It is well known that Eve Online’s community is regarded by the wider gaming community as one of the most toxic experiences you can experience in an MMO environment.
Lets not mess around, nobody cares how ‘hard core’ eve is supposed to be. Every single one of you knows this can be an extremely unpleasant experience. Everything from mass blackmail to threats of death.
Eve has stopped being about spreadsheets to some people… becoming something much worse in the process. This place is universally known as a “cess pit” of human interaction.
Are the rest of gaming community really all “care bears who should go back to world of warcraft?” … or do we need to lighten up a little.
Plenty of threads around here discussing dropping player count, I felt this needed its own however.
Can you really discount this as a potential reason for dropping player numbers?
I have to disagree, in my experience the eve community has been one of the most friendly and welcoming of any game i’ve experienced. sure you get the asshats, but you get them in every game.
The only difference is that eve has always been a game about freedom and personal choice, that means that while those assholes may not be any more numerous here, they have more freedom to push the limits of their dickbaggery. and because of a weird quirk or human psychology, we are much more likely to talk about the bad than the good. you will hear the 10 stories of the asshole who ripped someone off, or was super harsh to them in fleet etc. long before you will hear about the hundreds or even thousands of stories of people being good to one another.
The nature of the game also means that activities and behavior that is frowned upon or even bannable offenses in other games are just standard gameplay here. that doesn’t make the person using those mechanics a bad person, or an asshole, they are just someone else playing the game and having fun. and as long as you can remember that, you will generally be able to have fun as well.
if you make a mistake and get yourself ganked, learn from it, or hell, even reach out to the people who ganked you. more often than not they will be happy to tell you what you did wrong and teach you how to avoid that mistake in the future.
The problem with asking this question here is that it is like asking the mother of an ugly baby to rate her baby’s beauty. You will hardly get an unbiased response.
I’ve heard it say among ourselves that the Eve community is among the most mature, intelligent and kind. Now ask someone looking from the outside in and they see something totally different.
Eve community is awesome. However, the forums reflect a small minority population of the community. As with any small sample size, it creates a bias representation that does not accurately reflect the community as a whole.
In other words, there are a great many people in eve who are kind, content with the game and CCP’s direction, and are satisfied. They tend to have no reason to come to the forums and gripe.
This is a game about ruining someone else’s day (stop sugar coating it, a game centered around destroying anything that is build is nothing else) and laughing about it. What exactly do you expect? You can have nice people inside a quite narrow circle in your corp/alliance, but outside of that circle people aren’t exactly best friends.
Keep AFK ratting and ruining someone else’s income and talk down on them if they ask you nicely to be more proactive? Very nice.
Keep crushing market prices but at the same time expecting others to keep the markets stocked and rant about missing items in important situations? Very nice.
Keep cherry picking belts and only leave bits and worthless pieces behind that prevent respawn of the belt for others, and mock other people for politely pointing fingers? Very nice.
Keep gouging prices in contracts for essential items just because there is no-one competing with you and berate people in your alliance for expecting a moderate markup over Jita as agreed in the alliance rules? Very nice.
Toxicity is part of the game. The thing is that you need to do things to keep it away from you or throw some toxicity back at the most deplorable dimwits in your group.
Indeed. And it always has been from the beginning. It is a competitive game, often zero sum, where your goals are at odds with some other player’s goals and your success necessitates ruining their day.
So yes, I can discount it. Eve Online has been harsh since the beginning, probably more harsh than now for most of its life, and grew for 8 or 10 years straight while being “toxic”. Nothing has changed on that front.
Perhaps as an understanding that the original post is making it clear that Eve Online’s player base suffers in part from this gradual worsening of toxicity.
I think you’ve agreed rather than disagreed with me. You’ve said yourself it’s likely the situation is now worse.
The original post is focused on the worse type of toxicity, as mentioned:
Black mail, real world type threats and other such behaviour which borders into legality issues. You’ll be hard pressed to explain to marks family and local law enforcement that cutting power lines (yes, that’s a reference to pandemic legion) and bullying sisters on Facebook is “part of the game”.
Thank you all for your replies, this isn’t an echo chamber and I’m eager to hear from those who disagree with me as much.
Maybe I wasn’t clear, but no I don’t think things are worse now, at least not in the last few years. The game has always been harsh by design, and while there are examples of people that have gone too far taking things out-of-game with doxxing or whatever, they aren’t recent and therefore not likely to explain any recent decrease in numbers as your OP seems to suggest.
