crumble due to lack of progress thanks to a vocal minority of stuck-up old-timers, they instantly try to blame anyone else they can, especially the new people who obviously couldn’t have had any impact in the first place. 
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Threads like this are Eve’s real End game.
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The only thing in my 3 months of playing that has made me not enjoy EVE or have any suspicion that it might be “dying” is threads like these. If I hadn’t gone on the EVE forums or Reddit, as a new player I would have literally no indication whatsoever that EVE could even possibly be less than it used to be, let alone “dying.” Certainly there is nothing in the game I have encountered that seems particularly “dead” from the perspective of someone who has never played EVE before.
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Not that kind of End game fam.
I too would like to see those Log-in numbers again.
However I highly doubt it will happen, too many great employees have left CCP.
And all the big dreams left with them.
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When I started in 2012, it was already close to what it is now. Know how I got to vet status? The old fashion way, I waited and trained, killed and lost ships, made and lost friends. If anything, new players have it too easy.
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Let me quickly explain here what’s going on with this thread. This all may look confusing and it may not be quite clear why we bring this study up.
So threads like this happen all the time and in almost every case it is some old player which developed some weird attachment to his stuff and loses sight of the fact that in the end EVE is a game. I think there are in general two problems here.
Some of those old players may actually project their fears of loss onto newer player and think they will quit playing when something unpleasant happens. But new players are not born into the world with this fear. If you still see EVE as a game it may not surprise you that sometimes one loses and sometimes one wins, that is just natural and a learning process, I would guess you have no problem with that judging from your posts
And then there are those old players, and in my opinion that’s the majority of those posts, who are unsatisfied how a specific game mechanic impacts what they do in the game and instead of adapting like many others before, they try to get it changed in their favour. Those players, then hold the new players, because everyone cares about them and CCPs wallet because CCP cares about that as ransom in that they threaten if those game mechanics don’t get changed new players will not subscribe and everyone will quit and CCP loses money…
Something like this comes up every second day here. One of the reoccurring topics which get this treatment is of course suicide ganking as it is something which not exists in most other games and people sometimes lose a lot of ISK because they where lazy and complacent.
This whole thread where some old guy claimed that suicide ganking drives away new players was repeated so often that CCP had to look into it. The study CCP Rise presented was the results of CCP fact-checking the claim. Now a big part of science is that you have a hypothesis like “new players quit or don’t subscribe because of suicide ganking” you then try to figure out what you would expect to find if you go out and check with reality, and then you do go out and check.
So if what the OP says is true and this is a serious problem then one would find a clear indication of that when looking at the data. So they looked at the data and they found no such indications. In fact what they found was the complete opposite of what you would expect if OPs story was true.
So what does this mean? It means that it is highly likely that the OPs suggestion that suicide ganking hurts players is wrong as there is no supporting evidence for it. Of course most of the times there are OPs feelings and some anecdotes about some people he knows who quit about the thing he does not like and wants to be removed, that’s just not real evidence but hearsay.
No one suggests this is the ultimate truth or that the correlation says conclusively that suicide ganking or ship loss (in the case of CCP Quants analysis) is directly responsible for player retention. But there is something going on there because there clearly is a correlation and it does not go away just because people decide that this does not fit their gut feelings.
So I think the conclusion of all of this is that all those whine threads on the EVE forums have to be taken as what they are most of the time: some old player who wants to change the game in his favour.
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You are so wron in so many letters 
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That’s it! Suicide Ganking is annoying - but it rarely drives people out of the game. In the end it may be a reason that you have to bring more and more time to be economically competitive. If you just want to riot in a Thrasher New Eden may be a place … for economic growth you need some kind of patience the bigger part of the new generation is not familiar with 
That so-called study was a farce, complete smoke and mirrors misdirection. Anyone believing that load of bullcrap is deaf, dumb and blind. That BS study was done on a small percentage of players who were in-game with less than 1 month of time. More than likely a majority of them probably didn’t even venture out past the starter systems. And since most everyone knows that newbies in those systems are basically protected it’s only natural that ganking would be the least answer given when asked why they didn’t subscribe. That whole segment was orchestrated to show justification for spending Dev time on re-doing the NPE once again, something that’s been done multiple times before.
Now if that same study had been done with subscribed players up to 1 year who had quit, I’m sure the results would have been a lot different.
I like that, although the objective (if it’s an NPE mission and not just a “you should go join faction war” suggestion) would probably need to be something that must result in death, simply because of the possibility of death at the hands of other players.
