First problem is that CCP is loosing player because they can't get a grip on eve. Eve is so complex that you really need to spoon feed new players. I would start with a whole story which puts the new player through a serie of missions that will teach him the basics. The career agents don't do this there is no story that puts it all together and doing something once in such a complex game will just overwhelm new players.

Second is that Eve is a PC game. 75% of the sold games are console games so the basic idea of Dust wasn't bad but you need to get Eve on Consoles which would need a whole new UI something that it really needs on PC too.

Well, so much for safe high sec then...
You will see this game staying EVE for eternity, and with small playerbase.

First there no story of Eve but there can be a story that teaches new players the basics of eve.

Why is Eve on Consoles not Eve? It's the gameplay that makes Eve not on which device you play it and another interface will will not change it. There are blind players so you are telling me that they don't play the "real" eve because they use a different interface?

The future of any game is in constant change while keeping the core intact. If you want to keep Eve as it is you are condemning it to die. Eve's gameplay is unique, so you either love or hate it, but the UI is old and needs a big update

Aha.... how many posts are about market recently?

Nobody seems to have problem with it somehow. Just saying. Its a thing I like personally.

I would say its a troll.

Just the same as all the War Dec Is Broken/High Sec=No PvP threads then...

See, this kind of remarks always gets me. Why do you say that? How does CCP hold your hand now in a way they didn't used to before? I hear a lot of this "Eve's been dumbed down" but I haven't been around long enough to know what that means.

(by preference examples pertinent to nullsec pls)

Only thing that comes to mind is Carriers refitting-on-the-fly but they've done a lot of good for caps too. Is this dumber? I don't know. Different for sure. Then again, with command destroyers they've introduced a new line of tactics we didn't have before; introducing tracking on guns and getting rid of cruise launchers on Kestrels doesn't strike me as dumber in any way either-- keeping track of tracking is actually harder, no?

Same with the changes to MWD/AB way back-- those were not only necessary fixes but also introduced a meaningful choice for both tacklers and solo pilots.

~erg~ Rambling again. You have the bandstand Teckos- fire away those examples!

When I was playing World of Warcraft I loved the way they made ( still make I think ) everything new very clear to understand and very well explained to everyone.

When there were patches thy well are advertised clearly on their website on a very visible position some time before them, they were advertised clearly in the login screen and when I logged into the game I had many windows telling me what was new.

This is a user friendly way to deal with your customers and it means you are deemed important and you deserve to have all the informations easily available, you can decide to use them or not but they are there in front of you.

Their style can be deemed as a too colorful one so someone may not like it, but style or not everything was accurate, and they showed respect for their customers.

I think other companies, including CCP, should give a look at their way to keep players updated on new things and learn some from them maybe.

Edit: for example I've read somewhere there is some kind os cuncil of players calle CSM or something like that. I don't know if it's something official or what but if for example there are 3 or 4 candidates and I can vote for one having similar ideas to mine, I would be very happy to have a big screen when I enter the game and have some columns with their name and their general ideas and maybe every candidate with a link where I can find details and a button similar to a "poll" if I decide to give my vote.

It's just an example of a user-friendly way to make players partecipate to decisions or at least keep them update about what happens in-game.

Yes, I noticed that information exists.

Maybe it's the way they are showed that makes them not easily available, not friendly.

It's like game tutorials, informations are there actually but the way they are put there are not friendly to the newcomers, and it generates confusion.

When I see something I analize it with the eyes of someone that has no time to "dig" informations, to "study" them.

But again maybe it's only an impression.

I never said this game is horrible, otherwise I would not play it at all.

I think this game is awesome but there are some big walls that keep a solid potential base of player on the other side of the wall.

I don't know if a game needs to be for everyone, probably not.

I also don't know if there is a "critical mass" of paying players that can justify the existence of a game ( intended as the cost of the basic stuff for it ) or if there is a kind of critical mass that gives software house a kind of "long breath" allowing them to have a investment capacity that makes the game upgraded faster and better.

