Are you being serious? Thats like saying “The Dread Pirate Scarlet community is really small.” :smh:
And speaking of small, 1.5% of players sounds like really solid evidence that few people do incursions, right? Hmm, well maybe not. See the part you failed to take into consideration is that is not a cumulative number. Here is the money quote from Quant’s devblog:
You understand why the part that Quant emphasised is important to your claim that nobody does incursions, yeah? One of the big draws of incursions back in thier heyday was that you made so much ISK that you could spend most of your time/month (or year) doing other stuff. There were people who would grind like crazy for a month just so they didn’t have to do PVE again for a year.
Further, you understand the shear volume of characters under consideration yeah? How many characters log in each day? SInce you claim Incursions never became a popular thing, people just did missions/explo/ratting, you should probably use the 2011-2013 numbers. But lets keep with Quant’s 2015 metrics. Lets be conservative. If peak Concurrent Users averaged 25k, I think 50k average total users/day seems fair. SO, on any given day in EVE there was an average of 750 users running incursions that day. If only 750 users ran incursions in 2015 then there would be cause for concern. Nobody has offered any evidence to suggest that (or anything like that) so far.
Finally, consider that all mission running – from career missions to L5s – only account for 19%. Go spend some time on Dotlan’s stat page. Look at the top 10 HS systems by NPC kill in 2010 and compare it to '12, '13, '14 and '15. In 2010 top spots went to L4 mission running hubs. 2 years later, the top systems were neither L4 hubs nor fed by L4 hubs. Its almost as if 2012 characters with BS + LG gun skills moved on to other activities. I wonder what that could have been?
As much as I hate incursions, they have been hugely successful from the standpoint of PVE design. Burner missions, which are merely additions to the L4 mission pool, seem to be popular as far as L4 missions go. You don’t do them. Neither do I (but I have not done L4’s in 5 years either). The number of garmurs/DD’s I see coming and going from Langissi alone, however, suggests that there are plenty of people who do. Even if they are not doing burners exclusively. Same goes with clone soldiers (which I did for sec purposes). The rest are underused because of ISK/hr, low availability of information, or because they are new (it took a solid year before Incursions hit thier stride).
Oh, and M. Gladwell is the qualitative equivalent of Vince Offer. Great for selling a product, and you will love his nuts, but not someone you should quote seriously. I would argue that the majority of all TED talks are of the same caliber, but thats another story.
IMO, your whole “but mah PRAXIS” post kind of falls apart under even cursory scrutiny. You would have been better off limiting your claim to something like “There is a group of players who are advocating for stuff only they will enjoy. I will not enjoy it, therefore CCP should make more content for me.”