What do players want?

Communications Center General Discussion
45

Sure you (shill) and CCP can come up with a million excuses as to why they shouldn’t talk to the playerbase and as we all know they take those excuses very seriously (as can be seen by the fact that they NEVER post ANYTHING constructive on the forums).

The real reason is they simply cannot be bothered. It costs money to hire people to engage the community and engaging the community is only something you do if you plan on growing your game. CCP doesn’t plan on growing their game. They are CASHING. EVE. OUT.

Sure if their game HAPPENS to grow while they cash it out they’ll take it and if they can come up with some easily-implemented non-content that strings players along they’ll jump at the chance too. But they definitely will not consult the playerbase and overhaul the many broken systems in this game because it quite simply is too much work and doesn’t yield an immediate increase in income.

When it comes to the real underlying issues (too much isk inflation, not enough risk, null-sec is all blue, marketing to the wrong types of players ect.) CCP will avoid them at all costs because the solutions take money and effort that CCP is not willing to invest. Eve’s target market is no longer CCPs target market. CCP wants easy money, not a thriving game.

Even if I’m totally wrong and CCP wants to invest in the future of Eve online they’re still doomed to fail for the same reasons.

  1. There’s a massive disconnect between CCP and their players.
  2. CCP no longer understands how the underlying systems, mechanics, and incentives interact (mainly because they are not involved in community discussion) and are driving completely blind.
  3. CCPs only focus/goal is to make quick money.
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46

This is the scenario I fear most . So far the evidence supports what you say , I can only hope for the better … or perhaps I’m just in denial of truth .

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47

Eve is dying… it’s a very slow death…we just need to give it a kick or two now and then

48

Just can bring my perspective as I had no clue about EvE when I joined… after years of playing X3 I was looking for other space games, became a backer of E:D and SC, and while waiting for their completion (lol, I’m still waiting for the latter), I tried EvE … and was hooked a few days into trial.

It was essentially like X3 but much more, and total freedom, persistent, I could play my own story and didn’t have to follow scripts from others.

49

That is pretty much my story, I’m just at the start of my EVE journey.

50

I just want my original toon back… But the dude won’t respond to my DMs…

:sleepy: :cry: :sob: :sob: :sob: :sob: :sob: :sob:

WHY, BOB, WHY?!?

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51

Where did i say don’t talk to the playerbase?

Thing is, they can’t all respond to everything, and most of the time they can’t even respond to requests, because anytime they say “I will bring that up” people keep reminding them every 30 seconds until they get a response and they can’t commit to many things publicly because people will try and hold them to it even if CCP has internally decided against it

Its basic PR for most game developers

Going to need some evidence other than tinfoil conspiracies, i haven’t seen them doing anything that would indicate a final cash grab, they haven’t started selling gold ammo or ships directly for cash so i’m not really seeing anything that hasn’t become the norm in the gaming industry or hasn’t been there for years, if you have some actual evidence for this i’m happy to consider it

Outside of that they ARE a for-profit business, they aren’t running EVE out of the goodness of their hearts and they have had to change their business model to match shifting times, and there are subscription based games with far more payment options than EVE has, just look at FFXIV, they still charge for expansions, they also sell the ability to skip levels on classes, along with the usual smattering of cosmetics

EVE Atleast doesn’t charge you for expansions

So, how exactly would you fix ISK inflation? money has to enter the game from somewhere, and any way that can be farmed will be, you’ll generally always have more ISK entering than leaving, for example i rarely explode so i am basically an ISK faucet rather than a sink

Don’t get me wrong some ISK sources pay a lot for how “easy” they are, incursions for example are “solved” so literally print ISK, the only real way is to reduce the amount of ISK entering the game which is harder than it seems as you can’t just blanket decrease everything, and even then, some things wil lstill remain the defacto way to earn ISK and will just be farmed even more

Thats fairly subjective and depends mostly on what it is you’re expecting, they aren’t going to be able to respond to things in any kind of way that might imply its “a done deal”

They see more than you think, remember they can trivially see which incomes are highest and which sinks are the most effective, there will always be more ISK coming in than leaving the system, especially when most of the sinks (Manufacturing costs etc) can be massively reduced via grind, the major sink is insurance but because i don’t really fly any T1 hulls i rarely bother with insurance because it doesn’t pay anything of value, as i don’t produce anything either my ISK balance only really ever grows

Well they are a for-profit business, but that being said as PA publishes their financials for investors we can see that they arne’t even growing that quickly in terms of revenue so if they are just trying to make a quick cash grab they are doing very very badly at it

Its a much larger story than just what some people here see, and yes some things might need changing but the issue is actually trying to change it without absolutely destroying the ingame market to the point that not even new players can afford anything

If you have specific suggestions then by all means post them, but just asking for change without suggesting anything isn’t going to help in the least, and thats one of the larger issues, people complain about x but never provide viable solutions to the issue

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52

As much as I hate to say it, thinking otherwise is denial at this point. CCP’s might SAY they want a thriving game but their ACTIONS say they’re only goal is to not be upside down in debt when one of their ■■■■ patches finally kills the game for good.