This only game developers know and I suppose shareholders would never let any negative information to be published, while I imagine positive informations are easily published to increase shares value.

But this is out of a discussion between players, players can have only "impressions" I think about a game situation.

Except that what I linked is the reality, and back to calling names like a typical ganker circle jerk.

Seeing as you decided to try this tactic lets lay it out so people can see it:

The AG players ......blah blah blah

The AFK cloaky issue is still there, people are getting cloaky camped in Providence like mad with BLOP's dropping all the time, people are not logging in, the game does not reward you for logging in and doing stuff because someone with a lazy attitude can just set up like that and there is nothing you can do.

CCP don't do account linking, which is a real shame, I wish they would, it would solve other issues...

But the new player is handicapped because he has to run around in much more vulnerable ships, so they get carved up easily by hordes of bored vets with axes to grind, which is what I think CODE is. Perhaps CCP should enable all new players to have and be able to fly a DST from the start and put in a full tank fit with special modules. Perhaps also start them so they can fly a Procurer with a good tank fit and again supply them with that.

They are a little more than obstacles. Please share with me a solution to our corp being power blocked by Marmite and Archetype to the point where members don't even want to play the game anymore. We have been dec'd constantly and it will be allowed to continue until CCP loses more players. Please, I would love to know a solution.

But he might also go and look at your killboard and your spiffing history with war decs and think WTF!!!

I see a loss of a Brutix to Marmite on this character. I am looking for people who give the advice that you just did and have actually done this and defeated Marmite, Archetype., Vendetta, Break A Wish. So far people talk about it but I never see it, ok maybe a one off ship kill but I would love to see the fleet fights where you actually killed something and did not die in a fire. And by the way 0.0, lowsec and WH alliances and corps do not count.

I see a loss of a Brutix to Marmite on this character. I am looking for people who give the advice that you just did and have actually done this and defeated Marmite, Archetype., Vendetta, Break A Wish. So far people talk about it but I never see it, ok maybe a one off ship kill but I would love to see the fleet fights where you actually killed something and did not die in a fire. And by the way hisec merc groups, 0.0, lowsec and WH alliances and corps do not count.

So open question if any hisec entity has had a full on fleet fight and won send me a mail, I would love to be proved wrong.

NB. CODE does not count as they are Goons.

I look at this case, with my 20years experience of online games, and analytic approach to it.
That said there are few things needed to be address first:

1. Culture of gameplay new players face with, with two mayor nations having biggest negative impact on this field, one are Russians with there no respect to anyone and overgrow-ed ego based on there propaganda, another are USA fellas who in majority find trolling funny, while it is just them being irritating fools, but those new players can't recognize that, and it generates sick environment for them.


PS. I'm unwilling to discuss those points further or argue with people mentioned above.

It was on what I would call the main account only and flagged as such, but it would only really work well if CCP decided to do linked accounts, but then they have the issue of consequences on ganking to deal with to balance off against. But the objective for me is give new players a scout from the start.

Of course you do not want accounts linked, it makes spying and scamming so easy a child can do it. The gain is that people can check better for spies and scammers and perhaps create better content in terms of making ships explode rather then see all their hangers cleaned out or get hot dropped for easy kills. Of course it will only clean out the lazy ones, some will still get around it, but it makes it harder and taht is where CCP fails so often.

Generally when people say things like I will leave you to work out why, it means that they have no idea. But my expectation is taht they will have multiple ones set up ready to go, but so what, the killboard will not be totally green will it...

Yes and no, because if it was difficult to do then I would agree with you, except it is really easy to do.

What it did was just screw over any new alliance trying to fight its way to the top in the most easy way possible, without in a large number of cases actually fighting or blowing stuff up. I saw quite a few committed guys running fleets creating content just give up after all their stuff was stolen from corp hangers or their cap fleet was dropped on and obliterated.

