I hope someone buys and analyzes the 2017 statements when they’re released, because they might be interesting. The numbers for 2016 where engineered to somehow sell the company and also included the F2P move so they’re a bit unreliable. Also they include the VR thing that doesn’t matters in terms of how many revenue is generated by EVE and how much of that revenue is spent on EVE.
What we know is that critical redundancies happened when the company financials hiccupped last october, and that’s not what a company does when they’ve got the money to keep that talent inhouse and/or can fire younger, less established talent.
So, I bet the 2017 statements will be interesting.
That’s my source, hope he’s still blogging and can buy & interpretate the 2017 statements for us ignorants.
My hunch so far (might be updated with further micro or macro data) is that EVE will enter maintenance mode in 2020 and will shut down before november of 2023.
Serenity is already in maintenence mode for a year in fact. Player count dropped significantly from end of 2016 when the updates stopped. But its mainly because TianCity is even worse than CCP, I dont know how.
Expect more chinese players migrating to Tranquility, Serenity soon closing as a ghost town. I give it one more year before it will be empty like DUST514 servers in last months of operation.
Just today Serenity had Max (24h): 6,694 players. Only a bit more than there were in one system on Tranquility when that record breaking TiDi defeated around 6000 EVE players.
The CSM was almost entirely hisec dominated for the first 5 years of its existence, and only became a ‘nullsec dominated’ (i.e more NS than other areas) in the past 4-5 years as people from Hisec either stopped voting, or shifted their votes to NS candidates.
But, in terms of ‘care bears’ on the current CSM, we have Steve Ronuken, one of the top providers of industry and other PvE tools for solo players, Noobman, who is heavily involved in WH PvE, Yukiko Kami who, as a member of BNI, deals a large amount with New Player PvE, myself who used to FC Incursions in HS & NS, alongside having lived in a WH, and ratted in NS. Aryth is also, by some definitions, a carebear, as he primarily uses money making via the market - something that can only be done effectively in hisec.
Historically, we have people like Mike Azariah, Myanna & even Xenuria, whos personal goal is to run every single complex and site in EVE. Stretching further back I’m sure I could pick up more.
To say that the CSM doesn’t have people who like and enjoy PvE on it is blatantly untrue. There’s less likely to be ‘solo hisec mission runners’ on the CSM in general however simply because that’s not an activity that someone with the social abillity to get the CSM would chose to participate in, and equally, those players of the game are drastically under-represented in the voting pool are mostly unaware and uncaring towards the CSM. This is the reason I proposed one of the short PvE events to be made voting themed this year during the election, though that’s unlikely to happen, as I felt it would help to educate many of these otherwise non-voters.
Didn’t suggest that - Just want the team that we were told would be dedicated to balance to be given the time they feel they need to do their job. 1d a week would give them to option of making proactive tweaks like we saw with the alpha ship re-balance more frequently.
OK. It seemed to me the article was speaking about things more broadly. I dont even recall there being a “they spend less than x time on balance” kind of statement. That might be my fault though. You mentioned earlier that you need to wait till the min come out before discussing more, is that still true?
Well, the problem with Serenity is, why should Tian City implement F2P there? And why should CCP fork the code to have post-Ascension expansions with and without alpha clones?
Because pulling the slot machine handle 10 times is more likely to yield a jackpot than pulling it once. That says nothing about pulling 10 handles one time being better than pulling 1 handle ten times. Either is just as good as the other, i.e. 10 people going it alone should be as good as 10 people going as a group . . . all things being equal. It is not a given that a group is more than the sum of its parts. In fact, there is some philosophical question as to whether that is even possible, for something to be “more” than it’s constituents.
Tell us more about “poorer economic situations”. How is it?
In order to stay on top, Wal-Mart has to look over its shoulder every day to see what the companies behind it are doing. They have to look up the path every day to see what obstacles they may have to surmount, what distances they may have to traverse. I am reminded of what CCP Falcon said about EVE Online, that it is about action and reaction. When you say that someone entering Delve or Deklein or Tribute or Pure Blind, etc. will get crushed, I just wonder whether it was intended to work that way.
They call it “balance” for a reason. In a game such as this, it should require constant reassessment and readjustment to stay on top; shouldn’t it? Why should some group residing in a region of null be able to simply “crush” anyone trying to enter? Shouldn’t it take effort and foresight and resources to maintain that “balance”?
Seems broken.
External pressures like . . . gravity? Entropy? Social disharmony? Limited rewards? Information overload? Friendly fire and collateral damage? Lack of competent participants? I agree. There are a lot of “external pressures” in the real world that work to limit the size of groups. Maybe more of these should be introduced into EVE to help balance things out.
Maybe it has something to do with those external pressures you mentioned.