In fact, I think the game is as mellow as it has been in a decade. Grr Goons hate has ebbed since they got their comeuppance in World War Bee, and CCP has intentionally or inadvertently made everyone rich in game so there is no reason to fight over resources, and there is no apparent fire for an emotion-driven war for personal reasons amongst the big groups.
One might even go as far to say this is mellowness is problem for the activity numbers as people have less reasons to log in, some even going as far as to use this lull to try other games and quit completely. That might be taking this thread off-topic though so I won’t suggest that. I will say though that I don’t think the competitive nature of the game, is a problem, nor do I think unacceptable out-of-game “toxicity” is an issue keeping players away. No one is threatening new players will death in real life or doxxing them (aside from perhaps a few deranged carebear miners after being ganked) nor do I expect many outside the game have even heard of the few issues. Yes, the harsh and/or hardcore in terms of commitment nature of the game probably keep some people from trying or staying with it, but not fear of real-world harassment.
Certainly, real-world harassment isn’t worse than it has been in the past so it isn’t likely to explain decreasing player engagement with the game.
Well you’re not wrong. This is a disgustingly toxic game, but it’s beautiful in how it can roll the other way just as much. I admit, that I will even let the negativity of this adult gamer demographic get to me sometimes. Like right now I’ve had enough of Twitter so I deleted my account. I might come back but who knows. My phone is so much more quiet
I’ve learned from other MMO’s to definitely keep my real life at the login screen. Eve’s certainly not immune to stalkers and desperate men, removing the watchlist has probably been my favorite feature lol.
I’ve stopped calling this game community a community. It’s a mob. They’ll read and discuss some stuff on r/eve whether it’s true or not. I’ve watched people openly talk about others, even tagging them on #tweetfleet on Twitter with real personal insults and nasty things.
I guess I’ve found a nice place playing well, basically myself with my only character Lulu Lunette. A nice person in a bad world. I’m not someone who shuts out entire parts of the game for some credo or some pirate code. I enjoy the carebear parts of the game and I kill with kindness. I don’t care for being raged at and I have given people their stuff back when I’ve ruined their day. If they are just outright very rude or crass and say things that offend me, I’ll just screenshot it and introduce them to #tweetfleet. Or I add their insults to my titles in-game.
My advice is to not let it get to you too much. I’ve vented privately to a few people about what I think of this game and eventually I realized it’s better to shut it off for a while. (Like I did with Twitter) Eve Online takes thick skin to play, we all have to be able to take a bloody nose once in a while; and I think we all wanna be the hero of our own story and that definition can be very different between different players.
It may be my own experience alone as an industrial Joe talking, But this game has the most mature and friendly community i’ve run into, never had a question or request for assistance unanswered. Even when i’m ganked I see it as part of the game and say “Oh dang, you got me” and “thanks for not killing my capsule”, knowing i got ganked cause I made a mistake. And most gankers are pretty cordial about it. And keep in mind it’s all part of the game and usually not personal. As for corps being very harsh and strict, it’s their choice to play that way and your choice to join them or not…
My experiences with the Eve community have mostly been good. I suppose I make good use of the in game “Block” option in those rare cases I have an interaction with someone I don’t appreciate.
Eve is a big “choose your own adventure” book, with near infinite options/outcomes. My experience could be totally different than yours. Maybe I just got lucky and avoided a lot of the grief that has found you.
One other thing to point out… Eve is a lot like real life. Red Sox and Yankees fans (baseball teams) tend to hate each other. It’s a rivalry thing. Yet… If someone came along claiming baseball sucks and cricket is better, both baseball fans would rally together to hate on the cricket fan.
The same is true in eve. Goons and pandemic legion do not like each other and will happily go to war. Yet if at a video game convention, players from both alliances would rally together to hate on the WoW player. Similarly both groups may try to scam each other but both will donate plexes to help a good cause.
What this tends to mean is that yes you see a lot of Grr goons on PamFam hate on the forums and in game but at fan fest both sides are out drinking and sharing war stories happily.
OP, this game is based in a dystopian universe that is with little to no hope by design. Everyone who understands this plays into it to create content that suits this philosophy. There are others who try to play into the brighter side of things to counter the dystopian setting, but it is actively fought against by players and by design.
CCP wants all of us to be jerks, because they are jerks.
