J/K… I actually like the idea of beefing of subs with ‘extra value’ to encourage more people to sub and go for longer sub periods. However as you said, the alt-prevention would be the issue, so that specific idea would simply become “I can by a years sub and Omega my next 10 alts or sell these to newbies”.
I was thinking something like, buy a 3-month sub, get a 5 pack of skill extractors, buy a 6-month, get an Injector, buy a 12-month, get 3 injectors. OR, to encourage a character-based focus, Subbing 3 months gets you one of those “goes straight onto your character” 100k SP redeem items, 6 months gets you 3 of them, 12 months gets you 10 (so a million bonus SP with your years sub).
Unfortunately that idea might help sell subs, but doesn’t help with new players / retention / slow SP gain issues.
That is also an area I have been noodling on. In general, a great many MMOs I have played come to realize that it is the relationships/friendships/social interaction that is the key driver of long term retention and player satisfaction.
Then, armed with that data, they proceed to code some ham-handed approach that is intended to force players into groups. They make content that can only be accomplished in groups, they make content that only rewards groups, they make game mechanics that essentially cripple you if you don’t form the proper group first etc. It generally doesn’t work, and frequently just annoys many of the players.
CCP has probably been aiming at this themselves for a while, with their various game changes that appear to boil down to ‘join a big corp if you want to do well, and if you want to do really well, have your corp join a bigger alliance’. And it’s been ham-handed and annoying.
The proper way to encourage grouping and relationships is to give players a good reason to group up, make it reasonably easy and convenient to do so, make the group composition fairly flexible, and scale both the challenge and the reward to the group.
So far, the only game I recall being actually successful at this is City of Heroes, where grouping is fast, easy, virtually any team composition works, the opposition and rewards scale well with group size, and everyone gets rewards without any drop/loot/leader-decides type mechanics.
The Secret World/Secret World Legends is semi-successful at this as well, for pretty much the same reasons. The only downside there is that most group content, you’re really a gang of solo operators on the same mission; there is less interaction between group members (except for the occasional healer).
Might be worth mentioning that Ive seen some adhoc Triglavian fighting with a motley collection of ships, often brought together by the Invasion channel but also (gasp) talking in local.
Being able to fight right outside a player structure to limit the risk also seems to have an additional benefit of a) distracting the trigs off people undocking but also b) allowing players of various skill levels in various ships work loosely together.
Yes, and that’s the sort of thing that could work in EVE… except that it’s a bit too rare/random for ad-hoc groups to form on a regular basis.
CCP could easily have turned Resource Wars into a workable, on-the-fly group activity, and there’s quite a bit of room in Faction Warfare for that sort of thing as well. And of course, they should be introducing group content and grouping right up in the NPE, as opposed to … ‘auto pilot’.
Perhaps in a year or two, when they finally get chat working, they will be able to free up some resources to work on actually useful things.
Right there is the best question asked in this thread - Why don’t “new” pilots" just do what they like while training up skills to reach “their” goals.
Maybe it comes down to how the game is presented to them when they first log in.
A giant mass of information that has you running around performing tasks that may or may not interest you, then at the end it tells you - “You’re a pilot now” get out there and do it.
Eve is a game you need to spend days or weeks googling and watching youtube to find out how it is played and what you might like to do in it.
Then you have to find someone who won’t troll the crap out of you to guide you as to how to get started. This is the point many just decide Eve really sucks as a game - and just don’t come back.,.
I do like the new “NPE” - It very quickly weeds out those who won’t fit into the Eve ecosystem while by no means being inviting to new players who might otherwise make it.
Eve has never been a game that is “new player friendly” and unless they completely change the game it never will be. That in itself isn’t problem, the problem lies with CCP giving false hope to new players - Here’s the NPE, once you complete it you’ll be a space pilot - Complete and utter RUBBISH.,.
I recently had a friend from another game come to try out Eve, he created his account and the first question he asked me was - What is the best “Empire” to join, followed by what bloodline is best. Oh I have a bald character and all these options, what is the best way to do this to make my character look like xxxxx. The next part is pretty simple, you don’t get a lot of options, photos done we move on.
Oh crap now it wants me to choose Ancestry and Education - What is best here?
Oh awesome - I can choose a name, should i make it something silly then change it later? Turns out the name we chose fit perfectly - Nevermind Imnotstaying.
After all this, the NPE, I walked him through the NPE in about 10 minutes.
Once docked up at the end of it came the hardest choices and questions - What do I train now, what can i do with the ship they gave me, what is the best way to make isk so i can get better ships, etc (we’ve all heard these questions a hundred times) - HOW LONG UNTIL I CAN DO PVP with you.
B-R was what first peaked his interest in Eve - It took me this long to get him to try it, partly due to all those stories out the about how hard Eve is for beginners. Sadly trying it was as far as we got - Turns out, starting Eve as a rookie player for someone who has been a gamer for many years - Might just be too hard.
Or is it to over complicated by, too much information to fast - No real direction as to what you can and can’t do, no isk to even by the cheapest ship and fitting (no-one likes flying around in rookie ships to make 20K isk per hour)
Another one bites the dust - Eve is too hard for newbs.,.
There are already more formalised invasion groups.
Also incursion groups say hi. They grew from the same ad hoc start and took years to settle and formalise to their current forms.
There were even player organised resource war channels and groups. For a content that gave negative isk most of the time… (Yeah CCP badly dropped the ball on RW and pretend it’s a design issue, not a reward issue and are now trying to remove it instead of fix it).
So clearly group content works in EVE.
@Sgt_Ocker. the answer to how long can I PvP with you is “Right now, here’s a ship, let’s go have fun and die”.
