People stay in npc corps because they have no incentive to increase their avenues of exposure.

Ways that we could incentivize corp membership include:

• Differentiate personal and corporate standing effects.
• Mass-based docking fees for everyone.
• Incremental war decs. (System > constellation > region.)
• Limit character market orders on a per station basis, 1 slot per skill lvl.
• Expand corp market orders to several hundred per station.
• Enroll NPC corps in region-limited faction-warfare system.
• Make local chat opt-in at the corp settings level.
• Limit structure "launch for self" option.

That won't solve anything. It doesn't matter what CCP does... Until eve is a themepark lets-be-friends-forever MMO, people like you will always cry for nerfs. There is nothing wrong with wardecs. It adds an element to the game that many people enjoy. The unique thing about eve is that there is content an mechanics that serve as conflict drivers. Most people think of conflict drivers as captureable fw space and null sov, but the most interesting conflict drivers are the ones that fall in metagaming and emergent gameplay,

The fact that a small mining corp can war dec or hire mercs to chase off the huge corp that's hogging all the ice and roids is incredible. I'm going to try and say this nicely because I want toget my point across without getting moderated: Hisec is not your personal playground where you can make friends and isk without any risk or the fear of consequence. Hisec is home to thieves, con-artists, gankers, extortionists, and mercenaries just as it is to "your kind". If you want fun without risk of consequence, then please leave and find another game.

EVE is a PvP game.

PvP is, by definition, not griefing.

The rest of your post is just you repeating one delusional lie after another, so I cut it out.

Oh, really?

When I still played World of Warcraft with my wife, I once followed someone across the entire game server for 7 consecutive hours, ganking him all the while. My only reason? He pissed me off by taking an herbalism node.

When he brought a GM in, the GM laughed and said "PvP happens on PvP servers."

Even in WoW, one of the most legendarily wussy of MMOs, you can PvP freely within the rules.

EVE's rules are simply more broad, with more avenues of attack.




Yeah, no. You do not get to define your own terms here. Only CCP's definition matters in this context, you can wave whichever dictionary you like at me.

PvP activity in this game, within the rules set by CCP, is not griefing by definition. Whether your attitude agrees or not.

This is logically impossible. Everyone cannot be simultaneously allowed to play single player and multiplayer at the same time. One style of gameplay must be secondary to the other.


In EVE, your right to play single player ends when someone decides to shoot you, or .01 ISK you, or insert any PVP action here.


It is as simple as that.

Nope.

You can try to succeed at whatever you want.

But you don't get to automatically succeed at whatever you try. Since EVE is a PvP game, other people get to have their say.

Their risk/reward ratio is hugely skewed.

Nope. What I'm asking is that NPC corps not be the most viable choice for almost everything in highsec.

You know, so that cooperative play is incentivized, since CCP has told us that solo PvE playstyle hurt retention.

Do you freaking hear yourself? Sitting there, pouting and demanding the kinds of things that people get in huge alliances, while demanding it for the literal lowest common denominator in the entire game?

You do not deserve it. Simple as that.

You don't deserve to exist, you don't deserve to be safe, and you don't deserve to be left alone by anyone, ever.

Not unless you actually play the game and earn it.

Nope, that's still you, demanding that we ignore the stats and the facts, and keep on the with the same failed paradigm we have been, just because it suits you.

It's shameful.

You might try actually reading them.

Try reading yours. Directly arguing against improving player retention, because it means attention being paid to a part of the game you irrationally dislike.

We've tried it your way for a decade, and it has been proven not to work. Time to go the other way for once.

Except for the part where CCP has outright said that your side is hurting retention, and mine is helping it.

You know, since logic dictates, and all.

Whether I dislike it or not is not relevant. I do, I hate this game's PvE with every ounce of my being. But my opinion doesn't matter, the facts do.

And the facts say that PvE centric game design is boring subscriptions to death.

The end. You lose. You can cry all you want about how you don't want it to be true, or how things shouldn't be changed because it would make me happy, but that doesn't change the truth. For whatever petty carebear reason you have concocted, you are the one standing in the way of making this game better.

And now everyone knows it.

Ah, I love when someone tries to claim that a personal anecdote invalidates hard data.

Although it was funnier when that clown Dracvlad did it with Star Citizen forum dwellers, people who literally are not EVE players.

No, I don't believe that is a valid conclusion from CCPs analysis.

At Fanfest this year CCP Rise gave an anecdote about another CCP employee who had joined the game many years ago and had happily played in his starter Corp since then, involved in a range of highsec PvE activities. It is a perfectly fine choice. (e. It might have actually been the CCP employee himself and not Rise who relayed the anecdote. I'll try to find it)

However, when all the data is aggregated, that style of play is not the most successful way to produce long term subscribed players. For those it suits, it's great.

For the bulk of people, other experiences seem to be more likely to result in long term subscription.

CCP are also not interested in forcing people down one specific path. They just want to expose people to more varied experience early with some control to ensure they get the needed skills and then hopefully more will find the play style that hooks them, whether that's solo npc Corp play or not.

The data is not flawed merely because you don't want to face the truth that it presents.

"as I see it".

Gotta keep pushing that agenda, huh carebear?

We all know it is a correlation - we are not idiots. But this correlation, and the others they found in their dataset provide strong support for their view that the retention of new players strongly depends on the social bonds and social interactions that new players make. It certainly doesn't provide evidence for your position which seems to be that NPC corps are great as is and couldn't possibly be the cause of players leaving the game.

Take a step back man. You are projecting your Eve experience on the new player experience for everyone joining the game. You are arguing that CCP should make no effort increasing the social and sandbox integration because you are quite happy living in an NPC corp. That is just a downright bizarre position to take.

You are right the data doesn't speak for a single player - it is a collection of data from the behaviour of over 80 000 trial accounts and in aggregate, those that don't integrate in the sandbox are less likely to subscribe. That doesn't say that no one who stayed only in an NPC corp never subscribed, or that joining a player corp is a sure-fire way to retain a new player, but just that overall, these socially connected players are more likely to continue playing.

Maybe CCP is doomed to failure but trying to get more players socially engaged seems like a reasonable strategy to increase player retention. Even without the hard data, any reasonable outsider would accept this proposition, and in the face of the compelling data CCP Rise and CCP Quant have talked about recently, it really makes sense for them to focus some effort on increasing the exposure of new players to social and sandbox interactions.

Quit being pedantic and arguing that new players should be "left alone" or that player interactions are bad because they haven't done all the acceptable double-blind studies and exit interviews to convince you they can read the mind and motivations of every player. Stop arguing that opportunities for social interactions for new players should be ignored when all the data CCP has talked about says the opposite just because you really like living in an NPC corp.

All the data points to the increased retention rate for players who leave NPC corps, engage in social interactions, participate in wardecs or even that are ganked. How many thousands of players have started the trial, mined for two weeks by themselves while in the NPC corp where nothing interesting happened, and just quit the game out of boredom? We can only speculate, but CCP has access to that data and it is telling them that it is far too many. CCP are convinced that social interactions, both friendly and hostile, make these trial players engage with the game and stay, so expect more changes to nudge players towards each other in the future.

Why would they want to defend? Why not evade? Is there an obligation to a course of action? If there is why do other courses of action exist?

Are we dealing with people who don't want to defend themselves? Probably. Why is that an issue?