State of The Game, 2020 Edition

Communications Center General Discussion
101

I didn’t pay much attention to Crimewatch at the time, living wiith a perm-red safety button in nullsec back then :stuck_out_tongue: It has its merits, but it’s still complicated - I have the old webpage still bm’d for reference, lol.

While I certainly don’t have the answers on broadening the fan base I do believe that there are ways to attract and shape the right kind of player - I don’t mean this in an elitist way, but rather a player thriving in EvE Online - when that player is given proper guidance. CCP never made serious or perhaps insightful attempts in that direction. A serious effort in acqainting new players with the harsh pvp reality of the game, via another type of “career agents” (“shenanigans 1-5”) working in a simulated environment, and via organized public fleets, would go a long way, and could be combined with a review of the current rules of engagement (yep, those orca locust fleets in hisec, every way you turn, are a thorn in my hide, lol). On the flip side, as you mention, people attracted to the pvp aspect of the game have an equally hard time figuring out how to get involved in it. Of course, more experienced players know the answer to this: get involved in a corporation, that’s the most important step.

I don’t care if someone chooses to be a full time miner, as long as that person is embedded in a social structure involved in pvp, and therefore contributing indirectly to pvp and exactly knowing his/her position.

It’s far too easy now to stay out of pvp altogether, not even become a member of a corporation but play blissfully solo every day - this is an MMO… - and still feel entitled to make unreasonable demands on forums about pvp nerfing and higher security. And CCP should and probably does know that EvE is not a great mining game that will attract scores of new miners. Mining, or trading, or manufacturing, as examples are meaningless on their own in New Eden. Embedding them in a more meaningful way is key.

tldr: Selling pve elements as embedded in the bigger pvp picture via advertizing would go a long way in adjusting the expectations correctly and attracting a better balanced player, I think. That is not enough, however. Allowing players to behave like this is not an open pvp MMO, with everyone on the same shard even, is one of the core issues. Videos like Official Gameplay Trailer and even the adrenaline pumping This is EvE - Uncensored we all love watching don’t address these elements.

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102

Here’s my interpretation of the numbers:

  • Blackout overnerfed farming and lost a lot of players.
  • CCP reverted Blackout and over the course of 3-4 months, those players returned.
  • From March this year, there was a Covid spike - players could play other games, but ALL games are seeing a large pop spike as there is a larger market currently. If you have 1000 players in the market and your share is 10% you’ll have 100 players, if that doubles to 2000 and your market share is unchanged… That’s the Covid effect.

Here’s my predictions and I put them out there knowing people will jump on them, but I’m prepared to be proven wrong and will do so with humility if that becomes the case. I’d love to see some predictions from some of the outspoken posters on either side of the debate.

  • Ratting will reduce.
  • There has been little change in pop recently, but I think the ESS/DBS and resource distribution changes are only beginning to be felt.
  • With the ratting indexes now hitting 70% in the -0.6 to -1.0 systems, I think there will be a slow gradual reduction in PCU, not to Blackout proportions, but perhaps 10% lost over the next 6 months.

Now if CCP can push the carrot that they’ve been referring to at some point over the next 2 quarters, I can see this all being a stunning success, null players finally see a reward to aim for and the pop could increase rather than stagnate/decline.

Just my 2p!

103

i would like CCP Explain WHY they changed Ore distribution and mining in general so much

There is no answer given

prices already spiking high - this will have direct impacts on PvP. cost of pvp does up drasticly

If i was full miner i would .!.. CCP and go do other stuff putting my whole mining fleet offline keeping 1 many 2 accs in the air

i had 4 accs now only 1 is in the air thanks to CCP changes, if CCP don’t need my money i put in elsewhere

PS.
Compared to other Online games EvE sup is very expensive in term’s of monthly fee (Aion / TERA / WOT / WoW’s / WAR-T premium is much cheaper)

104

There was no question, because the question is unnecessary.

The reason is simply that they want to cut it all back as much as they can …
… and they don’t want farmers, who solely play for wealth generation, around.

So the reason why is because they want these kinds of people gone.

No one forces you to play EVE and we’re all, yourself included, happier if you find a game you prefer playing.

That’s the index finger …
… and there’s an actual emoji for this. :fu:

It’s even aptly called : fu :

105

I’m old school :stuck_out_tongue:

Farmers - people who play for welth generation are pure miners - people who produce goods others use for pvp and farmers cerate content for “PeVePee” groups to hunt and gank them

Remove Farmers you remove content and you remove people who help you to PvP, or you want to go and mine yourself a new shiny ship? Before losing it in PvP?

