That’s a considerably more valid point than “It costs $200 to start where I want”, however it’s still got problems. Basically you’ve shifted to “I want to start playing and be immediately competitive with people who’ve been in the game for 2 years”.
That’s a game design issue, to some extent. Usually handled by separating the zones of interaction between newer and older players. That can be done in a number of ways, and CCP has pretty much always ignored this aspect of game design. Which just makes it one of a dozen game design principles CCP is apparently ignorant of.
On the other hand, no game that I’ve played in the past 2 decades makes you immediately competitive with people who’ve been playing and progressing their characters for one or more years.
You’ve basically shifted your whine from “It costs too much to get what I want” to “Why should people who’ve been playing for years have an advantage over me?”.
There are game design reasons for giving new players areas to work in where they don’t need to compete directly with veterans. There are few reasons for giving in to entitled whines.
EVE is a game of long-term planning. Stop whining about the fact that you can’t have instant gratification and go straight to the endgame with no effort (and then probably quit because there’s nothing left to do).
Most people spend the first 6-12 months just doing PvE stuff anyway - PvP mostly comes later. If they do PvP early, it is probably fleet stuff where they can be useful even with low skills.
Man, this makes me so mad. I literally learned about this game from an ad while playing Superhex.io with my friend. I was 13. In that 2 years time, I went from asking for 20 minutes in Rookie Help chat how to lock an NPC target to making about 3,000,000,000 ISK total from FW, with plenty of fun solo pvp included. Most of that has been within the last 6 months, as I was still learning about all of the aspects of the game before then. Haven’t paid a cent, and am almost ready to get my first month of Omega. There is no paywall. This is an MMO. It is a learning gamethat takes dedication and time to learn. I have only been around since late 2018, but I speak for all of the galaxy when I say that no one is a master of this game. NO ONE.
o7, fly safe, learn long!
You can’t buy knowledge. You can inject skill points up to the same level as an EvE veteran, without his experience and expertise, use the same ship and have equal freedom in fitting it, and still come up very short. The PvP would be exciting enough, but only in the harvesting of costly, salty tears, and most likely those would be the tears of the less experienced pilot. Training is not just sp, it’s mostly learning how to use skills. Does that mean it’s unfair ?
Would you also call the life long experience of a professional unfair, one who has been working in the same field as you just obtained a degree for ?
Yes indeed. The very first time I got in a willing PvP fight, a 1v1 in min/amarr lowsec, I won. This is exceedingly rare, but I did it. I was in a 1.6M ISK Slasher, as an alpha, and I killed a full T2 Tormentor with T2 drones. An alpha can absolutely kill an omega will many times the number of SP, and I have repeated the feat many times since.
Don’t spend money on this game, spend time.
Edit: Didn’t even use faction ammo…
Many players find progression systems to be engaging and rewarding. Goals help to keep us engaged, and working towards them provides us with content. And achieving our goals feels rewarding.
It presents players with meaningful choices. You can’t fly everything at max skill. You have to choose what you want to fly, and how much skill training you want to put into it. You have to balance polishing skills with increased options and versatility.
Making everyone perfectly balanced might be fair, but it isn’t necessarily the most fun option. I know that may sound counter-intuitive, but imbalances encourage a diversity in ships, fits, and tactics. Of course, preferred play styles and differences in ship cost and incomes would help preserve diversity, but I guarantee you that leveling the character skill playing field would result in greater homogeneity of the ships and fits that get flown -especially considering that income disparities would shrink as a result of everyone being able to fly everything.
Okay, I’ve got to cut this short. Check out this video about buffs and nerfs by Core A Gaming. In it, he discusses about how balance doesn’t always lead to fun game play. I supports my third assertion, and I think it’s a pretty interesting video.
Choice is fine, I’m not saying get rid of choice. I’m saying reconsider some of your walls and barriers to entry. With a skill tree of 500+ million skill points (27 years of RL training at 1.5 mil a month), removing 20 mil points (maybe a year?) of “pre-training” can give players a better “choice” at what they want to fly, rather than training for things they want to be training for.
It’s not about perfectly balanced, but rather about better engagement. Right now a player has to consider that they have to invest either a large amount of money, or a large amount of time to “get to zero”. Once they do get to zero, they can then decide what types of ships they want to fly. Then they get to wait while they train for those ships. Then, after that initial period of waiting, they then get to find out which part of the meta that they fit into.
That initial period, based on new player retention data that we have, is probably too long.
How does the player retention data compare with that of other games? One data point is not enough. There are studies of the marketplace that suggest Eve’s retention rate over time, specifically up to 90 days, is about average for at least one segment of the market that Eve is in.
Oh god, 3 months of almost mandatory skills that enabled you to learn skills faster.
Getting rid of those was probably the best thing to happen to newbies in Eve history.
There in suggests a maximum of 150k subscriptions, with that likely being a lower user number given multi-user accounts and revenue from non subscription based items, but how much lower being an unknown to mortals without access to more granular CCP data.
Compared to the population of MMO users that’s relatively small.
Navel gazing is nice, but it’s value is pretty limited.
I believe both should be asked tbh. Eve is getting on for being a pensioner in game terms, and the market has changed in many ways with new genres etc competing for players.
It does, but without comparing with competitors there’s no way to determine whether or not retention is “bad”.
@Qsrik While there’s certainly a link between retention and accounts I thought we were talking about players new to the game.
For the most part when we talk retention here it’s normally in reference to new player retention, which is about around 2 or 3% after 90 days.
See, there’s the can of worms. Ask twenty people and you’ll get twenty definitions of which games comprise “competitors”. Some will say space games. Some will say MMOs. Some will say games produced in Iceland. Etc.
You’ll end up with a threadnought of people cherry picking to push their chosen agenda and nothing gets accomplished. If you compare EVE to EVE, that is lessened. You’ll get some guy selecting the hills compared to the valleys in EVE-Offline to push his point, but it won’t be near as bad as people arguing over EVE to Elite being less legit that EVE to Checkers.
