Would be similar to if they halved the amount of systems in space, would just be a conflict explosion. Sounds amazing 
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Because ships would be cheap due to an overabundance of all careers player ( still staying with reading the charts upside-down, let’s not forget ) and so everyone would take more risks. Miners would mine and get ganked more, gankers would gank and get paid more ect…
I don’t know why it’s dropping. My guess would be price over value but I’m far from being an expert.
Maybe they should close off some gates and add a new race of pirates to fight against to re-open the gates. Those pirates would drop all t2 modules and the bigger ones would drop valuable ores because they’d be miners-haulers, here to rob NE of all her riches… Anyway. Maybe I’ll write a book.
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I see when covid hit and I think I see the Whovians come and go.
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THE BIGGEST CONTENT UPDATE EVER HAPPENED
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I have two Goon friends from real life who quit EVE, there it goes their 30-40 alts who were logged everyday mining at Delve as much as they could. Poppulation drop by the dozens, real people who left were only two.
There’s another guy who is a good EVE buddy of mine who is null seccer from another alliance, he never logged in EVE again after the pandemic hit… 10 less accounts logged, but only one person left.
This was one example of three people who together kept online everyday 40-50 alts for a lot of hours.
I’m glad they are gone.
EvE doesn’t need bots.
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Doubt.
Which proofs what I am saying all the time, that the total player online count is at best only 50% of real players and the rest are multiboxing alts. And that is pretty generous estimate.
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Surely the best indicator for activity in Eve is to look across a wide range of ships, structures, etc to see whether kills have fallen. Well…after doing this for lots of things from Ventures to Astrahus…I see no indication whatever that activity is falling.
Actually the best indicator for activity in EVE is to look at the Monthly Economic Report, which shows activity down in virtually every area and sector across the game.
Assuming you want actual facts that is, rather than simply looking for random, unquantified data to support your preferred belief.
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If kills haven’t fallen, but ‘activity’ has fallen, then that suggests that the players are all still here, and only the bots are gone.
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Or. The remaining players knows it is the end so they are burning their assets in PvP.
Clarification: this is a joke.
I doubt that’s the case. For, uh, the “regular” players, the hoarding mentality is just too strong. If a player isn’t already “into the peeveepees,” they’re probably not going to start just because of the perception of the game going into decline. It just doesn’t match up with what I’ve seen from players here and in other games. The players who are into PvP already operate at capacity because that’s their primary reason for playing as is.
So activity declining, but PvP activity remaining stable, could be a sign that the economy is not lucrative enough for players to grind more, while at the same time meaning that there are few enough players trying to PvP/getting kills that even with a reduction in activity, they’re still unable to get anywhere close to the game environment’s PvP capacity limit. As in, if before PvPers were killing a quarter of the active population, and now that the reduction in activity had the net effect of halving the active population, well, the PvPers are basically still only killing half of the active population (25% of 100 becomes 50% of 50).
Basically this means that the game needs more PvP/players who engage in PvP as a proportion of the population, which would in turn increase PvE engagement with the game by its players. Let’s take the converse of this, and say that players can’t PvP anymore in some way or another. Well, the economy becomes even less lucrative, and PvE players start playing less because it’s just not fun to grind for a pittance. Because after all this is a game and not real life, where if the product of your labor is devalued, you are forced to work more just to be able to eat. Here it’s “what’s that? veldspar’s worth like half now? okay, I’ll just go and play something else.”
So the player turnover from getting angry about ship losses is like a constant, but the turnover from dissatisfaction with the game because people’s labor and efforts aren’t being acceptably validated through the game’s economy is a dynamic variable.
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I blame NPE for this. There is no PvP in NPE (excluding soldier of fortune AIR challenges). Players have no idea what a duel is and have a misconceptions against it. Additionally ISDs are driving away any player who tries to duel peoples in career agent sectors with an argument that the new players don’t know what they are going into.
I was doing career agents on my alt(s) to get progress in AIR. And so I was trying to get some progess on soldier of fortune by throwing out duels to anyone I met while doing it be it in Uitra or Unpas. Everyone declined (was offering duel only to frigates and above, I was flying Rifter) and that is including veterans in Gilas, Feroxes and other ships that came there to do anoms.
New players are extremely scared and NPE and this PvP protection in the NPE sectors is making new players soft and unaware of what this game is mostly about. Then they get ganked few months later and they either quit or come here to forums and spam crap about how is ganking wrong and highsec should be perfectly safe from any PvP.
Now, I am not saying that this protection these sectors have should be removed. But PvP should be part of career missions and Agent or Aura should explain how it works to avoid misconceptions. One of the career mission should have a task to duel with another player and then explain player what he can expect in such duel including the fact that he can lose his pod and thus he should set home station beforehand trying it. Something like this.
That being said eventually one brave player came forward and dueled me. Although I doubt he was brand new player considering the talk we had about fitting after the duel ended, but I truly believe he had good time despite he lost (we had pretty much same fit, higher skills that I had on that alt made the difference, idk maybe I should have let him win too, mb).