It’s lovely that you think this should be the case, but it won’t be. Why? Efficiency. 10 people going it alone have to do everything, each of them, themselves. A group of 10 can, by comparison, take turns doing things like carrying things, or keeping watch for predators (in whatever form that takes).
The 10 people on their own all need to be able to find and collect materials, develop those materials into useable items, and then be able to use that item. And again, this takes multiple forms, everything from hunter-gatherer work to ‘I have to go to the store to buy supplies’. The group can specialize. This doesn’t just mean specializing their expenditure of time, this means they can specialize knowledge. The builder doesn’t need to know where the best place to quarry rocks is, he just need to know what to do with them.
As for the philosophical question of whether something can be more than the sum of its parts… it’s answered right in the phrasing. Efficiency and specialization are force multipliers, in terms of effectiveness. As an EVE example: You take 10 Zealots, each with local reps. I’ll take 6 Omens with no local reps, and 4 Guardians.
You have more dps than I do. You may even have more EHP than I do, total. I’ll win. Why? Because your inefficiency is additive. My efficiency is multiplicative. My 10 will outperform your 10, even though my smaller number of less effective DPS ships are T1, and your greater number of tougher DPS ships are T2.
More than the sum of its parts, my group is the product of its parts.
Go on, try to deflect and shift to make it into some half-arsed value judgment. The data across centuries from all around the globe is consistent: as populations become more affluent, the number of children per household drops. Go argue with censustakers around the world if you don’t like it.
You make it sound like the smaller guys don’t. Even mom & pop stores have that issue. You know what issue Wal-Mart doesn’t have? The presence of a global giant using its monolithic purchasing power to negotiate better prices in bulk, so it can price those small individual shop-owners out of competitiveness, and then, out of business.
If you think we don’t do this already, you’re a fool. However, even if we make a wrong move, we can brute-force the solution by throwing 1,000 subcaps at a smaller, ‘more nimble’ problem.
You, personally, can spin up an unlimited number of alpha accounts. Go on, check. See how many you make before CCP stops you. I’ll put money on ‘so many, I got bored and gave up before they did’.
Maybe! I’ll take the bet on who’ll best adapt to them. Will you?
Or maybe it’s got something to do with most mutation and variation being either detrimental, or quickly subsumed and overwhelmed among the genetic diversity of the general population. Natural selection’s a fairly conservative process of speciation—it generally takes changing underlying conditions to push a significant change in a species, and even hive insects don’t have a true collective intelligence… just a broad, fairly shallow, pool of central directives being communicated to workers to then execute according to their own internal instincts.
So do 10 people going together. They have to do all the exact same things that 1 person does, just x 10. Sometimes, a greater efficiency can be achieved by doing things in a different order or by specialization and division of labor, but those have their own overhead to consider.
Yes, and the hard and fast solution that humans and even some other organisms have come to use is not “grouping” per se, but trade. An apple tree and myself are not a unit, but we each have something the other needs. We don’t form a group. We simply trade, sustenance for motility, in that particular case.
Exactly what I’m talking about. Guardians are intended to nullify DPS. The question is: How much DPS should they nullify and at what range? Should 4 Guardians nullify the DPS of 10 Zealots at 50km from the target? Why so? How does this “balance” affect the gameplay of EVE on a micro (tactical) and macro (strategic) level? Does it not artificially reward grouping and thus artificially punish individuation and reliance on tactical efficiency?
If your Guardians had to maintain proximity to their target and generally respected the limitations of the modules they were specialized to employ, wouldn’t the outcome be much different? Isn’t “150% bonus to Remote Capacitor Transmitter range” or “60% bonus to Remote Armor Repairer optimal range and falloff” PER LEVEL specifically intended skew gameplay away from individual decision making and action over to massing and group coordination?
In the real world, it only takes one shot to sink a carrier. It doesn’t matter what kind of grouping the carrier or the tank or the soldier has done. They can be knocked out just as easily, although there can be more care taken in a group. Risk can be offloaded to more survivable and/or less essential members. But, a carrier can run out of aircraft or a tank, fuel or a soldier, energy, just as fast. Coordinating group action requires consensus, practice, communication. Small groups or even individuals can easily neutralize even large bodies of opponents. There is no “150% more hitpoints per group member”. Such “bonuses” are artificial choices to balance the game in a certain way, an artificial way.
That’s a fact. What is not a fact is that this happens because more is better. If more were better, then affluent households would have MORE children according to your theory since they are the ones with a choice.
Wal-Mart requires a population center, a police force, infrastructure for logistics and communications and just keeping the lights on, a money system, etc. That’s why if you look back in history, there hasn’t been such a phenomenon until now. If your business model requires a global transportation (jump freighters?) and communications system (standings, local, Regional Markets, alliance and corp chat, etc.) to be competitive and mine only requires a roof, an oven, and a deal with the farmer down the road, guess who survives in the long run?