To follow up on some points @DeMichael_Crimson made, I’d dabbled a bit in the first month but discovered the Eve Uni wiki and discovered I liked the Gallente drone + hybrid combo and planned my skill training based on that. (back before the infinite queue)
My advice would always be to work on the basic skills for a given line and to train to V those that are really needed.
(I’d also like to point out that some of the null sec alliances have excellent resources on skill training to get pilots in fleets quickly (and to thus have fun))
Of course - taking him out in a T1 frigate with T1 guns to die in lowsec is of course the best way to introduce a new player to Eve.
The 47 DPS his T1 frigate has with next to no defensive skills is probably the best introduction for a new player when that first T2 cruiser lands on him and insta pops him as he decloaks on a gate. Or maybe he’ll get really lucky and die to one of the many smart bombing gangs, without even getting to see what it was destroyed his poor little under powered frigate.
Lowsec after only a few hours in the game is not a good introduction for 99.9% of new players - Anyone can start a new game and just go out and get killed, problem is, most never come back.
I challenge you, as an older experienced player;
Start a new character, finish the NPE, send it enough isk to buy a T1 frigate and fit it out, then go to lowsec and see how you fare.,. Take a friend with you by all means if you want to.
So you didn’t tell him to fit a web and a t1 ewar… Why not? That’s easy train. Corvette get bonuses to some of that even. And he already has a racial ewar frigate trained, though yes he’ll need half an hour of skills.
I wouldn’t normally take a 3 hour old character out, but if they are keen then just say hey, we might die in a fire but we can do it right now and maybe get kills if lucky.
Its stuff like this that makes me think high, low, medium slot is just not “suggestive” or “forceful” enough to help new players build properly. Maybe we should look at some sort of system that is locked until unlock that forces modules of a specific type (say like web) unless the player turns off “Training wheel” mode for modules.
Out side of that imo, just consolidate everything into a single type with a single system (like moving all ewar into a point system like point/stabs).
Gate guns should make it impossible to camp in low or stations for any period of time. They should do 25% HP a volley and have multi-firing capability (can hit all aggressors on the gate or station).
I know it seems insane but low sec needs to be more smooth in its transition from consensual ish pvp to non-consensual pvp. from low to null its not to bad, very similar, but high sec to low is a totally different thing.
David did research on this for 3 years from 2003 -2006.
At that time eve had 70% retention rates (meaning they kept 70% of the people) who started playing on launch. After two years, the retention rates dropped to around 25% recording data for the equiv of 17,000 ish years of played time.
This shows that ccp had a problem with retention since the start of eve.
An important point here is that davids position while well researched at his time was implemented on eve itself, and was at the early stages of the industry when we designers were still working things out. This is not an attack on his study as much as it is a note that, while he may of done excellent work on his project, it was not done at the right time. Obviously over the years we have found ways to keep people in games that are more effective. You’d be surprised to learn those facebook games with energy actually increase retention rates. more to the point this is an attack on eve, because of ccp’s neglected on upkeeping eve with modern advancements in game design. I point i keep trying to express is directly liked to retention rates of eve
going to other - multi-game metrics (statistics tracked across many games)
An appropriate benchmark for duration is somewhere between two months and six months. That implies a churn of 15%-50% and a retention rate of 50-85%.
Now if we look at other MMO’s we see the following
GW2 has around 90% Retention and 10% Churn rate
FFXIV, SWOTR, Planside 2 Are between 80 and 85% Retention, and up to 15% curn
Even wild star had around 82% Retention rate when it was around (at the the time of this study)
The lowest recorded mmo in this study was defiance, at 60% Retention, 40% Curn rate
It’s kinda making your attack on my statement of the averages being 30-40%, look really stupid right about now, Considering the above are mmo and mmo’s are consider to be notoriously bad at holding people.
There is already an incentive to buy longer subs, it’s a cheaper monthly sub price. I pay 12 months up front each year and essentially get 3 months free compared to full price.
Does Eve not already do exactly this?? Joining corps is actually really easy, the thing that makes it a bit more of a chore isn’t the game, it’s the players who you are joining. Yes, that in part boils down to the risk that they can potentially expose their selves to if they choose to give you access to stuff and also the threat of spies - so players, not the game, have imposed a system of recruitment that can at times make it arduous.
Flexible group composition, scale of challenges and reward… hmmm? What part of the game restricts any of this just now? You can’t really get better flex in group composition if you are looking at skills and ability (game, not player) to do almost anything in the game you choose. Scale of challenges grows with the size of the group. Look at a single player who never joins a group (corp) at one end of the scale and who is happy to see a billion isk in the bank after a few years (they DO exist) and then look at the mega alliances whose members throw billion isk ships around like noob ships just because they can. And the reason they can? The size of the group and the tasks that the group can complete are immense.
This is one area of the game that should not be “Realistic” As ccp spins it, having criminal acts etc. That in many ways destroy the fabricate of corporations, and the perception of corporations players have. This ultimately erodes the games social structure and moral fibers.
On top of this we have a no real reasons for corporations to exist, out side of more isk, or more blob. there is really no sense of accomplishment to it, no… soul or spirit to them.
The issue is that this is possible because of alliance related mechanics. Take away alliances ability to generate income, and you will see this quickly leave the game, and alliances will quickly die as a result. Granted a lot of these sorts of things have been shifted, it would be easy to accomplish this by removing stations ability to generate income, effectively removing alliances abilities to general large amounts of isks out side of player based game play, and that will result in a lot more of the old days “resources wins the wars” sort of realism that we once had.
The only reason isk can be tossed around like that is because of the passive incomes alliances have.