What this game needs is new blood and new entities, the easy spying scamming side of things is a major block to that.

I would like to see a reduction in blanket war decs though I am totally happy to see them on 0.0 alliances. I would like to see small corps beating the hell out of each other.

So if that is eliminating war decs, I have to ask what the hell?

Then expect Eve to continue to decline, if you have a very strategic game with superb fleet comabt excellent ship types and all taht stuff and yet you drop back to the lack of account linking making it virtually impossible in game to work out who the new recruit is then you are pretty much creating a glass ceiling.

The only people who can survive in that is small core groups who know each other well or big entities that can take the hit. the rest have to accept major hits again and again which often breaks them and at best feeds easy kills to entitled top feeders.

Anyone with a brain can see thst this is a major issue for dynamic new players.

Not at all, projecting your own ignorance on me, why do you guys always get insulting, I know the difference between tactics and strategy, this is baby stuff mate.

The simple issue is that there is nothing in game to enable you to check someone out. How the hell can I find out that the nice helpful guy with a JF and multiple cyno alts is not a PL spy? I can't, the only way is to have something out of game like IP addresses and stuff like that.

Anyone with a brain can see thst [sic] this is a major issue for dynamic new players.

Gankers are, as soon as we started shooting their wrecks bang, wreck EHP went up.

Did I say rules to force that, nope I just suggested that I did not care about 0.0 alliances being blanket war decked, which is why they got the price increased. The 0.0 dominated CSM did that mate.

So have you created a major corp or big alliance and if not why not?

Risk and reward is exactly what I am talking about, the risk is very high and it destroys the reward, the adventure is to have great fleet fights a campaign or two, not see all your caps stolen from your corp fleet hanger, so the choice is don't do it. Keep it small keep it tight. The ceiling of low expectations...

PS That was a general comment on anyone with a brain can see it.

Was I being aggressive, I was merely asking if he had done it and if so what stopped him? Seems like when I ask a simple question I am being all passive aggressive or something. I wanted to know if he had gone through this type of thing. That is the funny thing about you and others like you, you project your own feelings and actions on others.

He is quite welcome to say no its too much work, that would be evading the question a bit because the work comes n different forms, such as drama management, do logistics, getting an SRP into place, security and verifying new players along with recruitment. Diplomacy and making sure your team is up to it. It is a lot of work.

That is what is so funny about debating with people like you, you porject your own approach onto others. If people are aggressive to me or troll me then I return it, if not I talk reasonable. If you want to define it as passive aggressive then feel free.

I never assumed it was laziness, damn its a lot of work, did you notice drama at the start of the reasons, well that and the issue of spies and scammers was my reasons for giving up on it. In truth I rather enjoyed it up until I had a low sec pirate guy and a 0.0 FC going for it. Also I got to the point it was too much effort, so what you see as me projecting that on you, is actually me accepting my own weakness. I suppose that is passive aggressive...

Seen them, not going to watch it again, so question for you, PL guy uses alt then trashes him and I don't know who it was, can't really get my own back can I.

New products go through a life cycle and surprisingly it is a similar life cycle across a wide variety of products. The way this life cycle is characterized mathematical is via the Bass Diffusion model.

They are not unique, sure. But one thing is to lose half of your 13,000,000 playerbase, another is to halve your 60k online players.

It has. It's not some random trend seeing corporations and banks doing their best to become multi-national and then global.
Costs don't proportionally go up or down, plus there's always a baseline cost that requires profit to be above a certain thresold. In small companies all it takes is some economy event, some important lead developer, a serious hardware breakdown and troubles run deep and fast.

Also, if you halven playerbase on a shard based architecture, you can merge servers and obtain a playable game, games made to be played with 5k players per server provide an healthy gameplay even with a large global players drop.
On a single server game, instead, if you lose half players you don't have any way to keep it working (*) as good as before.


(*) Working = providing a fun and immersive experience.