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106

This line of thought doesn’t actually work, because reality is completely different.

Unlike what most carebears believe, PvPers also PvE.
It’s just the carebears who solely PvE and thus believe the other side is equally exclusive.
This is also one of the roots of the “playstyle”-fallacy.
Excluding PvP ship combat from your in-game activities is not a playstyle!

I’ll happily mine ■■■■ myself and piss off other miners while doing so, for example.
I’ll happily run someone elses lvl4 missions to get the bounty while pissing off the actual mission runner.
Suicide ganking is also always a nice way of making money to buy ■■■■ from the market other PvPers, who also mine and PvE, will sell.

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107

Forgot to mention there is also another type of farmers who like to farm ISK and use the ISK’s for expensive stuff - like officer damage mods on their ratting ship - these people generally do not care about PvP and do not participate in such - they play their own eve and they are happy with it

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108

Pls don’t forget that now you HAVE to mine in High-Low-0.0 sec in order to mine whole ship by yourself

Yes true PvPer do PvE but it look like in order to PvP you would have to do much more PvE at this point of time (PvPer have to make some ISK in order to buy stuff from “PvE” Miner who busted his ass mining rocks and taking huge risks ISK wise doing so (these Rorq prcings mmm and these mining drones…))

109

Or we just mine it ourselves.

No one busts his ass off mining.
Risk … well, sure … but that’s mitigatable even in lowsec.
Not particularly hard staying safe as long as you’re always aligned and looking at space around you.

I can tell. I only ever mined in covetors and hulks, because tank is for sissies.

This whole game started with everyone mining his crap by himself,
because there weren’t enough ore and minerals to buy.

When all the PvErs suddenly left there, of course, will be less targets …
… but that won’t last. More people will be coming in all the time anyway …
… and hopefully it will be people who actually appreciate the game for what it is …
… instead of playing it like all the other wannabe MMOs out there.

110

Assuming the increased difficulty of material acquisition is applied evenly across the board, I would expect only that this change would cause people to adopt a new META that takes the higher costs into account. During the lag between implementation and thinking people devising just what this META is we will have people complain on the basis that the way they’ve always done things is the only viable way to ever do things, but this has never once been the case. The only lasting impact I think likely is the lowering of the skill floor. Smaller and cheaper ships take less time to train into.

If someone could show the new playing field is not level, then that would be a long term problem. People should have a generally even (though not guaranteed in Eve) reward in proportion to the effort they put into generating it. That people don’t seem to argue on that point, though, makes me think things are still pretty even across the board.

Regardless, looking at the graphs and such from both sides, I can not see a sustained downward trend because of CCP’s changes lately, so at the least it looks like we are no more the worse for wear in any provable way. I find the data available to us must be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism since the introduction of non-paying alphas into the counts. For the sake of analyzing game overall health, I think screening for omega accounts would be far more indicative of where we were, but it is still valuable to analyze what information is available to draw the best conclusions we can.

Sol’s analysis is conjecture, and correlation doesn’t equal causation. Two points, though. First, conjecture is all we’re going to have on a topic like this where we don’t have access to all the facts. We are trying to analyze incomplete information to attempt to draw meaningful conclusions about what is likely. We wouldn’t have science without conjecture to form a hypothesis we could test. Secondly, doing no more than pointing out that correlation doesn’t mean causation is not proof (or even conjecture!) that there is no causal relationship. If you’re going to spend the breath to repeat this convincing sounding jargon, go the extra mile and explain why you believe there is no causal relationship, otherwise the conjecture that there is one remains the stronger position.

The OP is a pretty well written summary of why he thinks what he thinks with lots of specific points people can contest with their own interpretations of the same provided graphs if they want to. You’re just never going to get any better than that if you’re serious about proving he’s mistaken.

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111

Problem you’ve got with your line of thinking is skill training where it’s optimal to specialise rather than split your training between the two.

It should be fairly obvious, but it’s entirely legitimate to be a dedicated pvp’er or pve’er or, as per the majority, somewhere in between.

112

Can baiting’s fine, heck within reason even ganking in high sec is fine.

