CCP will obviously look at the corps that can no longer be war decked and look at activity levels and of course their average size, if both are up then it would be a success on one level. After that it is a wait and see on how many people come back. People can still go for greater risk and put down a structure, I hope CCP looks at the impact on those players as part of this.
In any case the final design of the war dec system has yet to be detailed in anyway, I am waiting for it with a certain amount of trepidation. In one sense I am not at all bothered if it stays like it is.
So Iâm looking at eve offline, checking the first and last half of each year for average active players.
2016 - 32k/31k
2017 - 36k/31k (the 36k is from alphas before dying off)
2018 - 32k/30k
So aside from a short lived jump in activity from alphas, the numbers are fairly steady (as many people have been saying the numbers leveled off).
However, since December when decs were changed. Activity from the last 6months goes like this:
6m - 31k
3m - 27k
1m - 24k
2w - 23k
Now everyone is right when they say itâs too early to tell for sure. But if wardecs were so god damn destructive to player retention youâd expect to see something right?!
And Dracvlad is right when there is more than one way to look at this. I have no arguments against saying that wardecs are destructive to a corporation and itâs activity. Iâve seen it happen so many times with my own eyes. And corporations are related to player retention in some ways. (social corps would have seriously helped us if they were implemented in 2013/4 when the idea first came up).
But i have big doubts that wardecs had such a big effect on player retention. Iâm inclined to believe that players quit Corp A when they are decced and join Corp B (a normal process that sorts chaf from wheat). I also believe that many players that quit at the onset of a wardec were going to leave not far down the line anyways, either from other forms of pvp or boredom because eve is just not what they expected.
So far, it does appear Iâm right. And itâs costing us long term players (former loyal customers) to realise itâŚ
One thing I would like to see if the quality of the war decs now in terms of ships or things blown up compared to what there was before. If there are more actual explosions in space per war dec then we had before then those leaving because they think it reduced content will be leaving prematurely.
But I have listened to people who see it as a reduction in content which is why I have suggested and continue to suggest that you are limited to five war decs without any structures per entity.
That is this: wars cost too much for the low probability of a fight each war represents⌠unless you pool assets to the point that isk is meaningless.
Thatâs why marmites existed. They were the âride shareâ of war decs⌠an option to make them affordable.
No. No-one has numbers of player retention lost to wardecs. Not even ccp. In the csm minutes they were looking at corp activity and in the presentation at fanfest they looked at wardec activity.
But what we do have is player activity for the whole game which is a good indicator for whether players are growing, shrinking or staying the same and therefore overall retention.
So if wardecs were putting a massive ball and chain onto player growth (retention) itâs removal for thousands of players would have probably caused a positive shift in player activity.
New players are a smallish proportion of total EVE players anyway, and those who are affected by wardecs are a subset of them. Similarly the relevant wardecs will happen some time after a beginner starts EVE, so it wonât affect their activity the entire time they play. If anything it will be skewed towards the end of their playing time.
Iâd expect it to be hard to measure the effect on activity of removing those wardecs - in the short(ish) term the changes in activity could be lost in background randomness.
If I was doing the analysis, Iâd be hoping for good data from the retention rates after 8 to 12 weeks.
wardecs were not âputting a massive ball and chain onto player growthâ . A correlation was observed between a wardec to an HS players corporation and the reduction of the corporation activity. THAT IS ALL.
Of course the activity of players dropping means a reduction of the total activity of the players in the game. But the removal of a possible cause of the reduction in players activity is not the same thing as the addition of player activity.
You are affirming that plugging a hole should increase the water in the bucket. It is just false, there is nothing more to explain.
Again, maybe there was no actual causation between the wardecs and the activity loss. But saying CCP affirmed this modification would increase in a noticeable way the activity of players is just a strawman.
The CSM in general were surprised at how stark the numbers were and noted it was clear this mechanic was having a significant impact on player recruitment and retention.
Theyâve stated that theyâre looking at âcorporation activityâ. Theyâve noticed that people stop being active after being wardecced, aka âcorporation activityâ dropped. Measuring changes in âcorporation activityâ is just as easy as it was before. The intended effect of the nerf to wars was âcorporation activityâ not dropping due to them.
The situation CCP was trying to prevent was âpeople stopping playing due to [reasons] which root in their respective corporation getting wardecced.â
The nerf should result in more people playing. The people who would now get decced donât, therefore they should not be quitting anymore.
Considering the massive amount of wars declared every day back then, the effects should have been clearly visible in the second week post nerf!
The reason for this lies in the duration of wars, which last one week at minimum, which means that, within the second week, less people would have had stopped playing, because suddenly less people would have gotten war declared upon them!
Those people mostly quit long ago, but youâre not wrong. There is reason to believe that there are plenty of people quitting regularly due to the ongoing pussification of EVE ONLINE, which has been a reason for people quitting games since literally forever, from literally every game that went that route.
Plugging the hole should have an effect on the rate of water/gain loss in the bucket. Why wouldnât it? And if that wasnât the intention, why did you even bother plugging the hole?
It could be, and that was the expectations of many. But so far Iâve seen none of this influx. Nor even a reduction in player leaving.
Itâs like we plugged a hole in the wrong bucket.