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53

Not yet .

For me the changes they did since 2016 to present were just terrible for the game . I won’t go into details here , we can talk about those and why they were bad for the game for days . That tells me two things: negligence or they just simply do not care anymore .
As of lately they are trying to fix those, but so far I only see the broken eggs and no omlet.

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54

I repeat: Eve’s target market is no longer CCPs target market

Their business model is flawed. They’re doing the exact same thing that basically killed WoW (which lost 75% of its playerbase to the EXACT SAME MISTAKES Eve is making).

You cannot attract everyone, casual players are not your target market with an MMO like Eve. Yes attracting lots of casual players will make you money in the short term but in the long term you will lose your hardcore playerbase which is actually what keeps your game thriving.

Remove all of the bounty payouts and replace them with increase LP and loot/salvage payouts. Then once the market has restabilized reintroduce bounties but only slightly so that the amount of isk being injected into the economy is equal to the amount of isk sinks.

A ship exploding is not an isk sink. An isk sink takes RAW ISK out of the market.

It’s not subjective at all. It can be SEEN with a simple trip to eve-offline.com. They’ve been making changes to bubble-wrap the same group of players for close to 10 years while their player counts continue to decrease. You can actually play the game for free and there are LESS players than there were.

Furthermore, it can be seen with the state of the game. Eve used to have conflict-drivers ALL OVER but now conflict has been all but removed.

Sure they can see the EFFECTS of player actions and make adjustments in retrospect but they are too far removed to be able to effectively guage beforehand what those actions will be. For instance, when CCP allowed cap ships in low-sec. They likely were thinking “Low sec players will now be able to engage in even larger battles for Faction Warfare” while being far too disconnected to see that

  1. Faction Warfare is not a profitable enough resource for anyone in Faction Warfare to be able to afford cap ships.
  2. Nothing in Faction Warfare is worth bringing a Cap ship to defend.
  3. Most people in faction warfare actually prefer small ship PvP.
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55

if i lose like 3 coercers worth 18 milion each a day i lose like 1.8 billion a month
thats no small money
about the amount i used to work with before FW became full bollocks last year (and amarr was tier 2/3)
now every miner and her mon are in low sec, every null group to
making 500 k a minute
sry i cant continue in low
ccp screw up

remove missions . remove tier 1 and 5
take the minerals to null wh hs , low sec should not be = null sec

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56

Are you referring to gameplay changes or MTX changes, with regards to gameplay changes those are always going to happen, once you’ve seen nearly 17 years of changes you get used to it lol

Based on what?

CCP only has 1 target market, they only make EVE, where are you seeing a difference?

In what way, the MTX seem fine to me and are far below what i would consider a “cash grab” considering they aren’t even really bringing in that much per year

And WoW has been on a decline for a really long time, its mostly due to the decline of MMO’s as a whole, especially subscription based MMO’s, F2P is the current market trend and there are still 3 games holding on to the sub model despite that, hardly surprising those aren’t bringing in as many players as they used to

Yeah that doesn’t really work, you need bounty payments for new players and for people in null, there aren’t any real LP sources out there, and you would still need a basic way to convert that LP in to ISK from an NPC source, so all you are doing is shifting the ISK faucet step to the right by adding an extra step in redeeming the drops/LP for ISK

Insurance and production costs associated with the new ship, the fact that you’re missing that already proves there is more to the bigger picture than you think, and i don’t mean that in a negative way

Show me a game that hasn’t had a decline over its last 10 years alive, you’re looking at a natural decline in players and immediately assuming its because its CCP

That being said our decline is actually far slower than most games of this age, and you’re also ignoring the part where EVE has and always will be a niche game

Which is down to players, CCP can’t force players to fight, just look at what happened with Serenity during the trig invasion, almost the entire server supported EDENCOM, there was nothing CCP could do to change that because they can’t control what players choose to support or do, if most of null wants to be blue to each other then they can, CCP can’t force them to fight

They can add all the conflict options they want but they can’t force people to participate in them, just like most people ignore incursions, just like most people ignored the triglavian invasion, just like most people ignore faction warfare

How exactly would you force people to participate in conflicts, given the sandbox nature of the game how are you going to force people to fight each other?

