Just give eve a year break or something man, they will probably release new content in a few months and a lot of people in the same situation will come back.
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Ok, if you’re trying to use graphs, please show the whole darned graph:
EVE launched in 2003, I started at the end of 2005, less then 10k concurrent players. But at that time there where no Alpha accounts. Those were only introduced in 2016… After the peaks of 2010-2012. But keep in mind that these are concurrent accounts, not concurrent players. But especially before 2016 those were all paid accounts. Skill Extractors were also introduced in 2016.
Concurrent accounts stat for EVE means the number of accounts logged in at anyone time.
As for doing ‘great’, if your join date is any indication, according to the graph, EVE was already in serious decline! 
The drop now isn’t as bad from 2018 compared to peak 2014 to 2018…
But also look at this graph:
We’ve got more new accounts in a period where we have less concurrent players. So CCP is (rightly so) now focusing on new player retention. What the results are for that, we’ll have to see in two years. How well CCP was doing would require access to financial results over the past 19 years, results you and I do not have access to…
The price increase was only announced a week or so ago, not months.
The rest is mostly critisism for lack of new content and fixing existing content.
I’ve done all I want to in Eve so its very unlikely unless thay make massive changes to the game. I’ve mothballed my stuff, its just pixels anyway.
The item is ‘worth’ whatever the seller sets it to and the buyer is willing to pay for. The price of the subscription has no relation to the cost or ‘value’ of the service/product, beyond what marketing wants you to believe. Companies price their services/products at prices they think they can get away with.
CCP has a certain unique product that has no real competition within the market, sure it’s an MMO and WoW is also an MMO. But EVE is a space MMO, with a single shard server in a 19 year old persistent universe. Please point me at a similar game in a similar or better state… This is a pretty unique luxury service/product. If I look at other companies that have a similar position in the market, I see that they’ve also been able to get away with constant price increases to insane heights.
GW for example increased the price on their core product over a period of 35 years 1100% while inflation was only a quarter to a third of that. Every time there was a price increase (almost every year), there would be tons of hissyfit threads were people didn’t take it anymore and left. At one time things even got set so crazy that after a significant change to one of their main games (WFB/AoS) people started burning their collections (some even posted it on YouTube). After all those complaints, the company is now in their most revenue/profit positive years ever. But that was not without it’s own peaks and dips. They changed stuff many times, but never permanently decreased the price. There were pauses in price increases though… They made huge strides in improvement when they stopped primarily focusing on competitive players (think Null sec) and focusing on the more casual players (HS/LS) and new players (NPE). That wasn’t an instant fix and they lost a lot of competitive players in the meantime…
CCP is an independent daughter company of Pearl Abyss, what CCP wants is not really important here, what PA wants/demands is important. It seems they have a way better sense of the market/business then CCP has. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if certain financial targets have been set by PA and if CCP couldn’t meet them (which I doubt if their track record is any indication) the mother company will send people over to ‘advise’ the daughter company on how to properly make money. This can go well or this can go bad, depending on how well the mother company can assess the market of the daughter company. At other companies I’ve seen it go perfectly well, and I’ve seen it go flat on it’s face, pretty much destroy the business.
To be honest, we do not have a complete picture of the past, the present or the future of CCP (and PA). I think that OZ did a good job analyzing the financial results: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ab-NNmZ424
Imho magic 8-ball says: We’ll see in two years!
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i have to smile at all the math being done here.
it is about value, not price.
The clumsy price increase announced along with a promise of some big announcement at fanfest was just painful .
people want content. they will pay for content. and no, content isnt more proving grounds or abyssals.
if you really want to increase content without using any dev resources. just increase the drop rates from PVP fights (with combat ships not weak industrials)
and for the luv of gud, dump the BRM crap and no risk game mechanics like outside the ESS or hide and filament away options.
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No, then EVE has NOT changed at all, they’ve been doing that since 2003.
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either you are a shill for CCP, or a CCP Dev…
if the latter use your Dev account to post.