The real question here is not “Why does CCP encourage/discourage ganking in high sec?”. The real question is:

"In a game supposedly built around PvP, why is high sec ganking the only rewarding activity for so many supposed 'PvP’ers? Why is the 70% of the galaxy that’s a free-for-all not appealing to them?*

On many levels, that’s the problem with the game right there. EVE is designed poorly to provide and encourage engaging PvP, that’s all. So many ‘PvPers’ opt to be weasels in the henhouse , beheading chickens and sucking eggs in lieu of anything actually worthy of the name PvP. Because actual PvP engagement in EVE is slow, unsatisfying and too prone to wildly unequal engagements.

People game to satisfy a need that isn’t adequately filled in their real life. For many gamers, the goal could be stated as “to experience a feeling of progress, productivity, and developing a more powerful relative position”.

The most popular games do that through direct formation of conflict groups from a relatively equal standing (shooters, MOBAs, etc.). MMORPGs tend to attract the “progress and grow my character” types to a higher degree. One of the key problems in EVE is that player combat (let’s dismiss all the “trading is PvP” nonsense right here) is not inherently rewarding and does not progress your character.

Given that fundamental flaw, the only way PvP becomes “progressive” for most players is to have it take place in controlled circumstances where the gain and loss becomes predictable and the net result is an increase. Hence, high sec ganking.

The issue with that is, high sec ganking for progress requires other players as a consumable.

And that’s the problem with EVE right there. That’s why the numbers were falling significantly prior to Crimewatch 2.0. That’s why the “PvPers” bailed after Crimewatch 2.0, that’s why player numbers rose after 2.0, and that’s why player numbers started to decline again as soon as highsec gankers copied the strategy of smarter PvPers and learned how to gank for profit again.

When players realize they’re a consumable, they stop playing. And since the hens outnumber the weasels by 3 to 1… that’s the reason for your “Local chat is silent, fleets are dead” right there.

I mean, if you like, you can certainly follow Solstice down the rabbit hole and try to explain how if there’s so many carebears and krabbers, and CCP has turned the game into carebear/krabber paradise, that leads to declining numbers of players in the game. Feel free.

For me though, it’s pretty clear that this “PvP” game is not actually designed around PvP. It’s designed by some guys who thought hiding in the bushes outside town and ganking the unwary was “PvP”, and that’s been it’s vision ever since.

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113

You guys are welcome to toss some facts or numbers or maybe a reference in here to support your biased opinions. Seems to me CCP advertising hasn’t changed at all. They waited until late 2016 to go F2P for heck’s sake, literally a decade behind companies with more marketing sense. The trailers certainly don’t promise safety and security.

Ask in any gaming forum or site about EVE Online and you’ll get told it’s a gankfest cesspool. Or they’ll tell you it’s slow, boring, spreadsheets in place. Or it’s dead. Or some few players that have actually played it may jump in and say “Yeah, it can be rough, but you just have to pay attention and figure things out and be willing to take risks and work through the losses.”

But you know what absolutely none, zero, zip, zilch of them will say?

“It’s a carebear heaven where you can farm away all day and nobody will disturb your PvE experience.”

So yeah, when you’re done imagining the explanations you wish were true, feel free to dig up some facts to back them up.

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114

Are you someone of note or do you wear women’s underwear while playing eve online? It’s okay, I respect you. The state of this game is $h1t. But this $h1t I would NOT put on evrything…like Frank’s red hot sauce…have some today!

115

That’s the most ignorant post in this whole thread.

Like … either you’re just an asshole for making this ■■■■ up …
… or you must have had a stroke laying in a coma for the last years.

You don’t know what we’re talking about. That’s fine.

No one asks you to include yourself into this thread …
… and I sure as ■■■■ am not willing to educate you on the matter.

Other people seem to understand just fine what is being talked about …
… so please keep believing it’s just made up and exclude yourself from participation.

Literally everyone benefits that way.

116
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117

Gotcha. You have no facts to back it up, you’re upset that you can’t refute the arguments, you don’t want to deal with a real challenge, and you only ‘invite’ people with easy arguments into your threads.

Yep, that pretty much sums up high sec PvPers right there. Thanks for the additional data!

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118

Great! You’re right!
Have a nice day. :slight_smile:

119

Is someone angry? I don’t appreciate your expletives…eve groupy. Maybe try your creative writing at a junior competition? Whine and cheese volume …5 zillion?

120

I prefer the lumberjack waltz and SPMO by Nascar Aloe.

Nascar
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