Natalie Caladan
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Posted - 2010.07.13 08:20:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: ChrisIsherwood
350k people with average subscriptiom of 7 months IIRC, means one person leaves every minute. 50,000 a month. Complete WAG, but say that means that CCP needs 300,000 people a month to sign up for a trial account in order to convert that into 50k subscribers. Considering à EVE players and developers want EVE to be much, much less novice friendly than W*W, then CCP may need at least 500,000 people to sign up for a trial account every month. Every Month. So maybe a million people a month click through a Google Ad. Which means tens of million ads served up every month. ... Yeah, I think CCP needs lots of new players to replace the churn.
Yes this is also something I've been wondering about. Is it CCP's wish to let EVE grow or do they want to playerbase to remain at the steady number it is now? Yes, the number of players (or more precise: number of accounts because we don't know how many players are actually playing) may be steadily growing, but not by a lot, 5% a year isn't that spectacular. And in spite of the 300k accounts there's never more than 50k accounts active at a time.
The tutorial may have improved but new players are basically still dependent on wikis and forums to find out how the game works. While the first few weeks are vital to get a player attracted to the game, I always wondered why CCP doesn't make an effiort to improve upon those first few weeks. Then there's still the learning skills that reqire 1.5 month of game time and subscription, which may be 100% accepted by the current playerbase but also functions as a barrier for new players once they get to know about them. Next to that the skilltraining is very slow, not everyone is ready to invest years and years into a game in order to reach the end-game ships. A 3D shooter takes a few weeks, the online version doesn't require a lot of time to unlock all the options. In EVE even training a single skill to V can take weeks. It's definitely not for everyone, it requires an unusual amount of patience.
Is EVE ready to grow? Can the servers handle an influx of 500,000 new players, and if they do, are there enough systems to host them or will EVE get really crowded and become unplayable?
Sometimes I wonder the reason for Dust is that the growing potential of EVE is very limited because of of the novice unfriendliness. CCP doesn't want to lose its current - very conservative - playerbase by revamping the game mechanisms - but on the other hand they want to grow and get income to develop new things. So the only option left is designing a totally different game and give that complete priority, the idea being that some Dust players will make a move to EVE since they already have a feel with its universe - and subsequently taking the 3D character model with them (Incarna). This time not as space marine but as spaceship pilot.
In the end this may benefit us all - as the playerbase increases, so does CCP¦s income and they may attract more devs to improve upon the current gameplay and fix the current issues a lot faster while continuing with designing new features and expansions.
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