You want these extra players, because these extra players are "costumers." If you only got people left in the game that ONLY want to blow stuff up because nowhere is safe anymore, well sheesh, I can't start to even explain to you how dumb that is. Hahaha, that is great material for a stund up show right there. To give it to you so you understand: The community would self implode, and I do believe that is exactly what is happening at this very moment.

Think minecraft. I think it is about time that the game evolved. Because if CCP doesn't have the balls to let it do that, it can burn down to ashes for all I care.

We're trying to tell CCP not to pick sides. That's all.

That's what I would say too.

Except if you are a ganker loot scooping, you can point someone with no consequences, you can loot scoop for the risk of a noob ship, so I have to accept that gankers have it really easy? Yeah right, harsh dark gritty, tha's a total laugh...

bumping

I can think of several things off the top of my head right now that would be fair and fun for the gankers as well as the AFK miners and haulers. There are solutions and we don't need these walls of text to deal with the relatively minor play issues being discussed.

Dirty Forum Alt totally nailed it

My focus is on what I would call casual hisec players, what was once a large subset of the Eve population.

It's the very reason your supposition points out. Your comment demonstrates you have a negative bias against AFK miners. There's no way I can convince you to change that. As long as you have a negative bias toward ANY play style, you are in jeopardy of hypocrisy.

Clearly CCP allows this play style. That should be good enough of an endorsement for every player of EVE.

Your play style may be attacking AFK miners. That's allowed as well. Good enough of an endorsement for me.

I'm saying, we need to advocate change that respects everyone's play style, even if we don't like it.

This thread was about less players or why there are less new players. If there is such an abundance of HS-AFK-miners why not spare anything under 6 Month? Some of CODE said they would gank everything in a venture: which vet is mining in a venture? Most likely none but noobs that can't afford anything else. It's the arrogance of vets which kill everything because they can. Farming noobs just for fun, even if you are loosing money, may be fun but is destructive to as a whole.
It's the same as Mittens STATING that the new tactic is "denying fun" and he doesn't get tarred and feathered by his corp. We are ALL here to have fun that's the reason why we are committing RL money and free time to this game. If everyones tactic is to deny everyone else fun, as the other one defines fun, this game will die.

What stops you from just pointing, shooting once, without killing him, and then telling him what he did wrong? You will loose your ship anyway and get nothing back.
But I don't think that this is the real problem. In the beginning you are totally on your own and don't get any guidelines what to do next. The gaming industry changed since 2006 and so the expectations change too. In other games you either have a class or story to go along. In eve you are kicked out and have to find your way and to top it you are told a lot of ways to make money (industry, research) that are just not fitting for a noob.

Everyone is talking about Eve as a cold and harsh universe. Most of those people have no idea what that really means. Bedroom/basement/home office "warriors" . If you are a considerate person and have experienced real life harsh and cold universe/environment, you will never want to "reap tears" without a very sound reason.

Mining - boring, missions - boring/repetitive with negative effect on one's standings, lowsec - gatecamped, nullsec - divided/owned and most of the time unreachable for a noob that does not care about corporations/alliances.

Maybe Eve was intended as a sandbox, but it is not (especially for a new player). I looked on the recruitment forum to find a corp to join, that is in a WH/null. What do I find? Logi/mining ship/bait frigate skills for null, 20 mill SP for WH. Is that an open world/go wherever/do whatever you want environment? Hardly so!

A dev has to understand what drives his customer base, otherwise he quickly becomes and unemployed developer. That's why I am trying so hard to analyze the issue at hand.

Since at least 6-7 years ago, EvE's customer base demographics have somewhat changed.

EvE is not the 5k concurrent players MMO of old. It got top notch, expensive hardware infrastructures, lots of developers, multiple offices... it cannot survive only on dedicated players alone.

