EVE Evolved: What pushes EVE Online players to breaking point?

These natural breaking points happen to all players eventually, and some will invariably take the opportunity to quit the game when they occur. EVE is more of a long-term hobby than a game, so it’s only natural that some players will leave the game if something catastrophically upsets the way they’ve learned to enjoy that hobby. Lately I’ve been thinking about these moments in which a player can lose something they’ve invested heavily into, and wondering whether there’s something more that could be done to minimise these failure states. Should CCP provide safety nets for players against catastrophic failure, or is this just part of the player-directed nature of the sandbox?
In this edition of EVE Evolved, I consider some of the things that can push a player to breaking point, and whether additional safety nets would make a difference.
The pure meritocracy
As player Jin’taan recently remarked in an article for EVE fansite Crossing Zebras, EVE Online is a pure meritocracy at its core — As Jin’taan puts it, “EVE doesn’t care about what you say. It cares about what you do.” A big part of EVE‘s battle-hardened culture is that you’re personally responsible for your success in everything from PvP to market trading, and that your failures are the results of mistakes you made. Even in the case of suicide ganks or scams, players will always point out that there’s something that the player could have done to avoid their fate.
This idea is burned into EVE‘s core identity, but it’s not exactly a universal truth. There are still plenty of ways that a player can suffer a critical loss or failure through no real fault of their own. You could be part of a small roaming PvP gang that gets hotdropped by a dozen bored titan pilots, or you could be one of the freighter pilots regularly suicide ganked in Jita with nothing valuable in their cargo hold. You could even be one of thousands of players who put their trust in an alliance’s leadership and are then unexpectedly betrayed, as happened with Circle of Two’s spectacular betrayal last year. Unless you play EVE solo and in the most hyper-paranoid way possible, you will inevitably need to trust other players and expose yourself to risk.
Catastrophic failure states
The vast majority of losses and failures an EVE pilot will make throughout their career are minor, it’s all part of the sandbox experience and the possibility of failure keeps us on our toes. Practically everyone has been suicide ganked at one point, run head-first into a pirate gatecamp, or had some scheme fall apart unexpectedly, and we take those losses in our stride. The problem is those rare times when things go so catastrophically wrong that you can lose everything that keeps you interested in the game.
It’s the miner who grinds for months to buy his first Rorqual and loses it to pirates the next day, or the industrialist who loses all of his original blueprints in a gank or heist. It’s the corp leader who sees his organisation fall apart because they can’t handle a war declaration, or the alliance grunt who has just been evicted from the home he’s spent months building. There are moments when people can completely lose the thing that keeps them interested in the game, so should CCP should be striving to eliminate as many of those catastrophic failure possibilities as possible?
Safety nets and community collapse
As much as we like to think of EVE as a cold and harsh universe where you could lose everything in one attack and a single player could topple an empire, the truth is that EVE has always had safety nets to protect against catastrophic failures. Ship insurance reduces the financial cost of losing a ship, skill points are no longer lost on death, and blueprints can be locked down in a station to prevent theft. Reinforcement timers on structures give you time to evacuate assets if your home comes under attack, and the asset safety system now makes it impossible to lose items stored in a citadel even if it’s blown up.
So could any additional safety nets help prevent other cases where players are driven to breaking point? Certainly the war declaration system that has driven countless small highsec corps from the game is in dire need of an overhaul, and a clearer corporation role system would help prevent players accidentally exposing their corps to theft. But in cases of social breakdowns such as alliances collapsing and corps falling apart, the best safety net will probably always be the EVE community and the corps that actively recruit players and help give them a place in the game.
Every new player learns the golden rule of “never fly anything you can’t afford to lose,” but what about the greater risks we can’t choose for ourselves? EVE may be a pure meritocracy on the scale of everyday gameplay, but there are still plenty of ways that a competent player can lose the thing that keeps them interested in the game through no fault of their own. To quote a certain wise old starship captain, “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.”
