I think there is a misperception about nullsec dwellers. Most of those guys are just like the PVE players in highsec - they just want to mine in peace.
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It’s easy to speak for the silent majority, they rarely object to what’s put in their mouth - Abrazzar
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You’re being overly optimistic (the highlighted parts). That’s the veteran projection of “what EVE should be like” thing that I was talking about before. That whole bit about many players being here for the economic interaction while accepting the potential for loss is an agreeable notion, but has no bearing on reality.
And that reality is one in which the gaming industry changed its focus from difficult single-player games and heads-up competitive multiplayer games to low-difficulty, open-world cooperative crafting games and PvE MMOs (and don’t forget the casual mobile wallet-milking trash games). It’s not just a generational thing that can be blamed on the Zoomers, either. Many of the same people who were trash-talking each other over Mario Kart races or matches of Street Fighter during my childhood are now beanie-wearing hipsters sipping craft beers (the one good thing to come out of all this, I admit) and discussing the finer points of a new socialist revolution while passing the controller to take turns playing a casual indie platformer.
People wanting to mine in peace are the new normal now. They easily make up two-thirds of this game’s population today, compared to a low single digit percentage fifteen years ago. They’re not the outcasts, we are. And that’s why EVE’s original vision needs to be protected. They have many choices, and we only have one. If this game is fully casualized to meet the demands of the contemporary market, we won’t have anywhere to go.
Yes, there are players like you out there, but you in no way represent how the average player thinks today. In fact, I’d venture to guess that three out of five players in your vicinity at any given time would label you a psychopath despite your stance being limited to merely accepting the element of risk as something that is necessary to the game.
Pretty much this. Add all of the null-sec bots and bot aspirants to their venerable high-sec compatriots, and you get two-thirds to three-quarters of the game’s population.
Has anyone tried to perform a killboard analysis lately? I did a simple one a while ago. There’s only a few thousand players doing 99% of the killing. A few hundred high-sec wardec hardmen and gankers, a few hundred low-sec pirates, and a few thousand null-sec and wormhole regulars. Only about 2,000 players have even tried arenas. It’s pretty nuts. In a game with a six-figure active player count (not concurrent), only a tiny fraction has scored player kills.
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I am not surprised. It is shyte content which doesn’t belong in EvE at all, and obviously the playerbase agrees.
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Agreed.
This forum has a fair amount of whiners about ganks and wardecs etc but head over to the Elite Dangerous forums, oh my horrendous wordy word.
lol … it is interesting how playing Eve for a number of years changes your attitudes to other player communities, even though I’m not a PvP’r there is a feeling of “difference”, a certain hardness compared to others.
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According to Bartle’s player types research, there is a general balance of player types in the gaming world
- 80% Socializers
- 10% Achievers
- 10% Explorers
- 1% Killers
Generally only 1% of players are those highly competitive PVP-oriented players. Might be slightly more for EVE being PVP niche game.
I like these player types pics.
Yup, I’ve seen those charts before, it’s very interesting research, and my own personal experiences fall in line with it quite well.
I think that as far as EVE is concerned, the “killers” and “achievers” essentially fall into the same category, and make up the percentage of the population that is pro-PvP. The explorers are the ones who accept the role of PvP in the game as a necessity, and will defend themselves when needed, or take part of offensive ops when asked.
And then you have the “others,” who’d just as well pass laws in real life to make attacking players in a video games an actual crime.
I miss those earnest posts by wronged innocents, demanding that PvP players be sent to prison, in real life.
While Richard Bartle’s groupings are the general rule of thumb when it comes to groups within the gaming community, there are exceptions to every rule.
In Eve the “killer” minority are using the interests of the majorities to further their own playstyles and goals.
The biggest and most powerful entities in the game would be nothing if they didn’t do this.
Politics in Eve are just as brutal and exploitative as they are in real life.
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There was that really good one many years ago in which the guy was threatening to take it all the way to the US Supreme Court.
Nobody cares about gamers right now, but it only a matter of time before some celebrity’s kid gets ganked and tells there daddy to have his lawyer do something about it.
What’s worse is that they’ll have no problem finding legal services willing to take on such a ridiculous case, even if the culprit lives in a habitat somewhere in the sea of tranquillity.
