Not weird. Protection against equivocation. I wish it wasn’t necessary, but collectively, this forum is severely “logic-impaired”, so I do what I must.
A lot of people say it here, including the guy who induced the post you replied to. It’s an obvious “faulty generalization”, but it’s still part of the standard “bittervet narrative”. It’s also one of the more toxic parts of that narrative, because it’s a “call to inaction”.
In fact you’re doing much the same thing below, though in the less extreme form the that other guy I was talking to.
You got that from some eccentric claims, which I can summarize with one quote:
This isn’t false, but it doesn’t describe what actually happens. The interesting question isn’t something like
“Can a new player have fun if they join the right nullSec Corp?”.
It’s
“What proportion of new players actually join a high-end (e.g. nullSec) Corp, and of those, how many stay in EVE”?
The two-stage question is essential, or we’d get caught in a “petitio principii” fallacy.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if new players who joined a nullSec Corp stay in EVE. But if there’s a pre-req not available to most beginners (like the “Goons” old technique (participate in a non-EVE online forum (Something Awful?) forums for a year of two) it’s not correct to draw any conclusion about new players who don’t meet that requirement.
I don’t see where you’re going with your conclusions related to other games. For any given type of game, or specific game within the type, there’s plenty of evidence that some will like it, some will not.
We can conclude (unnecessarily that not everyone will like EVE.
But it tells us nothing about why EVE has an exceptionally poor retention rate
What does need to be considered is two related questions:
- What kind of person tries EVE (regardless of whether they leave or not)?
- If those, do a significant proportion of them come to EVE without any understanding of the type of game is, or of its more obvious of its defining characteristics?
The “bittervet narrative” (and, to some extent, yours) only works if the answer to (2) is “a large proportion have no idea, and leave because they discover EVE is the wrong type of game for them”.
II don’t see how that could be true. EVE is 15 years old. Information is readily available (including e.g. the free-fire PvP characteristic, and loss of equipment in PvP). And both the game and its players both have terrible reputations. How many new EVE players wouldn’t learn all this, and decide to try EVE anyway?
The only way the “bittervet narrative” works is if most of the people who try EVE are very poorly informed about EVE, and/or have hardly any online gaming experience of any kind.
Perhaps it was true in 2008, though even then EVE’s reputation was well established and well publicized . But it’s 2019 now - I don’t buy the “most new players are ignorant about EVE” assumption.