Every EVE player will inevitably experience an event that could push him to breaking point, whether it’s losing months of progress to an unexpected gank or losing your corporation to an untimely war declaration. Is there anything CCP or players can do to make these events less catastrophic for players, any safety net that would prevent players from quitting when the worst occurs? Perhaps we as a community must simply learn to embrace these events as the engines of change that they are, as opportunities to try something new in EVE Online rather than giving up.

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27 Comments on "EVE Evolved: What pushes EVE Online players to breaking point?"
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Not everybody has to leave this game bitterly. For example, I left Eve because, well, Guild Wars 2 happened. Time is limited and I was more into GW2 than Eve.
Goonswarm, pretty much.
I didn’t get pushed away from EVE Online even being ganked a couple of times didn’t push me away as I had already accepted that was going to happen so played accordingly but I did kind of drift away from it.
I only ever found that I enjoyed the scanning down of relic and data sites and wormhole exploring. Non of the other stuff really hit the right spots for me personally. It was either too constraining or so way out of my league that it was beyond my means to reasonably reach or just not of interest full stop.
In the end it came down to be having to do things that I didn’t find fun to get to the things that seemed like they might be fun at some point or I could go play something else that I knew I would have fun with right away (guess which I picked).
I have no ill feelings for EVE Online and I may well return at some point to pick up on the scanning as I had just put together a decent Stratios build. However, for now other games are hitting more of the fun buttons for me personally.
I think a fundamental problem is that the best interests of the CPP shareholders and the vocal EVE players (and the devs) are not aligned. I could see if you poured a lot of money into EVE you could get a million subscribers (a lot of money – far more than would be profitable.) But I can’t conceive of how to come close to that and retain more than 20% of the vocal players. Can a few tweaks really impact much? Does significant growth require an expensive and risky “NGE” that will devastate the existing player retention? I can’t see how “listening to the players” isn’t going to preclude a huge % of the potential addressable market.
A related problem is, “What does CCP want to be when it grows up?” If EVE were part of a NCSoft or EA, then it could be one of the cash cows to fund some other games, growth games. CCP shareholders have repeatedly given money to a management team that is more aggressive than wise or competent for them to aim big – WoD, WiS, DUST, VR, … None of that has paid off. How much longer will they keep spending like that? Is the (reading between the lines) new strategy of mobile, perhaps Asian mobile, going to get funded? If non-EVE diversification does not work and, for the reasons in this article and others, EVE is a mature business without a lot of growth prospects, then what is the strategy going forward? Keep a tight grip on expenses and cut costs faster than revenue declines? What do the VCs who own CCP want/expect out of CCP???
” try something new rather than giving up” is sound advice for your jobs, relationships, exercise plans and diets. But it seems quite dubious for an aging, declining videogame hobby. Ignore the sunk costs and move on might be wiser. Perhaps even noticing the “breaking points” of others around you and not having to wait until they hit you.
This is how I played and eh, at the end, it was just boredom that did me in. You can play entirely in Hi-Sec by your self with very little risk of players messing with you, but it’s not very much fun. Running missions and complexes endlessly got really old. Not to mention that the last skill I learned before I quit took over a month of real time. Eventually, you set your queue, log out, and then just never log back in.
I’m not saying the whole game is boring, but the part of it that fits my play style is, and I came to terms with that.
QFT
These days I play EVE largely solo and casually too, and you’re right that it’s pretty boring in the long term. EVE Online is definitely at its best when you play with a small core group of friends that you choose to trust, and playing on your own is severely limiting in most areas of the game. If I tried to set up an Upwell structure, for example, there’d be a very real possibility that some corp would come along and knock it down for no reason and I wouldn’t be able to do much about that on my own.
Having played from the beta to various points on and off, it really might be the childish tantrums that turns off players but mostly it is usually, that no one wants to admit if you stop playing for six months you have to spend actual currency to catch up just the level of game play you were at and you have to grind low level missions to build rep with the npc mission givers to get better gear and missions.