That isn’t how lawyers work. They will do discovery and find somebody that they can prosecute in a favorable district. They don’t have to sue all of Goons - they just have to find one guy on the killmail or on the chat log that is in the desired country.
What about that one country that thinks their domestic laws apply to the whole planet, and bullies anybody that disagrees?
Yeah I know this used to be us over here in the UK, now it’s someone else.
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All gamers in 4 simple stereotypes.
Horsehocky 
If the Clown Emperor of Western Civilization plays Eve, do not gank his retriever. Just let him mine.
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Can we gank his pet tribble terrible hairpiece?
Good description by the way.
I still disagree. They may not consciously understand what brings and keeps them (hence the non-stop background noise of anti-ganking/anti-war, make highsec safe, threads), but many of them are really drawn to the whole “real” economy aspect of the game. Maybe the player-base has shifted some more since the era when that data was being released, but I still believe it is the near-unique meaningfulness of items that keeps a large number of players, and those that would keep playing a version of Eve with no market, PLEX or feeling of meaning - that is, just stick around to run and refine their running PvE - is comparatively small. A sizeable minority, but not most of the non-combatants.
Most may not want to PvP with ships, but they are captivated by collecting meaningful wealth and power. At least those that stick around for any amount of time. And that meaning depends on a healthy PvP/market ecosystem. CCP did spend years catering and pandering to the farmers probably inflating that population at the expense of players looking for some challenge in their game, but at least they seem to have seen the writing on the wall and are taking corrective action to restore some competition back to the game.
Here are the unique players appearing on killmails (both killers and exploders) for 6 days over last weekend with two scales for clarity:
First, yes, abyssal PvP arenas seem to be a failure. There was not a day where more than 350 characters participated in the arena. Ok, maybe Battlecruisers are the issue, but the Slicers were even worse with about 180 on the peak day.
But more generally, about 15 000 people engaged in PvP over those days. With a 100k, a reasonable guess for daily unique logins, that means 85% of players don’t shoot or get shot by other players on a given day. That is in line with all the other data CCP has released regarding PvP participation.
That is also expected in a game like Eve. Resources and equipment are meaningful which requires them to take effort and time to build. I still maintain the majority of that remaining 85% is engaging in activity they find rewarding because it supports the 15%. So while direct PvP brings some players, it is this larger industrial effort to support the PVP activities that drives the most number of player hours in this game. Many of those 85% are not here to run missions nor engage in activities mostly separate from the shared economy. Most are here to amass wealth and while many of them don’t fully understand the concept of the game and are more than happy to whine that they should be made safer or even safe so they can be isolated from the other players and are guaranteed to “win”. However, they also wouldn’t be here in the first place if no one would buy their stuff, or pay their subscription via PLEX for their productive efforts.
We’ll see if CCP is able to successfully transition the game back away from a farmer-focus to a competitive game again. I am encouraged they are trying, although I don’t discount yet they waited too long.
Time will tell.
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That’s not what I was arguing against, though. Do many people play EVE because they enjoy the economic aspects of it? Absolutely. But as you said, that enjoyment exists on a subconscious level. These people, at the same time as they’re enjoying EVE’s economy simulator aspects, consciously think that the game would be better off without PvP, because they don’t bother to evaluate their beliefs on a logical basis, and either don’t understand, or refuse to believe on principle, that destruction stemming from PvP is a necessary component of keeping the economy functional.
One thing you aren’t taking into consideration is that while about 15,000 players appeared on kill mails during that time sample, the majority of those engaged in PvP incidentally. Take, for example, a suicide-gank situation; after the perp goes criminally-flagged, he might get shot by some random passer-by who would under no circumstance be inclined to attack a player otherwise. Or a null-sec miner or ratter (which could even be a bot) getting some hits in on an attacker before dying, with the attacker himself dying to a response gang shortly after. Or the drones of a high-sec miner attacking a ganker before the ganker dies to CONCORD.
Once you take out these outliers (mainly, characters that have very low combat activity), you are left with less than half of that 15,000 figure.
Yes, but like I said, they either don’t understand this, or refuse to acknowledge it. It’s not like these people secretly agree with you; the principle of a safe game without “griefing” is more important to them than a game that’s functional.
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