So here me out before you start flambeing me. I'm not what you might call a noibie anymore, i've been playing fir a while and just starting to going with pvping ect ect. I saw there are something like 48 thousand subscribers, and I seen the stats so ok, on average 4 out of 5 palayers have multiple accounts so as to use the forums and mine without letting on their goonfriends that they're carebells too. But. Subs dont grow on trees as lot's of now deflanked MMOs can evedince. The Matrix Online, Shadowrun, and Earth and Beyond were two strong competitors for Eve and look what happened to them? CCP shouldn't let the grass glow under foot. All it would take is some kind of undescribed disaster and Eve would be finished. And none of us want that. But. How to solve this problem?

Well, with Dust dying too it looks like now would be a good time for CCP to widen the net and catch some of the other market's customers. Now there's no space competition left against eve so its unlikely that we can loore any more space fans, which leaves just one stone upturned : fantasy.

I know, nobody except Ace is going to look at that and be happy, but its obvious that fantasy fan's are now in the majority of paying customer's in terms of movies books and other video games. Just look at the appeal of the Harry Potter series of books and films, and the new Horbit movie which is a sort of remake of the Lord of the Ring trilogy it looks like. I havent seen it myself yet but the golem was in the trailer so maybe they sold the franchise. And everyone has heard of the game that inspired them all, Wow. Even my cousin Janice and she doesn't like games at all apart from Candy Crush and Scrabble (she saw me playing Wow once and liked my mount but then I got attacked by a giant spider and that put her off lol she literally crapped in her pants. She hates insects)
So if we want to increase the eve subscriber base, we must get at least a portion of the wow player's. not all of them of course, Eve will never be a wow killer haha thats a ridiculous idea. But wow has something like 6 million players at last count, imagine if we got just 1% of them to decramp to New Eden! That would translate into another 100,000 eve subs! Which would triple our current playerbase. Imagine what CCP could do with 3 times the income they have now! It's literally mind-boggling.

I'm not saying we have magical spaceships and fantasy fashion in the CQ like elven boots and wizards sleeves ect ect but there is a percedent for fantasy in space : I heard of this company Gamers Shop and they make a boardgame called Warhammer 4000. Its set in space in the future and there are orcs and elves and dwarfs! Only they're not real magical creatures, their just aliens which happen to have beards and be really short, or green skin and big teeth, or pointy ears.

Now I think of it, Dr Spock had pointy ears in Startrek, he could have been an space-elf I guess. He had green blood too.

Anyway, jovian space isnt use'd yet, so my porpoisal is that the next eve expansion is called Eve: Fantasy Invasion, and it's basis is that 3 alien race's invade New Eden from Jovian space: now we cant use orcs elfs snd dwarfs because they're already copywritten by JR Hartley, but we can use common usage words like Monstroids (orcs), shortoids (dwarfs) and for elfs we could just like add a letter and call them gelfs or something.

They'd also give us 3 new factions to choose from, which would give bored vets something to do. The new factions would have advantage's in different professions too: the monstroids would be good at pvp and ganking, the dwarfs would obviously be miners, and the gelfs could be very wise. The races would have their own style ships and stations and gates ect ect of course, like the monstroids could be made of some kind of wood-bone and the dwarfs would be hollowed out asteroids. And the gelf ships would have solar sails. Maybe introduce solar wind sailing mechsnics where warping away from a star is faster than towards it! There is literally no end to the pissibilities!

This could totally revivisect Eve Online! New faction avatars, skills and ships would enable the devs to expand their repertoire and new players would come flooding in, vets would get whole new decade of gameplay out of it, and it might even prove the way for vampire's from the masquerade to one day enter New Eden.

I only see upside's to this, honestly. The markets there, CCP just need's to provide the content.

Who know's, one day you could be flying your gelf star sailer through orc space with a huge vampire starcruiser chasing you. And your captains quarters could look like a medeival tavern! Imagine that!!!