You realise that predicting the outcome of something like this isn’t as easy as you seem to think it is right?

And if you genuinely think you have a solution to this and the insight in order to predict the future you should get in touch and work for them, because i’m going to go out on a limb and assume you don’t have all the miracle solutions to ISK inflation in your pocket

They were always allowed in low sec

I very much doubt it was a consideration given most plexes don’t allow capitals in and never did, they were always deadspaced to prevent cyno’s being used aswell, i think this is a situation where people are assuming something that wasn’t the case

See the issue there is thats very subjective, for you 1.8bil is a big deal, for me, thats a weekends grind of high sec incursions, its a few days ratting for null blocks etc

Its why ISK income isn’t a blanket thing that can be cut by massive amounts, because cutting all ISK income in half would affect people like you far more than it would ever affect people like me, which makes balancing faucets far more complicated than some would believe

57

yeah but this prove my point
3 bil a month was a nice income to a FW pilot
they could pay the pew pew AND the omega time
now NO ONE DO COMPLEXES = NO FIGHTS
even the militia
they do in groups (BIG CORPS) to have land to mine and mission
the “WAR ZONE” is not a war zone anymore
that suck

edit:
the most important part
it was possible to do 3 bil/ month doing exclusively small ship PVP

18 mil destroyers / faction frigates
50 mil t1 criusers /pirate frigates
100 mil navy cruisers
200 mil pirate cruisers
price full t2 fitted

i had a bunch fitted and was happy before the fall of niarja and the mineral thing

59

I think you’re half right and half wrong. Half right in that things like RVB’s 100th event roam(or whatever that was years ago where they YOLO’d a large capital fleet into low sec and said come kill us), or Nightmare in New Eden, or a lot of the other little community events of that vein were definitely easier because people could make the money to field the ships.

But also half wrong in that the same ‘bigger, bigger, bigger’ mentality also led to basically a handful of groups being able to just dunk on whoever was trying to run the event. So, instead of having some of the great brawls that had like, 10 different fleets of various size and complexity and goal running around all just having fun, you always ended up with one of a handful of groups showing up and farming the heck out of everyone else.

There was a point where the profit/destruction balance was in a decent state and the unrestrained capitalism you’re talking about was an okay thing. But with the dumping of so many isk and material faucets that followed that era, it’s fallen heavily out of balance, as has the ‘just bring bigger people’ thing you address there toward the end. There are no longer 10+ different groups to bring in a bunch of random and crazy fleets TO do those events, either. For the most part.

Clarity edit because I should be better about proof reading my word vomit

60

i cant do PVE or mine
im to tired of it
soooo ill lose my last isk in pvp
but now im the guy who is ignored or ganked in the warzone
ill continue to fight but is palpable the lack of quality fight after last year
my KB shows it … nice dessy vs dessy , faction frigates , cruiser 1v1
NO MORE
because the people who live in low don’t care about FW, they have intel channels and big blobs
JUST LIKE NULL
i was TNT , i don’t like null gameplay
now LOW is the same ■■■■
because CCP think the only gameplay possible involve COMS and F1
terrible …

62

Oh, I agree. Players are just playing the game as it is. The problem isn’t the players(outside of some people making very bad decisions to YOLO 6k mans into 5k mans already deployed on a field all at once). The problem is a fundamental flaw in the game design that was exacerbated with poor development decisions. To fix it, CCP would have to be willing to move away from this constant chasing of bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger… and start making design decisions that punish being too big.

3 Likes
64

there is no problem to play in disadvantage
is a normal kind of gameplay
1 v 3 ok thats nice
you kill one and try to GTFO, sometimes you kill 2, sometimes you die
the problem is the incentive to form BIG groups that DONT LIKE RISK in a place were once
a anarchic democratic risk intense form of gameplay was the norm
now its 0v1 or 10 v1
because they wont attack until formed and on COMS
this kind of people need to leave LOW SEC

sry im ranting again :smiley:

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65

That is not an isk faucet. By having to sell a resource to another player you are no longer contributing to inflation because that isk is trading hands as opposed to being created and deposited directly. So instead of receiving an inflationatory ISK deposit, you instead receive an asset to trade for another players ISK.

Insurance is actually an isk faucet (as it deposits isk into the market) and production costs are again TRADING HANDS not being taken out of the market and are thus not considered an isk sink. An isk sink is ONLY when isk is taken from a player and not given to another player.

