Actually, I think having the fit of guys who deal the most damage, the final blow, the 2nd most damage, and the guy who did the 3rd most damage fi the final blow was one of those two other guys should be on the killmails.
Notice how a lot of FPS games have a killcam that shows your killer? This is so that players don’t die and not figure out what happened. I don’t know a lot about MMO games, but I have played a lot of FPS games and seen what patches can empty or fill servers. In games where long ranged weapons can three shot or one shot a player (often with a sniper rifle, but it can be a futuristic laser weapon) that can’t be dodged, what determines if a player will stay is often a killcam. The reasoning is that killcams prevent new players from leaving because they don’t ragequit the moment they die to someone who they didn’t see. Oddly, it’s almost always the long-ranged weapons that cause these ragequits, never any games with a one hit kill melee weapon.
Wait how do I know? Well in a lot of games, I see server regulars and recognize the same screen names. 3/4 people are actually people I only see once so the regulars are actually a minority. But sometimes, a guy just dies to a long range attacked, quits, and never comes back. In games with leaderboards that span all players, I sometimes notice those names never go up in total kills after that last time I saw him.
Moving into this speculation, one of the reasons I think these ragequits happen among newer players is that they don’t have any understanding of why they died. The presence of a killcam means they can see that some guy managed to reach this terrain piece and got that optimal sniping position. They feel that it’s hopeless while the killcam games make them know where they were hit from, either gaining the ability to reach that spot and dispatch the sniper on his own terms, or the illusion that he can (since to get there he’d have to overcome obstacles besides that one player).
Some people quit EVE after a particularly bad loss. Like this one case I saw an Orca (with an expanded cargohold that can actually fit in his cargo hold along with whatever he was already carrying *sigh) where the surviving drops had enough assets to sell and PLEX an account for 38 months and then his character info showed he changed to the new player NPC corp and his zKillboard had nothing for months makes me guess I know what happened. This guy got popped in his Ice Retriever before, lost at least 7 Porpoises before, and seemed to do a lot of solo PVP and he won most but lost some. After that Orca loss by the gate, activity was silent.
Or maybe I’m wrong and he just stuck to high sec mining for the rest of his career, not like I can look I last online status like with my corpmates.
And some people have only one ship loss on their killboard followed by a pod and no kills or losses after that. If this happened in a low-sec to high sec gate, I can also guess what happened here.
However, I suspect that the recruit retention could be a bit higher if these killmails gave the fitting of the attacker. Some people just don’t realize the fundamental PVP nature of the game and so will quit here since the game was never for them in the first place and they just realized this, but others might have only done so due to the frustration of not knowing why they were so outclassed and got podded. In fact in HU I saw at least three people asking what fitting on earth their attacked had to let them win a one vs one and I think they quit.
The fact that they didn’t bother putting an “I’m leaving” post makes me more certain they actually left and weren’t just fumming only to come back a few months later. When it came to FPS games, almost everyone I saw with a “I’m quitting” forum post I saw them in game within 36 months, one time within 1 month. Sometimes I saw them on the same server, other times there was a global leaderboard.
So applying my FPS knowledge to MMOs, I believe that a lot of people quitting after a loss in EVE didn’t fully understand what game they were joining, were an old veteran on the borderline of leaving due to some patch but kept logging in by habit until the big loss, or were frustrated they didn’t know what killed them.
But honestly, while posting the fits of 3 of the killers I think is a step in the right direction, it’s probably too complicated for marginal gains since most of the people who quit were a bad fit for the game in the first place.
Something much easier to code and would bring more benefits is include everyone who gave repote support to guy who gave the final blow on killmails. Coding for “just add this player to the killmail” is a lot easier than reformating to show a fitting and some guy would be like “damn, that guy repaired my foe”
I must admit EVE is not an FPS and a lot of what I said could be completely wrong.