I’m honestly not sure what point your’re arguing here. You started out by saying “players refuse to fleet” and “players make no attempt to fleet”, firmly placing ‘failure to fleet’ on the players.
I respond by saying it’s not a ‘refusal’ to fleet, it’s lack of interest and accessibility to fleeting that causes players to not fleet. That means it’s a failure on CCP’s part to set up fleeting mechanics and rewards that make fleeting accessible, engaging, and rewarding, without undue effort on the players.
Then suddenly you’re saying:
Which is exactly my point: it’s not stubborn refusal on the part of players, it’s a lack of good fleeting mechanics in the game. You also mention fleet-only content, which is fine, it’s what most MMO’s do to encourage group play (Raids, team content etc.).
I then point out that group play is traditionally hard to encourage in MMO’s because grouping up, getting everyone in one place, and tackling content that the whole group can handle is inherently slower and more time-consuming than solo play, especially these days when more people are doing their gaming in short stints than 3+ hour gaming sessions. This is a well known issue in the entire MMO community for years, which you apparently dismiss as:
That’s funny, because it’s genre-wide and decades old. It’s also funny that you dismiss such barriers as “jump distance” to grouping, and recommend ‘ad hoc’ grouping. Tell you what, why don’t you outline for me what a new player, entering the game without a group of pre-existing friends in the game, needs to do to regularly find grouping opportunities that he can participate in under 90 minutes that’s more rewarding than playing solo. We’ll see just how “ad hoc” and “easy” grouping is when you tell us all how it’s done.
I mean, you’ve already mentioned that for this “easy, ad hoc” grouping you should be in large corp/alliances, in FW (a quite broken game feature), and/or in a large EVE discord channel. Those all seem like noticeable barriers to me but perhaps you have an easy, ad hoc solution for these, as well as for forming large groups of friends in-game.
By “a few exceptions” I take it you mean you need to find people who are already in your area (because jumping any significant distance takes too long), and in the right kind of ships, and interested in the content the group is running. Oh, and able to trust you not to simply gank them when they show up. My gosh, I never realized how easy this is! Perhaps if you’re part of a large null-bloc alliance this works better. Which is right in line with CCPs decade-long drive to get everyone to move to Null and join a large alliance (which is “playstyle C” that generates the most money for them btw, something you also dismissed out of hand).
You seem to think I’m arguing against group play, and you’re presenting a bunch of fairy tales about how easy it is and how it’s clearly advantageous to the player. That’s where you run into hard reality: if it was easy to do and beneficial for the player, then players would be doing it, in droves. Players are quite good at working out what their most rewarding activity is, given their own personal situation.
All the “it’s very easy and ad hoc: just develop lots of friends in-game, join Discord channels, join a large corp/alliance, have jump clones and travel ships and multiple bases of operation, and synchronize your breaks with the rest of the group and then it’s all super easy!” hand-waving in the world won’t change the reality of it. The reality is staring you in the face: a lot of players don’t do it. If they don’t do it, there’s a reason for that.
. I a lot went unsaid - but that is not an invitation for you or anyone else to make assumptions on what I did or did not mean.