Stem the flow?
So player activity was steady-ish pre nerf. And according to you that’s whilst losing players. So now the flow has been stemmed, why is activity going down?
I’m just a few steps ahead of you that’s all. But I’ll coach you there.
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Where are they then?
Stem the flow of players quitting due to war decs, specificially.
Player activity levels are far more complex than that. You can’t look at that one single change and expect it to be the ultimate one fix solution.
Are there are accurately calibrated statistics on new player retention that we can refer to?
“Calibration” would include taking account of this BTW:
I know. But wardecs were destroying player retention were they not?
Or weren’t they?
Either they had a huge effect on player retention and their nerf should be felt, or it wasn’t that big a driver behind player losses.
So which is it?
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Llama
A suggestion: don’t spend time on a troll unless you’re definitely enjoying it.
Serious question llama. Anyone knows I’m not a troll.
Just trying to get you to think about the reality of the situation.
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Link where they say it.
I know the data. Link me where they say it’s griefing.
Is roaming in null or low not free?
No it’s not.
A griefer or bad faith player is a player in a multiplayer video game who deliberately irritates and harasses other players within the game (trolling), using aspects of the game in unintended ways.[1
Hold up.
Salvaging peoples wrecks most certainly causes them ‘grief’. Honestly go try it.
Link me the bolded part pls.
Shared hangars and shared wallet aren’t necessarily social parts.
There was. You even agreed when i said it above.
Peoples weren’t going inactive. Their corp was.
And like I said before, where is this increase in activity now that so many people can enjoy the ‘social’ things and not worry about decs?
I’ll make a bolder statement. Every High Sec nerf ( making it safer ) has resulted in less players online and not more. Is a direct consequence of the change? That I do not know because the number of online players might even have dropped further if the changes were not implemented, but it is very clear that the changes did not result in more players.
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You didn’t spell stalker correctly.
You’re beyond hope, well you have fun crying in the corner over a change that isn’t going to get reverted, embrace that denial
No proof then?
Did i say i expect it to change?
Just sayin it wasn’t a good idea. Clearly.
It’s pretty straight forward. You remove interesting gameplay and replace it with stupid uneventful boring grind, what effect will that have on a game whose main purpose is entertainment? I don’t know why CCP and the CSM can’t see this simple point. If you make the game boring people will quit, simple as that.
No large crowd of carebears will suddenly join because they hear how boring and uneventful the game has become.
People act like the purpose of the game is to have a stable, secure life and a rock solid economy, with everything fair and everyone should always be happy. That’s not a game. Those are maybe good goals for a RL society, but not for a game.
The goal here should be:
- more destruction
- more chaos
- more imbalanced niches where people can thrive
- more ability to scam and screw with each other
More interesting, less boring and people will play the game again.
But that is not where we are heading and the PCU numbers show that pretty clear.
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That’s the point. Players grew, and left, before that. You are standing on a hill, declaring it’s all on your favorite subject - apparently - and taking credit for predicting it. The big picture is much bigger than your one subject.
I played since 2006 and the golden age of Eve had little to do with wardecs and PVP. They were elements. but not the entire thing. And over the years I see waves and waves of blame this and blame that while nobody realized that for just about every aspect of the game, it was only a matter of time before CCP go to it and screwed it up. "When they came for (insert playstyle or activity here), I didn’t care because I do not (insert playstyle or activity here)… " and other cliches™
Much of what you say about wardec changes is true. But when I first heard of these changes, I knew that the one-man space structure holding corps would suffer. Or even those that are more than one man and they are just farmers. But to me, that whole point of “if you put a structure up, you can be decced” mattered to me, because of the concept of “skin in the game”. To me it’s better to be at a point where you know “do this and that will happen” instead of “and we were minding our business and one day we got decced for no reason”.
And then if you fight back, oh look, content! And then it never ends. For no reason. That’s stupid. Even people who don’t mind lack or reason will still think it’s stupid. And people don’t subscribe to stupid.
Thus making everything else easier as well, being stupid, didn’t help. Like what they did to exploration for example.
But I see you gripe about structure holding corps being reduced to only large blocs. As if everybody expected the opposite. I think you are wrong. I expected these effects: if you won’t defend your structure, you won’t have one. It’s as simple as that. Those players who use structures as a monument to their min-max obsession get a dose of reality. I don’t see a problem here.
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It was about the sandbox and actions have consequences. That pretty much defined eves golden age.
The problem with structures being the defining point of wardecs is that it means players have less reason to work together.
Cypherous says that corp hangars and a shared wallet are social tools. But do they promote much social interaction? Or do they now just enable asset and wealth sharing between alts?
I suspect the wardec changes this winter have helped the latter more than the former.
You cannot be pro-wardec changes and pro-social interaction. It’s just not how this works. It’s not how any of this works.
The rule is as follows;
The easier and safer something is, the more likely people will do it alone. The harder something is, the more likely they will ask for help.
We can see this happening. The harder ganking has become, the fewer but bigger the ganking groups. Same with decs. Where as the easier and safer care bearing is, the more players are doing it alone.
And i can’t remember where i read it, but asking for a favour or providing someone with a favour is a very effective way to form bonds. Just sayin.
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This is gold
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I think you are only partially correct there. I was thinking about this the other day actually.
What my observation brings me to is this: back when solo content was more difficult, people were more apt to play more often because they had the option to be challenged while playing solo. That option is very important. The term “solo Drake” was a thing back in the day. Whether it was PVe or PVP, the more difficult the solo activity was, the more attractive it was.
Now you might be thinking that Solo PVP has taken a hit. Ah, therein lies the rub: not only did CCP make a lot of solo content too easy, they made other solo content nearly impossible, skewing the reward for the effort. So while some solo activities that mainly centered on PVe and exploration got too easy so as not to keep players interested and challenged, other solo activities got too hard.
Back to exploration for example. It used to be quite difficult. Rewards were a huge chance. Even with the scanning revamps in 2009 it was still a heck of a challenge. Plus wormholes. EVERYBODY liked it. From carebear to ganker. Because it was a difficult solo option for days when there was nothing else to do or killing time. Back in the days before SoE ships solo exploration was extremely difficult. Swiss Army Knife fits on a BC, having to offline the cloak to put the expanded launcher online… these things absolutely sucked. And everybody loved it.
Missions got too easy, not helped by the fact they have not changed much. There has been a lot of creeping towards OP mission ships. All this pleased are the min-maxers and farmers.
So ultimately the problem is no so much nerfs or what was made difficult, it’s that the solo things got both too easy and too hard. The “solo option” was a huge draw. When there is no option at all, OR it’s too easy, people get discouraged or bored.
It all boils down to options when all is said and done and the hurf and blurf has been cleaned and put away. People want options and challenge. The option they want is to do it solo when a situation calls for it, and do it in a fleet as well. Being funnelled in either direction is a turnoff. People want to be challenged too. EZ mode Farmville Exploration will bore people out of the game. Having to either be a fleet F1 monkey or get consistently baked in BLOPS/super drops in PVP is both not challenging on the one hand and discouraging on the other.
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I didn’t do much solo exploration but what you say makes sense to me. People join eve for depth and complexity. They join for the pvp sandbox. The player driven market.
These things aren’t interesting because they are easy. They are interesting because they are hard.
Ya know the whole Kennedy thing.
So lets say a good game is easy to get into, but difficult to master. Somehow eve is difficult to get into but easy (for those that survive) to master/min max.
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At long last we agree on something.
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Yeah, you’re post makes a lot of sense though. It’s a pretty spot on summary.