Therefore you have to do something to keep those "second class citizens" who silently keep the EvE boat afloat. What exactly, I don't know. I have no insight in the true numbers: not those CCP post around to make virtual bean counters happy. I mean the real numbers.

But whatever are the stats, EvE's playerbase is not monolythic any more like it used to be. It's years we have got those pesky "casuals" or whatever derogatory term we could stick onto them.

The first step at solving a problem, is to rationalize and accept it exists.
As long as we'll have people who just won't accept times are changing and that the "old, golden times" are over, EvE is going to decline a bit every year.

By "not quiet" you mean that guy out of 1000 who creates a GD thread about "whaa my Hulk got ganked" and then he never gets seen again?

About data: come on, you can't blindly believe on data released by the same company who benefit from them looking good, that's what 3rd party auditing exists for. I have worked on computer companies for 20 years, not a single time they'd spread the full, real data. They actually paid computer magazines and websites for friendly reviews and they got them every time.
I can't believe you play EvE (a game where deceit is seen as emergent, good gameplay) made by a company whose name is an acronym for: "Crowd Control Productions" and still take everything they throw at you.

I also have a Santa Claus sled for sale if you want!

Between "being aware" and "being able to deal with it" there's some meausurable gap.

CCP and not me, designed WiS and failed at it. They DID understand they had to cater to a wider, less "hard core purist we-are-playing-it-right-the-MMO-for-us-the-elite" playerbase yet they failed. And no, they did not fail just because of technology, but because of $1000 jeans attitude.

CCP and not me, created Apochrypha and it has been their last, huge success. It catered to those pesky "casuals" (I think we have got two different versions of what we think an EvE "casual" would be) who were fine with 0.0 "alike" gameplay but not with the useless mega-corp induced burden. I truly can't think of a single bad thing about WHs.
CCP, if they want, CAN create casual content that does not kill its "hard core" foundations.

However, they officially branded Apochrypha as a bad expansion and have steered well away off it. The results are speaking loud.

"Yes, but they wanted to stop those bad Holy Jesus expansions because of bugs blah blah" .

Oh well, guess which delivery model made EvE peak its success? Exactly that ugly kind of expansions. What did those expansions achieve? They renewed gameplay in a tangible way. To be honest, I immensely appreciated more having to deal with bugs and a GREAT WH experience, than having paid subs for 6 months just to see a sluggish inventory screen being remade. I guess this makes me a "casual" too. As casual as those hard core players who too enjoyed getting 2 expansions a year for a decade.

Reasonable stuff...

The point is that hisec is a place where casuals go to enjoy the game at their own pace, which is where the largest reduction of players was noticed.

My example of a miner who no longer has anyone they know to speak to is evident, this player is a 11 year veteran...

So what am I up to, casual like, well I am just making top level PI, log in to re-start my extraction, maybe move some stuff into the production planet, fine tuning here and there, then I log off and go and play another game. That is damn casual

Just setting myself a target of about 3 billion worth of the top tier PI products which I will not be selling into the market.

It is a sandbox, I can do what I want, and none of you entitled gankers can get in my way at all.

I guess I am playing the game wrong?

Explorers are only a small piece of the PVE pie. Not everyone who PVE's does so for the excitement of the unknown, rather many of us do pve because we like 'engineering challenges'. I never cared for exploration, but figuring out new ways to do missions and anomalies and complexes. And look at Dotlan for npc kills (and the missions and complexes forum), there are a LOT of folks like me.

When it comes to PVE, CCP has actually spent way too much time trying to appease the PVE Explorers (all the changes to scanning and data/reclic sites and modules and ships etc etc) while only throwing an occasional bone at PVE Engineers (Burner Missions and NPC capital spawns are about it lately).

As for the post you were replying too, that's just more of Herzog's bias showing, the game has moved away from people who love playing the game for it's own sake and more towards the "can I catch up to other players" ("why yes you can, with skill injectors) standard mmo crap.

typical of this generation of junkie degenerate slackers who want to take but not contribute