before summer we had like 30k players on at once but now its around 20k. is it just summer or did some **** "rebalance" kill the game?

Hint: Rebalancing ships and modules is not going to fix player counts.

yeah with a summer break you would expect higher numbers unless most of the people paying their subs are teachers and now they take their break to go on vacation some where fancy....give how most iq level is, more so with the drop at the start of alphas, I doubt that's the reason.

people got sick of ccps crap.

SP farming so people got rich without really playing pissed people off.
fozzy sov pissed people off.
citadel spam than made stations and pos and any semblance of taking space worth something. Pissed people off.
Giving sp farmers 100billion isk in free ships pissed people off.
the same ships being used over and over pissed people off.
getting blobbed pissed people off.
blueballing a fleet because 200 titans logged in you can't begin to fight. pissed people off.
having your super nerfed because you make to much isk playing the game. While nothing was done to SP farmers or roch haven smartbombers making 3-100x as much while risking less or not logged on. Pissed people off.
having new faction titans added that reward 1 person for the work of 100. pissed people off.

Its a simple thing

Skill injectors

i.e pay to win

buy plex, buy skill injectors, bypass newbie status bling bling ching ching

eve - dead

before summer we had like 30k players on at once but now its around 20k. is it just summer or did some **** "rebalance" kill the game?

Look at 30 day game time in PLEX prices.... it's too high, people just stopped playing.

people got sick of ccps crap.

SP farming so people got rich without really playing pissed people off.
fozzy sov pissed people off.
citadel spam than made stations and pos and any semblance of taking space worth something. Pissed people off.
Giving sp farmers 100billion isk in free ships pissed people off.
the same ships being used over and over pissed people off.
getting blobbed pissed people off.
blueballing a fleet because 200 titans logged in you can't begin to fight. pissed people off.
having your super nerfed because you make to much isk playing the game. While nothing was done to SP farmers or roch haven smartbombers making 3-100x as much while risking less or not logged on. Pissed people off.
having new faction titans added that reward 1 person for the work of 100. pissed people off.

Having Q&A where the dev team ignores the most asked question about fixing fozzy sov. Pissed people off.

people got sick of ccps crap.

SP farming so people got rich without really playing pissed people off.
fozzy sov pissed people off.
citadel spam than made stations and pos and any semblance of taking space worth something. Pissed people off.
Giving sp farmers 100billion isk in free ships pissed people off.
the same ships being used over and over pissed people off.
getting blobbed pissed people off.
blueballing a fleet because 200 titans logged in you can't begin to fight. pissed people off.
having your super nerfed because you make to much isk playing the game. While nothing was done to SP farmers or roch haven smartbombers making 3-100x as much while risking less or not logged on. Pissed people off.
having new faction titans added that reward 1 person for the work of 100. pissed people off.

Having Q&A where the dev team ignores the most asked question about fixing fozzy sov. Pissed people off.

It's simple

1.5bil for plex now (seriously?)

Skill Injectors - Those of us who had to training learn skills, what a kick in the teeth

Plex - Buying them and now selling for **** tons, jesus

In short

Dey dun ****** up :P

I agree with this 1000% and its dead on.

simple put.. the fanboys of ccp has made this game even worse for many players besides themselves.

this will end up being eve's death nail.

My take is the average EVE player is a complainer and whiner.

Take Fozzie sov and fatigue. People complained about the big blue donut. So CCP changes sov and jump mechanics and the big blue donut breaks up or is fractured....and yet the typical Eve player whines and cries like a little *****.

Honestly? EVE needs a restart.
With almost 14 years of existing, CCP made quite some dubious decisions and cut quite some content out of the game. However, the bone fragments still lie EVERYWHERE, from old tutorial leftovers to pile of promotion items. Add big players from 2003 still kicking, capable of shorting EVERYONE on the market and immune to any kind of fluctuations, stupid steps like seeding Datacores to FW agents, thus murdering R&D, whole FW contest system, bear as* err, horribly specific tags for LP shopsGǪ all adds up.

Why do this, you ask? Why throw everything down the drain?
1)Because main EVE problem is that everyone knows it's problems of: 2)Being rigged by and in favor of old players sitting on the ISK/T2 BPO/Loot piles. No matter how many times you will repeat "T2 bpos don't affect market that much", big guys have them and no matter how hard you'll try, you can't beat the guy with T2 bpo in the game of competition. He will be shorting you like crazy with stock he obtained during YEARS of preparations and he will gut you like a fish. And, with established trade hubs small guy got nothing to do but sell the stuff on the big trade hub since it takes hundreds of manufacturers to support another hub which could even remotely be worth considering. There is no such thing as local exchange rate, Jita -/+ everything.
3)Some people actually WANT to leave EVE forever. But they fell in hoarder trap and as long as game stands, there is no way out for them.
4)Old players still have their advantages of knowing the game thorough and through. As a result, blowing up the whole economy won't destroy the structure of said economy because old players know how to the olde ship.
5)Restart allows to take some long needed, but too damn bold tweaks, starting from completion of module tiericide (And finally solving navy/deadspace/officer module problem of first being outright bad in many cases and last ones being dubious in many categories for sheer force of way more available Deadspace modules) to rewamp of time/resources on literally every BP around.
6)Restart actually allows you to try out some bold moves after announcing of programmed death. For example, CCP may try some draft ideas on incursion through some "Last Stand against Drifters" event or cash out on some researches made after, for example, making JIta -1.0 system in one happy day. WIthout announcements. Because Grrr Drifters are made to be sudden and deadly.

