I agree it plays a role, but I would not take it this far. I think it’s more along the lines of null gets what it wants because of their player volume. There is certainly a feedback loop here, but I think it’s a mistake to oversimplify the problem.
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Maybe. But in my experience most “problems” aren’t so complicated; only people tend to overcomplicate to pay homage to the intelligence they think they have.
In the case of EVE the “problem” is even more simple: CCP doesn’t want to spend the money necessary to maintain the game but to a bare minimum. After so many years they expect the game to be on autopilot, no driver required, just passengers who keep paying without knowing the destination.
I too am a disciple of parsimony and a great fan of Occam’s Razor but I think this is in fact a complex issue.
You’d like it to be a complex issue because you’d like to have hope that EVE isn’t on a downward slope with disregard for serious new content from devs and an obvious money-grab direction but that’s exactly what’s been happening since they introduced their so-called “Era of scarcity” under any and all excuses known to man under the sun. But as for them making the bucks, you can be sure they’s no scarcity there.
I can’t argue that I prefer to find excuses for hope.
As for scarcity, I suppose those changes. I support the indy changes too.
The best argument for your outlook is their refusal to reign in multi-boxing, and it’s very strong evidence, I just think that ship has sailed and CCP will never ever do anything about it.
Not as long as it brings them money. Multiboxers pay up the wazoo to have all those accounts, they’d be nuts to cut them out the game. You can be sure they’d curb it or even end that activity all together if it ever started to bite into their profit margin.
Why?
Is it that cacamimi excuse of “environment” something or have you convinced yourself, like many others have, that those help the game? They don’t. Only thing those things help is CCP’s bank account.
Maybe it does. It would be difficult to discover. How many newer players quit because they feel like the only way to get ahead is to multi-box and are unwilling to commit?
Precisely.
Prior to the changes, and taken together rampant multi-boxing it was literally impossible to break into industrial game play at anything other then crippling loss. The changes created economic forces that allow opportunity for fresh blood to get into the system, and that in and of itself makes it worth it to me, before you even get to arguments based on economics.
I would say a lot. The question is asked all the time ‘can I catch up?’
That this question is asked at all tells a lot about the perception of the game to fresh eyes.
Fresh players are not wrong to wonder, though I think the answer is mostly certainly yes, they can catch up in most aspects of the game.
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And maybe it doesn’t. Need several paid accounts to multibox. It’s all benefit for CCP.
It would be difficult to discover. New player retention is a whole other subject.
Yes, we all know that ccp needs to make money, that’s perfectly ok.
Hope is not based on facts only, a lot of it is just a gut feeling. And it can be easily manipulated. The strange thing is why does ccp fail to give people that hope…
Check the change in tonality of communications new players get via email from 2010 vs. today as I posted here: What do you miss about Eve that is now gone? - #856 by Lara_Agnon
When I got that email in 2021 I was on the verge of crying
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If I were to guess, and this is just a guess, it seems to me that the only reason to do that is to keep more people logged in for longer.
This looks good on the surface to people on their end who have no real involvement in the game other than money. Meaning they invested in it in some way.
The drawback is sort of obvious though, if you do this and push it to far the players get sick of things that used to be a small chore becoming mindless drudgery and simply stop doing it, this makes them either switch to something else or stop completely.
Eve has a fairly large number of people already using it as a rather excessive chat tool, and a not so good one at that. These are people who lost interest in gameplay itself at some point but still have friends ingame. Imagine what would happen if ingame chat worked as well as something like IRC or Discord. The funny thing there is that it would keep a hell of a lot more people on longer because a good chat program is a hell of a lot more fun and useful than a game that’s been time gated to death, it’s not however as profitable since the competition is excellent and free. No one needs omega to chat.
Skill training is a serious time gate, but it’s one of the few in Eve that are actually beneficial for a few reasons I can think of. The first is that it keeps new people progressing in a controlled way that gives them time to learn the UI and game mechanics as they go, the second is that it keeps huge numbers of people from advancing instantly to endgame type stuff. This last bit is where things like Plex injectors and bundles being sold come in, you can pay to jump over the time gate and a lot of people do exactly that.
I’ve heard a number of times that an Omega Clone would take roughy twelve years to get all the skills available in Eve to level V, if someone were to do that with the number of accounts I have (5) it would be $10,800 USD and that’s assuming they didn’t buy anything else. A lot of people do buy other stuff like skill injectors and skins and stuff. That’s just one time gate in Eve, there’s lots of others and by the looks of things they are systematically being lengthened.
If you make something as simple as traveling from point A to point B take longer you have kept someone logged in longer and that looks good on paper, but, if you have pissed the person off by doing so they might stop logging in as much and might even cancel their subscription after a while and go so something else. That little event doesn’t just look bad on paper it is flat out bad for the game and not just because there’s less people playing, but also because they tend to be really unhappy before they finaly say “fuckit” and quit. This drags down the morale of other players around them who in turn start to have less fun and want to log in less and less.
Time gating is a very common tool in video games (and even a lot of websites) if you can make something that should take one click of the mouse take five instead you have forced someone to stay engaged for longer than they would have otherwise. The trick is to find a ballance between the amount of fun someone is having and the amount of time they are willing to spend doing it.
With something like planetary interaction it was boring as hell from the start, doing it in highsec made it easy but take longer to get the stuff you need, in my case I started doing it in lowsec but switched to doing it in wormholes, same boring process, but now with intensified danger and a vast increase in travel time. I used warp core stabilizers to survive and they helped a lot, it was almost worth the tedium, now they simply don’t mean anything and so the time spent vs the result and the risk of flying all that tedium from place to place has become something I’m no longer willing to do. So that was the end of that, no more PI for me.
After two years of playing I’ve become tired of jumping, if something is fifteen jumps away I’m a lot less likely to bother with it than I was not so long ago and this is where time gating fails, it leads to player apathy, and I’ve got it bad. If you add it to everything, and CCP seems to be headed in that direction you take a good game and turn it into a chore, and not a pleasant one. It’s like telling the dishwasher in a restaurant that they also have to clean the toilets and no, they are not going to make more money, and yes they are going to work longer hours. First they stop washing their hands between tasks, next they start showing up for work late, and then, after they get fed up they go get a better job.
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You are, sadly, right.
Eve is heading in the wrong direction.
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Hmmm, yeah that could be it. Time spent ingame per player as a KPI for some management people who have no clue why someone might be playing a game.
No worries guys, the new ECHO Chamber of Null CSMs will lead CCP into right direction.
I mean they made it this far, it cannot go wrong now!
Trust the chamber!!! VOTE NAO!!!
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Walking in Stations with emotes might be considered cringe.
It is clear that some of the people who have been put in charge have no business in their positions as they are completely unfit for their duties.
Especially the forum itself comes to mind when I say this.
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And yet there you are, kneeling behind and puckering up for the powers that be, always ready to give a like to horrific decisions.
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In what way good sir?
I love your bio.
“Liking” summary thread closures for example. Pucker up. 
Do you know what a sychophant is?
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