Please provide some “large numbers”. I do note that you went back to 2004 to find a page free of ganking threads for the ‘before’ picture, and scrolled back to February to find one in Crime & Punishment (you know, the section that’s about criminal acts) to find more than 2 gank complaints on the page.
Go take a look at C&P now - there’s literally ONE thread on “change ganking” in the top 20. Oh and your “Nerf” megathread… which is actually “anti-nerf” clickbait.
And hey, let’s quote the guy that started the “Nerf Ganking” thread:
Whoo that’s some hordes right there! Compare apples to apples: I’m comparing current numbers (20,000 people online, maybe 5 posting about ganking issues but more like 2, really). You’re talking “all the people that ever posted” numbers.
So let’s look at those: add up all the names, ever, that called for ganking nerfs. What have you got? A thousand? Two thousand? Ten thousand? Twenty? A hundred k? Think you could maybe add up a hundred thousand separate posters that asked for gank nerfs? (Not alts, and not doubles between EVE forums and Reddit)
Ship, there’ve been nine and a quarter million people who’ve played EVE over the years. Even if you could fantasize 100k “nerf gank” posters, it would still only be 1% of players ever. And you know the number isn’t a fraction of that. That’s your “large portion” - well under 1%.
You say there’s a lot of posts on Reddit about it. How about you link, say, 4 of those posts that have been active in the last month. If there’s a “large portion” of the playerbase in on it, and “CCP is listening to them”, 4 should be easy. Just go ahead and toss 4 active links in here, I’ll wait.
Actually what’s stunning is that you keep referring to mountains of evidence but can’t actually provide any. There’s literally zero evidence that CCP has “nerfed the game” because players asked for it. They may certainly have done some things that a very small portion of the player base has asked for, but then, a larger portion of the player base asked for the exact opposite.
Correlation does not imply causation.
CCP putting up numbers isn’t proof. CCP can post numbers all day long and say “the economy was broken” but that does not mean the economy was broken. What it means is that CCP has an agenda they want to spin to the player base and they’ll post anything they can to support that spin.
I mean, CCP literally said “We had to fix Rorquals” (and they did), and then showed graphs that displayed Rorqual mining had dropped off a cliff for about a year before the fix! They only fixed it because people had already stopped “paying to win” with Rorquals. They “fixed” it because they thought it would force people to pay more and grind more to maintain their position.
No, I like your posts when they’re good, sometimes even when they’re bad but interesting. And I agree when you’re right. You just haven’t been doing a lot of that lately. Ever since you decided that witch-hunts and smear campaigns with specious arguments was the way to go.
You used to be able to fact-find and confront unpleasant truths, but that was before you went off the deep end with this crazy “the hordes of bad people are everywhere and we must stop them before they ruin everything” stuff.
And look, here we are already agreeing again! Good work!
I’ll say this: your fixation on “players ruining the game” has one thing going for it - as players, we can change ourselves, but we cannot directly affect what CCP does. Not to get things improved and certainly not to “force” CCP to make bad changes. CCP does what they do with very little connection to the player base, bad ideas or good.
It seems odd that you’re so hell-bent on saying “CCP listens, but mostly to the bad demands” and not noticing that CCP somehow misses the literally hundreds of posts of excellent feedback they get.
You want players to somehow change their entire mindset and just “pay and play”, no matter what CCP hands them. I want players to put massive pressure on CCP and PA to make core institutional changes in the way they do things.
Not hard to tell which one of those directions leads to a better game, and which one leads to ever dwindling numbers as players give up and walk away.