So I say force them to PvP from the very start. Amongst themselves prefferably. Don’t hide the fact that this is a PvP game from new players. It is what is causing these misconception posts about ganking.
But I am pretty sure it is all intented. Especially with those special deals for new players that offers omega + retriever and try to push them unto mining. Because if they would know from the very start that this is primarily PvP game and anyone can attack them in highsec a lot of them would quit before PA/CCP can milk them…
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The way I see, the ISK destruction business will become the ultimate business tool in EVE when the population becomes dangerously low. We can foreshadow this by seeing the last economic report.
Because it won’t have enough people suplying the market, then a handful of people can buyout the market, just like how I fat fingered Tritanium in 2020 and made the tritatium go over 8,20 ISK. That week I was watching Talking in Stations and they were trying to guess what made the Tritanium price skyrocket, they were wondering if the cause was the war in Delve or something else. For only one day the price was over 8 ISK, but still it stayed for over 7 ISK for a long time, then back to 6 ISK.
Then came side effects on the products, including Catalysts that went over 2 milion ISK and I sold Catalysts as much as I could, then many weeks later someone fat fingered the Catalysts and they went over 6 milion ISK, then it went back to 2 milion in the next day.
Those waves on the graphics are healthy, there’s demand and there’s suppliers, you can’t truly force the market, people will stop buying your overpriced stuff and they will build everything themselves and kill you with the ships they built.
In the future with even less players and production, if someone fat fingers the market, who will make the price go down again naturally as it is today?
This is why the ISK destruction business will become the Archimedes’ Law of the Lever for the market in the future. Many mining multiboxers left EVE, many industry players left, the people who were grinding the ISK day after day got burned and left.
Ferengi Rules of Acquisition
Rule #34: War is good for business.
Oh yeah, absolutely. I’ve posted before the idea that one of the tutorial/career agent missions should straight-up be sending the player to kill another player (the system would basically send two players to the same zone with the same task). Win or lose, there would be good rewards for that mission regardless of the outcome.
It’s obscene that CCP literally pushes all new players toward mining. They don’t push any activity as hard as they push mining for new players. So whenever I see someone asking for advice on what they should do in the game when they start playing, the answer is most often mining, because other new players are providing this answer, and they’re just parroting what they themselves were told by the game and/or other new players. Many new players are in fact not even aware of activity alternatives, and come to think that mining is the entire point of the game.
It’s a self-feeding loop. Potential players see new-player educational materials heavily push mining, and get gaslit into thinking that’s what they want:
Meanwhile CCP keep shooting themselves in the foot by basically marginalizing all of the other activities in the game (and I’m not even talking about PvP specifically), in effect turning their product into a low-tier PvE grind sim monolith.
CCP, instead of marketing EVE like “YOU CAN BUILD A SPACE EMPIRE! Oh and also yeah you can like mine space asteroids and stuff if you want,” goes for the “YOU CAN MINE SPACE ASTEROIDS! Oh and also yeah you can build a space empire if you want” approach.
CCP has this amazing ability to set player expectations for their game, and they’re absolutely squandering it on ■■■■■■■ dogshit just to sell some shitty industrial packs, whose revenue could be vastly exceeded by sub and PLEX sales if they actually advertised the fun aspects of the game and had an extra thousand or two live players on the server.
This can hold true, but only if the demand isn’t falling as quickly as the supply.
If the ratio of PvP to PvE players falls in line with (or even faster than) the population in general, then even though the population is falling, there’s still too much supply, even with the buyouts.
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THE GAME IS DIEING.
FOR REAL NOW.
REJOICE.
FREEDOM AT LAST
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This is really one of the most disappointing aspects of the way CCP has mismanaged the game. The fact that so much of the player base leaves because CCP promises one set of expectations and then delivers something completely different (and worse).
I’ve said it before but it bears repeating - CCP is truly their own worst enemy. No competitor could do the damage to their IP that they do themselves.
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Problem is, can’t even blame CCP now.
Pearl Abyss should have replaced every single developer, including the not-so-glorious Hilmar, by now. The devs themselves have admitted none of them know how the games code works, as none of the original devs are here any longer. This means the devs themselves have admitted they are completely replaceable as they hold no knowledge of value to promote their retention. And the only thing Hilmar promotes is his own ego.
So every day CCP in its current form is left to develop EvE, is another day and more money wasted by Pearl Abyss. Tons of fresh, talented devs and real, actually educated and trained businessmen out there for PA to headhunt.
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True enough. Sometimes you can’t fix a poor performing corporate culture. Just take a look at CCP Shanghai developing a new EVE server with a new ruleset in roughly the same amount of time it took CCP Iceland to change over the chat system and get it (mostly) working.
However I can guarantee there’s some institutional knowledge at CCP that you won’t want to toss out willy-nilly, even if they aren’t putting it to best use.
Smartest thing PA could do at this point would be to acquire a small independent studio in Poland on the cheap, and progressively build up EVE assets and coders there while cutting back on Reykjavik. Sadly, neither PA nor CCP appears to be that forward-thinking so long as the milk is still flowing.
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