In fact you 1st two posts as i read them, my brain actually started injecting a voice…not sure which dev it was from this years fanfest or roundtable videos i saw…but the fact my brain made that connection on its own…
Yeah i doubt the sincerity of this post…
It is pure advertisment, and it bespeaks of an attempt to change our minds about something…
What are you afraid of CCP?
as to content? Why would anyone pay for 2 years, when the last 2 years were all nerf and very little content?
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Erm, it was announced a month and a week ago: PLEX and Omega price changes | EVE Online
It was implemented almost two weeks ago on the 17th.
The circle jerk that has been going around in April and May, months…
I’m also referring to all the negativity leading up to Fanfest of complaints about content that was not aimed at a particular subsection of the EVE playerbase.
Hmm, OK, so tell you what… in response to your “Tourists vs. Residents” comparison, I’ll do “CCP fanbois/EVE addicts vs. Rational Consumers”.
EVE addicts:
- Desperately try to spin any crap that CCP hands them into a “look, this is good for EVE!” angle.
- Keep making math assumptions that are simplistic and don’t take reality into account.
- Misinterpret their data.
- Attempt to turn all signals of “large masses of players leaving EVE or playing much less” into some sort of “but new players!” win.
Rational Consumers:
- Not being addicted, they can look at EVE and say “what is this game giving me for the money spent that makes it better than other places I can spend my money?”
- They can also ask themselves “Is CCP doing good things for the game with the money I send them?” and not have to live in denial of the answer.
Interestingly, looking at the above, I see that EVE addicts behave pretty much exactly like EVE devs.
So here’s a few responses to your points to shed light on the above:
You say “Price increase? What price increase? Tourists pay more but I’ll just be paying less.”
No matter how you slice it, you’re paying more than before. You only minimize the increase by shelling out almost $300 US for a 2-year sub. For comparison, you can get a lifetime sub in Star Trek Online for roughly 2/3 that amount.
“CCP was not the first to increase price”. Nope, just the second. Wooo big win! The ‘first’ is a new game still in beta, not a 2-decade old game in serious decline with spotty development. And Dual’s ‘price increase’ still leaves it as a new, developing game at half the price of EVE. I also note the other 98% of the industry seems to be managing their costs well and maintaining current pricing.
“57% of the player base is new”. Yes well that’s what happens when you move to free to play, allow unlimited multiple accounts for free, and have massive churn as people leave.
“If you previously paid full monthly price but now simply spend $270 on a 2-year sub you can actually pay less”. I can assure you that only a very, very small percent of gamers will shell out almost 300 US for a game in the state EVE is in. You’re basically just tossing out fantasy notions here.
“If you pay with Plex CCP is getting 50% more money”. I won’t bother to break down the price difference here or point out the major exaggeration. I’ll just note that other games have found they actually sell less cash currency as the in-game price goes up, since people need fewer Plex to fund the same amount of ISK. Also you’re assuming that Plex purchases are financed by current purchases, rather than the astounding stockpiles of Plex existing in EVE from years back. You should look up the concept of “unfunded liability” with regards to what it would mean, for instance, if a significant portion of the player base switches from current-cash subs to consuming Plex stockpiles.
In this post you’re just flailing around, trying to make massive drops in players look ‘good’. Yes, before alpha and after peak, EVE hit an all-time low of 30k, mostly-paid, concurrent accounts. This prompted the desperation move to introduce Alpha to pump player stats up so they could sell the company. EVE’s peaks are now lower than that all-time low of just over 5 years ago. And that’s including huge numbers of free, non-paying, alpha accounts.
Yes, exactly. And that’s not a good thing, with unlimited free accounts. In fact it’s very bad.
At any rate, your attempt to spin all this as “you people are simply being cheap and bad at math, you can save money here” is typical of an EVE fanboi. The fact is, Pearl Abyss is doing quite badly financially in recent times, and probably is putting the squeeze on CCP to justify the money they now wish they hadn’t spent on it. And CCP has two choices to increase revenue.
One is to expand the game and get more people interested in playing and actually paying and sticking around to sub for it. This would require providing more gaming value for the money spent.
And the other is to do what CCP has been doing for the last decade - focus on the smallish population of EVE players that are addicted to what EVE provides, and concentrate on squeezing even more accounts, subs and dollars out of that ever-shrinking population.