I’m not actually ignoring that fact. I’m stating that the reason for the decline is CCP stopped catering to that niche and instead started attempting to cater to solo PvEers… in a PvP mmo no less.

It’s not about forcing people to fight. It’s about creating platforms where players who want to fight can. For example:

Suspects in High-Sec used to be able to engage in fleet combat because remote support to a suspect made the supporter also suspect. This meant that the suspect wasn’t always at a disadvantage because they could bring logi as backup. This also wasn’t overpowered because the logi would turn suspect as soon as it activated its modules so the aggressor(s) (the people engaging the suspect) could kill the logistics as well. The BIGGEST positive though was that suspects could be riskier with their engagements, put more money on the field for a bigger effect, but risk losing it.

Example before logi change: Orca | Krig Povelli | Killmail | zKillboard

My buddy Krig lost his Bait Orca and his Logi here, but more importantly he was taking big risks because he could escalate the engagement by calling in backup (Krig used to run fleets as well). Krig wouldn’t be flying something as slow as an Orca if he weren’t LOOKING for a fleet fight. This type of big risk can’t be taken anymore.

Most suspects bait mission runners to get engagements and the mission runners do not always bring backup so often-times you would have a scenario where a mission runner shoots the suspect and the suspect and his 5 logi friends have a mission runner pointed. CCP didn’t like this because “the mission runner can’t fight back” so they removed our ability to use logistics. Now the logistics gets concorded.

So what was the REAL effect of this change? Now suspects ONLY target solo mission runners and AVOID each other LOL. And we TOLD CCP it would happen. PvPers cannot fight each other in High-Sec because the suspect always loses.

Example after logi change: Nergal | Krig Povelli | Killmail | zKillboard

My buddy Krig, the person with more kills in an Orca than anybody else in the game (literally), is now flying around a solo Nergal, no fleets, no fleet fights, just ransoming carebears. Instead of potentially creating content for 2 fleets of people he’s creating content for 2 people… and one of them isn’t having very much fun lol.

This is a perfect example of everything I’m talking about. CCP needs to just let the solo PvEer go. Eve is a PVP massive MULTIPLAYER rpg. Sure if a solo PvEer can hang, GREAT, but they SHOULD NOT be catered to or even remotely considered when it comes to balance. You’ve gotta leave mechanics intact for fleet PvP to happen or your fleets will simply unsub.

If you’re a long time PvPer and DEFINITELY if you’re the type that creates your own content it is quite easy to see how most of CCPs changes will affect the game. The affects are very rarely what CCP claims to intend.

I could’ve told you cap ships would’ve killed low sec from the first week I pvp’d there. I could’ve told you logi changes would kill suspect pvp and actually did, profusely, on the announcement post and the dev that posted it said that suspects would still be able to logi each other… which they cannot… which I told him the change actually says they cannot… then he consulted a real dev and came back and said I was right and that it was intended. Then the patch drops and all the in game suspect chat channels die in the next week.

No matter the reasoning, the effects were quite clear at the time. Furthermore it was VERY obvious by looking at killboards and community activities that low sec DID NOT want cap ships but CCP was far too disconnected to see any of these blatant warning signs.

66

Disadvantage isn’t just about numbers though. I’ve spent most my time in Eve in groups that always fought with smaller numbers, but we balanced with higher SP, better ships, better fits. Sometimes it’s just numbers yeah, sometimes not. You can do it, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea :slight_smile:

How so? CCP didn’t actively solve anything. They’re just at a point of players raising the number of people they’re throwing into fights on them again. This has been a constant back and forth for years. CCP raises the server stability, players throw in more players. CCP improves the servers, players throw more people in.

67

Let’s see… I wanted Walk-in-Stations/Captains Quarters but it seems that’s out of the question.

Maybe less resources requirements to build ships but I know someone will have a problem with that.

Less tax by NPC stations would be nice but someone will also have a problem with that.

The ability to apply and join NCP corporations… I guess there may be a problem there too.

Reduce the amount of time/skills required to get into a better mining ship… OH I know, I said the ‘M’ word.

Reduce time/skill for drones… I know someone will have a problem with that too but 9 freaking days is a while to wait for decent drone operation, but hey, that’s just me I guess.

So, all in all, I guess I don’t want anything more or less in/from EVE… OH I know!
A nice medal in the Character info for each 5, 10, 15… PvP kills and decent cut scene for when we get blown up so we can see our clone getting ready for use.

Anyway, who cares… but it was fun to write it.

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