Local producers still produce. They probably even sell some of their products to Wal-Mart.
Maybe over the course of a day or a week, but not for long if they are persistent, and let’s be real; there are plenty of people just using the likes of a Goonswarm (or Pandemic Horde or Test Alliance or Providence-bloc or . . .) strictly for economic gain. You are already overrun with competitors. They’re just wearing the same shirt as you. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, my friend.
Yes, even bees are mostly better off thinking for themselves. It’s too bad EVE Online is trying so hard to stamp out their individuality.
Actually, it is ‘grouping’. Welcome to ‘society’. Do you grow all your food? Do you personally operate the power plant that provides your electricity? Do you operate your ISP, run your cabling across the country, launch your satellites, build the vehicle you use, refine the petroleum that fuels it?
Or are you part of a group that specializes and distributes that work? This isn’t a modern innovation, this ‘society’ thing. The idea that cooperation isn’t ‘grouping’ is ludicrous. And by the way? ‘Trade’ is part of this. You don’t trade unless you’re working with someone else. And just for the record, if we consider an apple tree as an entity, then yes, ‘an apple tree and myself’ is a group. It’s just not a group of people. It’s a group of living things. If we consider the apple tree solely as an object, it’s still a group of objects. Don’t look now, but you’re a group of cells.
And, while we’re talking about the apple tree, you’re not trading with the apple tree. You’re eating its apples. You don’t walk up to the tree and say ‘hey, look, I’m gonna take these apples and throw the core around so your seeds get to places’. I mean, it’s possible you do, but let’s be real, 99.99999% of people are not thinking ‘hey, tree, lemme make you a deal here’. They just take the apples.
Yes, the 10 people all together have to do the same things 1 person does, but again: efficiency means that no, they don’t have to do 10x the work 1 person does. 1 person building a shelter to sleep in has to build a shelter large enough for 1 person. 10 people building a sleeping shelter only need to build a shelter large enough for however many of them are going to sleep at once. A village of 10 households doesn’t need 10 wells. Shared infrastructure is a thing.
This assumes that individuals always act in the interests of maximum efficiency regardless of personal effort and cost. This is demonstrably not true. You know why affluent people often choose not to have more (or any) children? They don’t have to. They don’t need the children as a way to ensure someone will be there to take care of them when they’re old and infirm. They don’t need more children, even if they have some. They don’t need to expend the effort of raising them, they don’t need to expend the resources that goes into it, and they don’t need to put the mother’s life and health at risk (and yes, even in modern societies, pregnancy carries health risks. Those risks are minimized, but they exist).
They don’t need to do all that extra work. Someone else is already doing that work for them. You know, another part of the group that is society. Conservation of energy isn’t just a physical law, it’s a behavioral imperative, too. (Just ask a cat!)
Mine, because if human history shows us anything, it’s that innovation and increased complexity may occasionally take a single step backwards, it doesn’t actually ever collapse completely. It just doesn’t happen. The end of the Roman Empire didn’t see society collapse across Europe, it saw centralized control decay… and reassert itself, on a more localized scale, before building up even farther, with even more people.
When the Roman Empire collapses, the population of the entire Earth is between 190 and 250 million. That’s after roughly 30,000 years of Homo sapiens sapiens running around. After another 5% of that time (1,500 years) there’s three times that number just in the borders of the old Roman Empire.
Trade—cooperation between individuals, ie: grouping—never actually stops during that time. It doesn’t even really slow down. Rome loses its empire. Rome itself doesn’t go away, it just stops having control over places that become Visigoth and Ostrogoth Kingdoms. The places that were organized and well-managed… stay that way. The Eastern Empire, run from Byzantium, is fine. China doesn’t even notice the fall of Rome.
Who survives the long run? Ask the farmers who used to have vast acres of farmland in what’s now Manhattan, or London, or Shanghai.
Then they’re not competitors, are they? They’re part of the group.
Not fair? They said that in Winter 2017/18 we would get HAC and AF changes so that HAC and AF would become relevant again. This was said in summer last year. Now we have Winter and only get some half-baked AF changes. If they expected a fair response to their announcement, maybe they should have followed through with their statement? It cannot be true that a whole team cannot do more than a few minor stat changes to assault frigates in 6+ months.
Yes, we should rather talk about forgotten technology or skills. Collapse of civilization? Thats too unspecific.
The simplest and most usefull skills and technlogies survive for longer tho. If they are not replaced by better things. And if the better things are gone, its always easier to rediscover the simpler stuff.
ps: It was schocking to read in Jin’taan article that Seagull could only be approached once after the summer of discontent in 2017, and the promise was in the end Meaningless.
