Uh-oh...somebody is being assimilated....

same here, ingame since 2009.

seriously, reset everything. delete all skillpoints, all chars, all corps, all alliances, all blueprints, all citadels, every single isk and asset in the game. respawn all stations, belts (they should be random anyway), moons, agents, everything. re-link the stargates to create a new universe. open servers. boom. eve's persistence has reached a problematic status.

in this regard, refineries is a much needed and far too late coming patch. should have happened earlier.
may i add another killer change to it: make BPOs decay over time.

All glory be to James 315. This thread of tears over the New Order is still going.

#mostrelevantallianceinthegame

Oh, believe me, I've read the thread. It's been entertaining me for days!

You gotta read between the lines of this thread, it's pretty stealthy, but it's definitely a tear thread over the New Order.

Post #291



All glory be to the Savior of Highsec, James 315. Peace and blessings be upon him.

Look at the OP's corp name, dude. It's pretty obvious that his entire identity is defined by butthurt over the New Order.

This would help overall subscriber numbers I think (at least in the short run). Many people (especially new players) would be more interested in a "start from scratch" location where everyone is beginning with a few hundred thousand isk... as opposed to sharing space with people who have hundreds of billions of isk when they have just a few hundred thousand.

In the long run... splitting the player base probably would be an issue. But I do think it will always be difficult to attract new players to a mature, 15 year old universe where people are already entrenched. I came back with the recent Alpha release... but I wasn't starting fresh. I had a 35 million SP and a 12 million SP toon to come back too with about 10 billion in assets. I'm nowhere near competitive with the long time players... but I'm not starting from scratch either. I'm not sure I would sub if I started from scratch.

Perhaps there's another solution than a new server to attract new players. The Alpha program gives people a taste and that has helped... but the trend is going to go back to a downward one soon I think. Perhaps some sort of gift can be created for a new subscriber to help new players feel like the gulf between them and established players is something that can be closed... without drastically messing up how new players learn to play the game.

I disagree with the first sentence strongly. I've seen a million people in the new pilots forum make posts about how it takes too long to get to (what they perceive) as the "end game" to be told by everyone here that Eve has no end game and that they should quit and go play WOW or something.

Now of course not everyone has the mindset of wanting to take part in the "upper echelons" of a game... but it's silly not to recognize that many do.

Second... while new players do join, we've been going in a negative direction for a while now in terms of total players (with an uptick with Alphas but not an upward trend overall). That means more people are stopping playing Eve than starting. While we don't have hard numbers on that, I wonder how many more of those who are stopping are people relatively new to the game (those who subbed for a few months to a year and didn't renew) vs those who had been longer term players. I'm enjoying myself a lot now... and I enjoyed myself a lot when I stopped in 2009 (I left due to out of game reasons, not due to lack of enjoyment). But even back in the 2006-2009 time period... I hit a lull period where the game stopped being new but I had to wait for a while to get to be able to do things I wanted to do. I stopped playing as much and nearly quit... but decided to give it another try (with another 6-9 months of AFK training)... and had a much better time. Perhaps I connected with a better group of players... but I'm not so sure. I've tried going back with alts and doing stuff with that level of skill points and isk rewards... and frankly I tolerate it less now than I did back then. I do think there's a period from after the game stops being new and before you start having enough skills and taking in enough isk to start thinking about strategic goals in the game as opposed to just "getting by" where Eve struggles most with retention.

Now keep in mind... CCP has done some good things to make it more palatable than it was when I went through that lull. For example, we don't have to worry about learning skills anymore (that was a horrible thing... waiting for learning skills to train so you could start actually training to do stuff... or suffering crappy training times by not training learning skills). But I still firmly believe there is a point (perhaps a different point depending on what you're doing) where you have to get past a grind to get to "the good stuff". And it usually hits at a point where the 600m skill injector cost is prohibitive in terms of what you can make with the skills you have at the time.

But again... my views are from my experience years ago and what I see as an older player who went back and tried to run lower level content in an alt. I could be totally off on what a 6-12 month player who's new to Eve is feeling.

I think there's a middle ground between "instant end-game" and lessening the grind to get to a point of skills/isk that feels like you're able to access most of EVE. CCP took a step toward doing that by getting rid of the learning skills. Perhaps another step could be that if you're Omega, you get 5X the sp when training until you hit 5 million SP (or some other smaller multiplier if needed).

I came up through mission running as an isk making mechanism... but the rewards from missions pretty much suck until you get to lvl 4. Once you get to the point you can run those without dying... your income goes way up and with that income comes a lot of other opportunities (including skill injectors these days). Think of the period I'm talking about as that time to get to being able to afford and successfully fly a ship capable of level 4's without having skill injectors. I'm thinking that shortening the time it takes to get to that point would be a positive on retention.

You used skill injectors in your first couple months to get into a VNI? :D


So cos you bought yourself into a VNI with injectors and got blown up, CCP should fast-track players even quicker than when you failed to P2W into existing game structures to this result?

So... you seriously (without getting isk from another account)... got isk for skillbooks... then got 350 million for a nightmare plus whatever you needed for whatever fit you use... then got in an incursion group and earned a further 1.2 billion isk... in 11 hours of game time?

Look... I can create an account and plex it pretty easily as well... just by sending enough isk for 3 skill injectors and skillbooks/setup costs for PI. But I can do that immediately because I have another account with enough isk to jump start it. I could probably do it through station trading as well given a big enough stake from my main.

But if I just started a new account with no isk transfer from my existing accounts.... where you leave the NPE with a million isk or less (can't remember) and after you complete the career agents (which takes a while) you only have about 10 million isk and an assortment of ships... that would take some time. If I paid for a month I could PROBABLY get there if I played 4 hours a day... but to suggest that a new player could get there with just a "few hours of grinding" is simply misleading. I think for most players it takes between 6 months and a year before they figure stuff out enough to start bringing in large enough quantities of isk to easily plex each month without a horrid grind.