Aaron wrote:
The bottom line for CCP does interest me. CCP have bills to pay such as, Electric, Taxes, Salaries, Services, Travel...what ever their business function there simply has to be enough money coming in to pay these bills and make profit.
So yes 10k more active players could make a difference to their bottom line, If they are the right kind of player then even better.
And I'm cool with all that. What perplexes me is that these people yelling "moar players" have BEEN here to see attempt after attempt by CCP to "broaden the appeal" of the game fail. Yet it never penetrates, and the cling to the same idea even in the face of it's repeated failure.
I visit an MMO site called "Massively OP". A few months ago that had an article on there about a Themepark MMO player being given the chance to try some Sandbox MMO experiences and then tell about them from his perspective. The result was predictable, the thempark guy noted many good things but he looked at it like a themepark guy and decried the "lack of direction", the "lack of good story telling" and other such things.
I mention this because a guy in the comments for that article hit the nail on the head about sandbox games (not talking about EVE specifically but it rings very true for EVE".
He said (paraphrasing),
"a sandbox game is "like writing a book, or a play, or a cool song. Most people will NEVER do those things for themselves, most people are content to enjoy other people's works. And so it is in MMOs. Themepark players enjoy an intensely interactive and immersive story told to them by someone else, sandbox players more or less want to make their own story. Themepark players will ALWAYS out number sandbox players by a whole lot thus the game world will be mostly themepark, but that doesn't mean stop making sandboxes)."I think the commenter is spot on, and I think it shows in CCPs lack of success with efforts to broaden the game. The new NPE doesn't work because IT ENDS, and most people need some kind of direction and set goal. Regular MMOs have levels to grind for this reason. After the NPE ends, so does the EVE journey for most , and there is nothing to be done about it because no amount of hand holding can make a person want to write a novel or screen play if that's not a natural inclination they already have.
Which brings me finally back to the point. More players is fine, but the pool of humans who would like EVE is always going to be small, and trying to change EVE into something the "feed me content and show me how to get there" bulk of the gaming community might like is also doomed to fail.
CCP should stop advertising to MMO players and start advertising to creative people wherever they can find them. Well, them and people studying to be accountants, tell them EVE has free spreadsheets.