EVE is a famously niche game.
It has spaceships, hey I love spaceships, but not everyone does.
It has a single world and no safe spaces, hey I love single world where anything can happen. Many people don’t.
It has a very skill-based gameplay, with a lot of challenge in accomplishing even some simple tasks, hey I love challenge and personal goals. Some people don’t.
It has a hyper-realistic economy with political intrique, market manipulation, regional culture, scams, and tons of data lined up nicely in spreadsheets. HEY! That’s so unbelievably my cup of tea it is insane! Most people are not into global economics to the point where they do it for fun.
It has vast swaths of time spent doing not much, and combat that is astoundingly uninteresting to watch. The excitement comes from the financial risk. A lot of people would hate that.
EVE is my game. I have no idea how such a perfect game for me ever came to exist, but it absolutely did. Some people I know absolutely despise most aspects of it, and that’s perfectly fine.
The key to EVE’s future success is an effective targeted advertizing campaign. Advertizing through a popular Minecraft youtuber, for example, will not work because of the demographics. They need to find the people who like the lore, the environment, and the finance. That may be tricky to do, but if global finance nerds ages 10-18 can be reached in sufficient numbers, the game will thrive.
Most of the time, potentially new players will read the forums to get a feel for the players inside. Most new players will walk away due to toxicity of the forums as well as being bludgeoned by alliances looking to grab rookies from their hangars within a week.
A new rule should be instituted that alliances cannot try to recruit a rookie players within the first two months of the new rookie joining Eve Online. Giving the rookie some breathing room to run the tutorials and then decide their own path is a key to player retention.
You want to make rookies play EVE without joining a corporation for their first two months?
Why? Why would you want to do that to them?
EVE’s gameplay is very limited solo, and it’s much easier to pick up the game with other players to help you. If anything, this would hurt player retention. Sure, some people may prefer playing solo, but many would benefit from joining a group early.
Also what is this ‘toxicity on the forums’ that you speak of? I see many healthy discussions between people, some with very opposing views, and luckily very little racism, ‘gamer words’ or other such toxicity. I wouldn’t describe these forums as toxic. Do you think it’s toxic when people disagree with you?
I just finished a 17 jump ratting run through the Outer Ring in a VNI and encountered close to zero players. How can un-occupied null space be converted to into patches of blue space to draw more new players into the game?
Just let the Triglavians invade one random constellation per week (high, low and 0.0) and if it is not defended by the players, it goes to Pochven. A quasi-nullsec connected by gates but without local and no hotdrops could be a real paradise for all those who are just sick of all this bait’n’blob shenanigans that makes normal space so unattractive to settle in as a small or medium group (unless you are part of some big blob yourself).