Slowing down the decline of EVE

You prefer opinion and hairsplitting to data. I prefer data. CCP’s own statistics show something like 65% of all players only having one account. Something like 5 or 6% of players have 4 or more accounts. I’m pretty sure that the 65% of the players who wouldn’t be multi-boxing would find it interesting to have more reasons to fleet up and more on-the-fly opportunities to do so. They might even find it engaging.

Again, if you have a better proposal to engage players into fleeting up with each other, please put it forth. Also, the above concepts are to give corps more reasons to recruit and retain. Nobody said they don’t have reasons to now.

This assumes that CCP actually mines the data usefully, that they know which questions, in effect, to put to the database, that they then have designers who can successfully take that data and turn it into game-improving, retention-improving changes.

IMO, CCP has shown many examples in the past where they simply do not make good use of the data they have, or they draw the wrong conclusions from it, or they use it to push the game in directions that are actually bad for the overall game - pushing people into huge alliances, caps/supers, Null sec etc. because they drew the conclusion that those activities generate more income.

Game design is an art more than a science, really, but there are definite design goals that stem from an understanding of human behaviour and motivation and competition for leisure time (and leisure dollars). CCP has been ignoring these for years, or they simply have no one on board who really understands them.

That needs to change.

How about just making an interesting game instead oft analyzing the players? I don’t think they tried to data mine the player base back when they added stuff that was actually enjoyable and sparked the imagination that made EVE more than just the game it was.

There is a lot of stuff to overhaul and change that will make EVE more enjoyable and stay true to the sandbox. I listed some of them in my first post in this thread.

Your corp idea doesn’t give them a reason to fly in groups though. It gives them a reason to join the 5-6%.

Already have.

Not many bites though, so share your thoughts.

I am not sure I agree with this as Eve has more data points and data available to the player to conclude they do not read or use it. IMO they see the data and don’t like what they are seeing and how it fits their vision or play styles they want for the game. They then make decisions to adjust play style in a direction they want. I will not say this is good or bad, it is what it is. My point is that if CCP as a business wants highest returns on investment then it should use data to attract the most paying customers they can. If CCP as a business decides it wants to make a game they like to play and don’t care about the maximum return on investment, which appears to be the case, then they will continue to use their data as they have been using it. As a consumer, we decide if we want to buy it.

Well yes, the corp idea is about promoting corps. The fleet-content idea is about encouraging them to form fleets. Those are two different (though potentially related) goals, with two different approaches.

An excellent idea and well presented. Kind of crazy that threads on “Nullsec blackout” get multi-thousands of (mostly bitchy) posts, while well-presented, practical ideas on seriously needed improvements to EVE get 4 replies and no likes. It’s madness!

Keep dreaming.

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Won’t work in current EvE.

Ever heard about dread bombs? Or fleets of 200+ stealth bombers?
Convoys might have worked in the past but now they are useless.

It’s obvious you haven’t did any recent gameplay with it.

You can fanboy all you want my guy, there isn’t a single thing EvE is going to offer that it doesn’t while the reverse is beyond comparison. Atmospheric flight and landing, FPS shooting, multiple people on a ship, real smuggling, the ability to work normal jobs like unloading cargo from ships, out of ship gameplay, etc. I mean watch some actual gameplay videos from this year, not 2012.

EvE is a wannabe pvp game that has been cucked into a carebear game by people who play a pvp game and do not want to pvp.

You’ll come to grips with this sooner or later. It should be obvious when CCP sold to Pearl Abyss. They are getting what they can before it’s ran out of business. It’s not that CCP can’t make a new game and have success, it’s that there is no upgrade to EvE that is going to take the market share of space fans from that game when it releases. It will take many from EVE though.

You look pretty silly cheer leading for a game that is nothing more than a tech demo ATM. I can admit that EVE is a mess and nearing the end of its product life-cycle. Can you even admit that SC might not get off the ground?

Let’s see who is the bigger fanboy…

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A mix of both is what would be the best, imo. Focus on improving the PvE, but do so by making it behave more like PvP. Reduce the number of ships you encounter in missions significantly, but increase their threat level accordingly. Build them such that the most effective fits against them are also effective PvP fits. Instead of PvE boats largely being targets for gankers, now attacking a PvE boat could lead to an interesting fight for both parties. Transitioning from PvE to PvP would be more fluid and comfortable, and participating in PvE would be more in-line with the rest of the game.

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Lol, seriously? SC? They are developing this thing for how long now and it is still a tech demo with zero interesting gameplay. I’m a backer since the early days, I purchased the smallest possible package to get the final game (one day, maybe). This isn’t a game, it is a way to sell pixel spaceships that don’t even exist in the virtual world yet to fanboys like you that pay them 1000x the amount you would even remotely pay for any other computer game.

The gameplay is more like a crapy space version of some truck simulator. It is boring to no end, with so much energy put in details and useless animations you wish you could skip if you saw them the second time.

EVE killer? :rofl::joy::rofl::joy: maybe in two decades man.

On observations of late, it’s possible that this decline is not going to stop. How long it takes, I do not know.

The damage has been done. Bots, RMT, and megablocks built on unlimited resources have driven real players away. Die-hards who remember the Eve of olde and long for its return hang on.

This is the kind of problem that was probably warned against by people who ended up getting forum-briganded by botters and RMTers. Once you drive out the real players, anything you do to get rid of the botters WITHOUT at the same time finding a way to bring back those real players you lost is only going to be a hit to the wallet and the boardroom is going to freak out about it.

And using tricks and gimmicks to bring players back without doing something about the botters is only going to have those players who do come back looking around, seeing the same old business as usual, and they leave.
And the next gimmick or gibs you try to lure them back is met with an exponential level of scrutiny. “Fool me once…” and so on it goes.

That’s what happens when you allow it in the first place.

To stop the decline at all is going to take some radical changes to the game and an “act of faith” by CCP to show the players who hung on and those who came back that “CCP is back!” and going to be fun, challenging, and dark. Not “Game of Bots”.

I still have hope that they might try it. Blackout was a bold strategy, Cotton. We all saw how it played out. The potential is there. But someone is going to have to stop listening to the “player” base because it’s not real, send the CSM home, define a vision for Eve that’s right once again with the genre, and press on, damning the torpedoes - and the tears. The world craves real leadership on many fronts, and what happened to Eve was a lack of leadership when all is said and done.

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Considering they make about 50k a day in crowd funding and have hundreds of millions of dollars in reserve no I can’t admit that. I mean you can try the game and see where it is. It isn’t a room with a ship anymore. It’s a whole lot more.

It’s easy to say the game isn’t fully developed therefore X, but the writing is on the wall.

Yes it is…because that’s a fact. It’s maybe getting “close” to Beta but with S42 delay for later next year, you’re still looking at years away for the actual game.

50k a day in crowd funding and have hundreds of millions of dollars in reserve

Please prove a link to that info…would love to see that.

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What, you thought I was lying?

Do you take every claim people make as fact? I hope not.

Thanks for the link.

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The more I lurk through these forums, the more I’m actually thinking that doing some sort of story line patch where New Eden is on the brink of galactic destruction and only pods can pass through an emergency gate to a new galaxy that has been discovered. Since it is an “Escape with only your life situation” all corps, skills, belongings, alliances, ISK holdings, etc do not transfer to the new system.

Everyone starts from square one in a galaxy with new systems.

That could very well lure back older players (like me) who miss the glory days of Eve and, with proper marketing, attract new players as well.

SC is a decoy.

The actual EVE killer is here:
Dual Universe

Sorry, but that is an even more pathetic tech demo the last time a looked at it. Can you actually play it now?