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I’m neither, I have a lot more posts on the old EVE forums. These new forums just don’t offer the kind of content I normally look at and the quality had gone down a lot after my 6.5 year hiatus from EVE. These days I get my info/content from YT, Twitch, Discord and sometimes personal blogs. I stay the heck away from the toxic cesspool that is the EVE Reddit section!
If you look around on the Internet you’ll see that I use the Cergorach name as my handle all over. It’s also easily related to my RL persona, which is not a CCP employee or an EVE shill.
Your old EVE forum posts:
My old EVE forum posts:
You know what I did the last three years? Trig event stuff, mining stuff, Abyssals, some missioning stuff, trade, manufacturing, exploration, events. Just before the recent event I was exploring Pochven.
Oh… Imagine, that there are people out there that have other points of views then your own…
No I was getting sick about all the negativity that’s getting around, I’m not touching EVE Reddit with a ten foot pole and a hazmat suite, so this was pretty much the place to post…
Look my jaw just dropped to the floor that so many people were paying full single month prices and complaining about it… Even back in the day I never paid full Euro MSRP, before there was a Markee Dragon store to buy my time codes, there was Shattered Crystal. Back in 2007 the dollar was in a bad place compared to the euro. So even a $14,95 time code was only ~€10 with the exchange rate at the time. The $38,95 90 day time code was only ~€26, or €8,67/month… Funy thing, just checked the old forums, 90 day codes in December of 2007 went for like 450M isk, or 150M isk per month… It’s now 12 times more expensive… Talk about inflation…
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Next to flat earth forums, Eve forums have to be one of the places most likely to find people rolling their eyes when presented with 2 + 2 = 4
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You’re absolutely bang on about the deals that appear in the launcher. I took advantage of a previous subscription discount to pad up my Omega time.
As @Mike_Azariah said in the last Fan Fest, the phrase “EVE Is Dying” has been around since, well, its launch.
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$270 for 24 months vs €300 for a lifetime (not seeing it for 2/3rd). I have a Star Trek Online account, I don’t really use it much. So why would I pay €300 for a lifetime subscription? I do have a LOTRO lifetime subscription from back in the day, but the same there, not playing it anymore (never really have, doubt that I got my money worth). Look, you don’t spend $270 for 24 months, spent $45 for four months and play one month now, a month in a year, etc. Or $25 for two months. If you only want one month, sure have a go at $20… Act like a tourist, pay like a tourist!
DU price increase is indeed half that of EVE, but that’s where the comparison stops. 98% of the industry hasn’t yet announced the price increase… Yet. Prices are increasing globally, inflation, that will also translate to higher salaries and all other kinds of costs. And let’s not forget that in certain regions MMOs have been increasing prices for years ESO in Canada in 2015 from $15 to $18, and again in 2020 from $18 to $20. Some industry insiders are thinking that existing MMOs will shoot them in the foot, but way more industry insiders are thinking we’ll see way more MMOs increasing prices in the coming period.
Prices ingame go up if demand goes up. If demand goes down, ingame prices go down. So if you replace the more expensive PLEX with really cheap subscriptions, demand will go down, prices will fall.
As for PLEX stock piles, that is certainly possible. But the fact of the matter is, someone paid for it sometime, that CCP has possibly already spent to money on booze and parties is another possibility.
Be an alpha chad instead! If you’re alpha you don’t pay for EVE. EVE will give you free stuff and lets you live rent free, because you lift and hold frame!
Paying is for betas and omegas.
Right. So not for “months”. Increase is recent.
Decidedly, either you are extremely clumsy, in which case you would be legitimately excused, or you are perfectly in your role of troll manipulator of the players of EvE Online, since for that, you deliberately accumulate under this topic, as many nonsense as shameless lies , in which case you would unfortunately be to blame.
For your personal guidance, there are international trade laws that make any form of publication of company accounts mandatory! And these publications are therefore accessible!
CCP hf. absolutely no exception to this golden rule in 2022!
The reality is very sad in the end since, contrary to the persistent soul of New Eden at its beginnings (I have already explained it at length on this forum, I have been faithful to CCP since 2003), the evolution of the policy of this company unfortunately happens! in contempt of this child’s soul unfortunately, and by extension, in contempt of all its veterans; that’s why a lot of players have definitely turned their backs on EvE Online, and for some, I know, reluctantly.