Really? If you rat for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week and make just 30 million/hour you should have way more than enough to PLEX your account.

[My guess nobody will get the point of that comment.]

1)Because main EVE problem is that everyone knows it's problems of: 2)Being rigged by and in favor of old players sitting on the ISK/T2 BPO/Loot piles. No matter how many times you will repeat "T2 bpos don't affect market that much", big guys have them and no matter how hard you'll try, you can't beat the guy with T2 bpo in the game of competition.

Plex prices are ridiculous , they are being manipulated by a few individuals and cartels to the detriment of CCP and the game . Exactly like real life the wealth of Eve lies in the hands of the 1% and the game suffers horribly in cost appreciation for it.

Plex prices are ridiculous , they are being manipulated by a few individuals and cartels to the detriment of CCP and the game . Exactly like real life the wealth of Eve lies in the hands of the 1% and the game suffers horribly in cost appreciation for it.

Everything is too expensive for people to not give a toss if they lose it , battleship pvp is long long gone it's insanely expensive to ask someone to grind for 4 hours to buy a ship and fittings that they might lose in 5 minutes . The fun is gradually being sucked out of Eve while they ring every last dollar / euro / pound they can from the game . CCP needs to take a long hard look at the gameplay fundamentals and make the game fun to play and items cheap to buy , they say it is similar to a real world economy in-game ...well most real world economies are nearly or have gone bust in real life so it's definately mirroring that respect !

The numbers say everything atm , people logged in are the lowest we've all seen for a long time , the game is stagnant which is a huge shame as it can be so much fun to play when you get those good fights we all so desperately look for . I'm predicting a gradual dwindle down of numbers as plex gets more and more expensive and the playerbase says f**k to grinding more and more .

Its a simple thing

Skill injectors

i.e pay to win

buy plex, buy skill injectors, bypass newbie status bling bling ching ching

eve - dead

You are, in part, correct, it was actually the sp farmers who abused the now illegal, and as yet unfixed skill point farming.
These players drove plex prices up, and abused an overly long skill queue on accounts that reverted to alpha yet retained omega length. It is speculated some of these same offenders then used illicit gains to further damage the economy by receiving massive amounts of concord ships, handed out to ticket holding accounts at fan-fest, which injected untold amounts of wealth into an already destabilized economy. The offenders received a strong reprimand, so don't worry!

Combined with the many perceived faults of recent changes, real or imagined, and an apparent growing discontent among the player base, we see the current decline in population. However rest assured it is not as bad as it seems! I say this because it is actually potentially much worse, the amount of wealth generated by the 1% of 1% is also allegedly being used to purchase even more characters from those exiting with the rats. Wait do space-rats do that? Well if they don't they should because it would just be horrible if they drowned! or er suffocated!

not much of a reply...

Really? They drove PLEX prices up? And why are prices still high? Wait...it is the conspiracy to corner the market on PLEX right?

You do know that CCP responded to the claims that ghost trainers would be getting those CONCORD ships take away and any illicit ISK from the sale of such ships would also be confiscated...right?

In actuality that bug drove plex prices down.

You see... the skill farmers existed before Alpha Clones became a thing. The reason is simple... they could take an account with 3 toons farm skill points off of one and run PI off of all of them. That would be slightly less than 4 skill extractors worth of sp for the account.

So... the math:

expense:
skill extractor = 360m isk x 4 = 1.44b isk
500 plex (for the account = 1.6b isk

total 3.04b

revenue:
skill injector = 775m x 4 = 3.1b

So you see how close they are? The skill farming pays for the account.

The PI revenue is all profit.

What the bug caused was to allow people to skip out on the 1.6b isk per account cost in plex to skill up the character who was SP training.

Skill point farming is COMPLETELY legal... as long as you pay for the time you are using to farm SP (by using PLEX or by subbing). The "illegal" part was using alpha clones to SP farm... not sp farming itself.

And since they were NOT using PLEX... the demand for plex was lowered, not raised. And a lower demand causes plex prices to go down, not up.

I think CCP needed a bit more story for early gameplay before they released Alpha clones.

Right now they have the tutorial (with voice acting) that was pretty decent. Then they funnel you to career agents which have missions without voice acting but still have an ordered plot. Then you have the SOE epic arc which is a little harder to find out about but still available.

Then you're kind of left hanging. It becomes create your own content. the missions are random and don't really follow any kind of story.

I think CCP would be wise to add more epic arcs. LOTS more epic arcs. Preferably with voice content. There should be triggers that cause you to get a message in your mail telling you that an agent wants to give start you off on a mission so you don't have to search for them.

The goal with this is to get players to have a goal to work towards early on... getting to the end of the story told by the epic arcs. This would simply provide a longer period of time where they're engaged in the game and exposed to the other more "permanent" parts of eve. They'd also be playing through an enjoyable story while they train skills.

It may be different for others... but for me there was a certain point in the game where I stopped feeling extremely overwhelmed by the game. I think a bit more immersive "hand holding" through epic arcs that teach you the lore while you learn through playing would be good.

This wouldn't fundamentally change the game in any way. It would just give new players more of what they're used to from many other MMO's so they can do that while learning how to adapt to the particularities of EVE.