I’ve been wandering around low sec for weeks, and the most excitement I’ve seen was a large herd of Goonies running thru Aridia in shuttles today.
With the exception of major hubs, low sec is a ghost town.
It sure doesn’t look like the old days…
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I had a really good time yesterday and it was because of some of peoples comments on this very thread gave me reason to jump out of a clone and undock.
It was also a extra bit of fun putting the isk we had receive to use.
well apparently making it much harder for roaming gangs and far easier to defend is the way to go…
“Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelled of elderberries!
Now go away, or I will taunt you a second time!”
(with apologies to Monty Python)
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Don’t forget CODE
I might subscribe and play again when EVE returns to sandboxing. It is just too unflexible and no fun right now. Everything was nerfed to serve a special purpose and you can’t even use something else to do it instead, because rules forbid fittings if it is not the intended purpose of a ship.
The same concept is applied to all areas equally: do it as impemented and balanced by CCP or don’t do it at all.
This is no sandbox anymore, where you can decide how to do something your own way. Emergent gameplay is something of the past in this game and thats where all the fun went: down the drain.
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Bob, PL/NC, Goons, code, even Test
The game has been transitioned into front-end monetization capture vs new player conversion. This means that CCP does what it can to capture as many $ in microtransactions from new folks before they leave the game, and while CCP feels it would be nice if they stuck around, that is no longer the focus.
The game has fractured into an hourglass instead of a diamond in terms of player population. In a healthy MMO, you have some new folks, a whole bunch of folks that are in the game 1-2 years, and then a few bitter vets who will play the game until the servers close. The new players funnel the mid-section, and while a few folks in the mid-section (the fat part of the diamond) go on to become bitter vets, most subscribe a year or two then move onto another game.
Eve used to be like the above and has changed to an hour glass. You have a ton of new players, a few people in the game 1-2 years, then a bunch of bitter vets (so instead of the mid-section of player population being made up of 1-2 year subscribers, most of the money now comes from bitter vets and new folks). CCP has doubled down on this by monetizing new folks as much as possible, knowing they won’t convert to the 1-2 year bracket nearly as often as they used to.
- Buy plex to get skill points and ships starting out, buy plex when you get blown up to get revenge, buy plex to get a leg up in the proving grounds, etc.
- All these ads are designed to get people to pay some $ before they bail out of the game, which CCP does presently expect them to do.
Now there’s plenty of exceptions, and plenty of people do stick around, but as a ratio of the population, it’s not meaningful compared to the top and bottom parts of the hourglass. CCP knows bitter vets (like me) will spend money on Omega so they don’t need to really cater to that audience to monetize. The focus is on the new player, especially with an alpha option allowing free to play.
That’s all context, now in relation to what’s happening to you. New players hang out mostly in high security space. Bitter vets hang in small areas of space that are heavily concentrated with player activity (usually other bitter vets so there can be pvp content), leaving the vast portion of space in low sec and null sec…empty. That 1-2 year tier is like the middle class. The more of them there are, the healthier the game population and the more spread out everyone is. Just as with macroeconomic paradigms though, when the middle class is squeezed out in favor of either the very wealthy or the very poor, the economy suffers for that.
I recommend you do what you say you don’t want to do and hang in a populated area (they exist but are dense in players) so it’s feast or famine.
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After only 8 years or so of telling them (CCP), someone found out that the game has problems. Now CCP is fixing something that wasn’t broken, so they don’t have to fix what is broken and has been broken for years.
Even after years of telling them how to fix what is broken, they are “fixing” things for the sake of letting the broken things as they are.
Well at least after only 6 years of telling them, they listened to one of several things that came up, just too late to have any desired effect.
Now they are playing catch-up and started by fixing the symptoms before attempting to fix the root of the problem(s).
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That’s quite a claim.
I assume you got this data from an anonymous source who is familiar with these matters.
The bottom line is that the world is in upheaval. EVE is luxury that is going to change or fade away.
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What a bunch of whiny nonsense.
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Disagree. Fairly spot-on economic analysis, and very much in line with the monetization and conversion strategies employed by big game makers these days.
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CCP’s business approach is the evidence. Converting players from new joiners to that coveted middle tier requires significant investment in gameplay mechanics. Monetizing new players however requires much less effort, in the form of micro transactions.
There’s a lot competing for folks’ attention out there, and CCP focuses on the micro transactions with less focus on stickiness of the game itself, feeling most new players will not stick long enough to get hooked. Look no farther than your login menu, login pop ups, new packages, to see this is the case.
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I don’t mean this to sound rude, and unfortunately it’s going to. I got this data because I have eyes that function. CCP’s own business strategy is testament to the point I made on the monetization tactics, Eve makes available through API the player data regarding time in game, activity, etc, and if you look at population clusters, you’ll see that the vets congregate (the places they congregate shift, but they do congregate in tightly packed areas).
As for Eve changing or fading, yes indeed, those are the two possibilities.
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There is another possibility I think, and that is that Eve is having a sort of midlife crisis and could get over it.
Where it goes from here I don’t know, but I do know one thing, Eve has been changing continuously since it started.
That it has and now we have CCP actively doing things they said would not happen “for the good of the game”
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Yah, but that might blow up in their faces and change again. I don’t like the monetization crap so I can only hope it doesn’t work. I told them what I thought of it, and Rattari’s attitude and I think a lot of other people did too, we will see I guess if they understood or not.
If I were going to monetize stuff in Eve I would do simple things like make a ton of wildly different clothing and stuff for characters and have the same free stuff in the character editor, and a toggle to find the good stuff for sale. If you could try on a bunch of different stuff and find something you liked instead of having to make do with the stuff there is now I think a lot of people would hit the “take my money” button
I would keep it cheap. They have this already in the fitting window for ship skins. I would also make a lot more skins for ships, make a way for players to create their own for ships and stations and stuff (with an approval system so that Eve isn’t suddenly filled with flying dildos and that sort of stuff) and charge a small fee for that as well.
This would not impact game play at all, and would be really fun I think.
Imagine if miners looked like they work for a living, or pirates looked like they had massive hangovers and clothing they stole from other people. I looked in the store recently, I think there was one women’s hairstyle. One. It was also kind of… Friggin ugly.
I didn’t buy it.
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I’ll have you know that not all pirates wear obviously stolen clothes.
The switching out to the New Eden Store seems kinda unnecessary. Why can’t I pay for my SKINs in the fitting window?
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That’s exactly what I’m suggesting.
Edit: I would just like to see the free stuff separated in some obvious way.
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