The EvE Board that you are brandishing here speaks for itself, since out of more than 17 million characters registered by CCP since 2003, only 25 to 26,000 accounts are observed simultaneously connected today, and this fall continues, even has accelerated since the announcement of this grim inflation of +33% imposing itself on players, without the slightest new content in return, apart from these repetitive cosmetic updates; take us for hams.
For the record, in 2009, when the game reached its peak with the release of Dominion at the end of 2009, CCP could count on more than 50,000 accounts connected simultaneously, with an average of 1,500 new players per day! Then there was successively Tyrannis, Incursion then Incarna in 2011, and then there, crash.
So what is actually happening that is about to torpedo EvE Online so badly today despite the undeniable success of its debut (2003-2009)?
It’s very simple: the implementation over the years of a totally flawed marketing strategy, and this alas! in defiance of the passion tirelessly expressed by its own customers. So inevitably, when you no longer listen to your customers at all, eh! well messed up.
Because to want to run several hares permanently at the same time, and this probably only by greed, eh! Well, you always end up throwing your baby out with the bathwater. And in this case, this CCP baby, hey! well it is indeed EvE Online. Historical examples of progressive betrayal abound: Dust 514, EvE Valkyrie, Gunjack, Gunjack 2 End of Shift, Sparc, World of Darkness Online (cancelled), Project Legion (cancelled) and EvE The Second Genesis (cancelled), Project Nova (cancelled), and this until the fateful moment of the development of pay to win mobile versions: EvE Echoes (3.3/5 on Google) and EvE War of Ascension.
https://opencorporates.com/companies/is/4506973469
Forgive me, but I’m an engineer, and when I look at such a dubious track record as that of CCP with so few resources in front, especially since their 2011-2017 restructuring, hey! of course, this can only end very very badly in the end.
There’s no doubt that CCP had eyes bigger than their stomachs.
You say Pearl Abyss would impose things on CCP to order them to make more money. Let’s not forget that if a sale took place in 2018, it was indeed that CCP needed it in order to support its development despite the pay to win implemented since the arrival of PLEXs! What do the results and benefits of CCP hf tell us. from 2015 to 2018 already, or even those of 2019? Oh yes ! That’s right !
Phew! It certainly seems to be recovering in 2020, but at what price, and this remains to be confirmed above all with the results of 2021; but my little finger tells me that if +33%… So certainly, Pearl Abyss is most certainly doing its part of the work, but this again, in defiance of the child’s soul of New Eden; Where have the true passionate minds of CCP gone for having dared to impose such a financial penalty on us after so many years of faithfulness hoping for new content, and believing promises never kept? So inevitably, the players have had enough and express themselves; for my part, I have remained rather discreet so far, but when the pond is full.
As we say back home, the devil is always in the details, and therefore never in the mass propaganda and ad nauseam influence communication in which you too seem to be taking part despite your previous denial.
On good terms, I salute you: we will never be their cash cows!
Ully Loom
Nice link you have there, that is stuck behind a paywall, so I’m seeing a few things that might be interesting, but I can’t read Icelandic and translations seem suspect.
As an example, I’m seeing Rekstrartekjur translate to Operating Income, pretty much profit after wages, etc. Those numbers seem awful high. Then I see a ton of greyed out data, and the term Afkoma, which translates to Performance. Unless you have a good and complete translation of that, I’m hesitant to use any of what I see there.
Absolutely agree there, so much potential, so much squandered! I still have a stack of Aeon magazine somewhere that had so many cool ideas! They had good ideas, but their execution was poor and that eventually cost them their company…
I would say that the sale was required to survive at all.
But the PLEX thing, sure PLEX were introduced later, but in 2005 you could already legally trade the EVE time codes on the forums for isk. I just saw a post from the old forums 90 days game time for 450M isk (2007)… I’m not 100% sure, as I only started playing in 2005, but I suspect this ‘feature’ was already there on release in 2003, it just was clunky as heck using the forums! Not just for trading gametime for isk, but also trading isk for characters, characters with the right skills and enough of them. So that p2w aspect was always there.