Personally, I’ve always thought the death in the NPE should be the second mission, styled like a gank or gatecamp. Instead of the station mysteriously not having any cheap minerals despite being 4 jumps from Jita, have it be that you warp to a rendezvous point for an agent to give you the minerals, but end up in a bubble with rats that additionally have points and scrams so you cannot possibly escape. You learn about propulsion jamming and medical clones and see some fireworks! Then the mission where you go after the pirates for the minerals is for revenge.
The Race event took many of us noobs into lowsec and nullsec. I made it to the monolith. I tried to make it to the EvE gate but I couldn’t get through without dying. I will try to get there sometime when I get some arms to bear.
You speak for CCP now? I personally know 2 guys who gave EVE a try and after being ganked again and again in their ventures they did exactly that - deleted the game. They wouldn’t hear about other options like exploration, missions, null sec etc…
Yes, you can say they are the carebear type and do not fit this game, but they did not get the chance to test that…Many of us started slow and easy.
I like that CODE are keeping in check people who think they can move around Billions of ISK and get away with it, but killing newbro’s in ventures…That ain’t cool. Maybe give them a warning first?
She linked CCP’s words in like the second reply in this thread:
But again, here is CCP Rise saying exactly this:
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Except that’s not what CCP said. they said that the people who stayed longer had a higher ratio of pvp encounters yes.
But that does not mean that pvp makes people stay. As an actual study it simply didn’t address the correlation vs causation question. Or perform any kind of checks to isolate factors.
it was the first round of looking at correlations that you use to indicate data points worth a closer look.
So attempts by any side to point at that as some kind of evidence are at best a joke and at worst a malicious attempt to misrepresent data.
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Regardless, people are not some statistics, don’t care what CCP or anyone on the forums say, those two people I mentioned will never return to EVE and if I know people like that then they ain’t an isolated case.
They pissed a friend of mine to the point that he went stalking CODE at their stations and even forced some of them to move to other 0.5 systems. So yeah, in a way they created content.
It’s exactly what they said - there is a positive correlation between being exploded illegally and subscribing.
Interpret that how you want but it is a statistical fact. It may have multiple and convoluted explanations, but this observation is objectively true.
Make up whatever reason you want to explain that correlation if it makes you feel better, but it does cast serious doubt on the simple assertion the OP made that ganking drives new players away. At the very least he needs to revise his hypothesis to explain why not only do we not see what he claims in the data, but in fact an opposite correlation than he predicted.
Of course people are statistics. What you do not, and cannot know, are all the people you don’t know personally who tried the game, got bored and left because nothing happened.
If you are going to claim some game change needs to be made because it is driving people away, there better be some statistical evidence it is driving people away. CCP looked and couldn’t find any. You can disregard that, or claim them incompetent or deliberately malicious for being unable to find what your personal gut feeling tells you, but you probably should take pause, and revaluate your core premises and consider all the things you don’t know.
It’s completely and totally reasonable that player-interactions, even of the hostile and explody kind, keep people in the game better than sitting alone in a belt or mission pocket for weeks. To me, it is obvious having sat alone in a missioning pocket for a month or two before quitting Eve the first time I tried to play. But if CCP showed me some data that players mining alone for two weeks had the highest retention rate for some reasons, I would have no problem revising my position and would support CCP’s effort to build a safer space for new players to get acclimatized to the game.
But that isn’t the case. The data, at least as it has been shared to us by CCP, suggests that social interactions - joining groups, using the market, shooting/being shot at by other real players are the things that seem to retain players best. That is, after all, one the distinguishing features of the game so it sort of makes sense it are those things, not the mining or mission simulator aspects, that keep players.
Whatever, that presentation was three years ago and we are still arguing over it. The studies were done, the conclusions made and the game goes on. Believe it or invent whatever convoluted explanations you want to explain the correlation. There is zero chance of CCP making highsec safe at this point.
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You heard it here first guys, the game experience shouldn’t be a concern for people playing the game.
Well said. I guess you are right that chances are better for people to stay than leave.
It’s just getting harder and harder to find people who want to try the game. Probably because the game is old enough now and many people have tried it out already. I am talking about local recruitment of course, of people I know.
This is kinda like the Star Wars phenomenon - die hard fans used to be young at the time of the first movies and they will forever be hooked. Nowadays I hear people who are seeing it for the first time say “How can you like that”? I guess this applies to EVE as well. Too many games, too many movies these days.
EVE however will always be unique for me.
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