The only way you lost skills in early game was if you did not have a back up copy of the data by training the clone skill and what you lost if you got pod killed was what was not trained on the clone. Most people back then did not pod kill unless they were after parts from your ship and many times the only people pod killing were posers since the more experience players would simply farm the series of wrecks for salvage and better weapons as if they were fighting an npc complex. then 2008 rolled around and the game became really popular with the griefer crowd and every time the game gets better the longer the tread mill to level up older characters to the point the game is fun again gets. It really faction decay that causes the most issues. That seems designed to both keep people playing and deter players from coming back to the game. pretty it was not designed that way but most mmo companies need money coming in every month to keep the lights on not a six month glut of money then six moneys of no money. if they could budget for those times when some player go try out the newest game out they might better balance some of those systems but they tend to encourage a feeling of inclusiveness in the players that stay so who knows. there is not a single mmo game that is not basically a death match game that stands still and really you have to wonder if that is even possible without it becoming boring for the people playing constantly? but basically eve’s down fall is that if you stop playing your main toon for six months you are in a worse position than a player just starting the game with potentially less skill points unless you have simply less the characters training while gone.
no one rage quits a game, that is just a meme that is funny because most people know that the people who quit in anger are being attacked by other players who want what ever feats of strength that player has. They can always come back to the game after the players find other keeps to attack, but some times the developers fall into the thinking griefers are a target audience. they are not simply because one of the targets they are griefing is the developers pay check.
I think you have some misunderstandings about how EVE Online works that might be colouring your judgement. There’s never been any faction decay in the game, you don’t need to grind missions to get access to better gear, and you definitely don’t need to pay cash to catch up to where you used to be if you quit for a period of time.
If you leave the game and come back 6 months later, everything will be exactly as you left it, including your standings with NPC corps and factions, your skill points, and all your ISK and assets. You’ll also definitely be ahead of brand new player who has just signed up, there’s no negative to having more skill points and you’ll never be in worse position than a player just starting the game just because you left for a few months.
snicker leave the game for six months and tell me what your standing with your agents is and how many agents will give you missions. As far as the cash, to come back to eve you usually had to spend thousand to millions of isk to catch up with the current high wave was that was profitable and to replace the storage you lost or the items that are stuck with huge station fees.
sounds like one you have never played the game only reported what others have heard and seen or you have never stopped playing the game. The number of times I have come back after a break to have lost what ever was in a corp hanger because the corp stopped paying the station fees or the owner account was jacked or the owner needed money and clean out all the blue prints and assets in my character’s hangers is likely five or six times. Since to me it is a game not a life style I laughed and went on. One of them was girl I was dating who cleaned out all the blue prints because I was researching them for her and had to stop playing for a military deployment and she could not afford to pay the station hanger rent. high sec costs pre-2008 icurus I think were horrifing expensive.
this is what you come back to after two months.
Insufficient Funds for Bill
From: EVE Central Bank
Sent: 2018.01.05 23:11
The selected corporation wallet division for autopayments does not have enough current funds available to pay the Rental Bill due to be paid by Friday, January 5, 2018 23:41. Transfer additional funds to the selected wallet division in order to meet your pending automatic bills.
one for every month you did not have money to cover. millions of isk. maybe you play on and off and only gank people in frigites but while I am not about give you a target to grief that is start of my second oldest character on the server.
Imperial Academy 2004.07.13 22:55 to 2004.08.16 06:43 (33 Days)
Honestly, there is no standing decay mechanic in EVE Online at all. Agent standing decay was added briefly in a patch at the end of 2003 but was removed soon after. If you leave for 6 months and come back, all of your faction, corporation, and agent standings will be the same and the exact same agents will offer you missions.
I guess it’s true that if you focus on industry and come back to see some new item that’s very profitable to manufacture, where you might need a load of ISK to get in on it. But there’s no reason for anyone to pay cash to do that, your old assets are still there and you can always liquidate them to buy new blueprints etc.
If you play super casually and don’t have the ISK in the first place, that’s another issue entirely. EVE does take a considerable time commitment to make any serious progress, especially if you play solo.
The only way this can happen is if you gave your stuff to the corporation by putting it in the corp hangars, at which point it doesn’t belong to you any more and the corp CEO and anyone else with hangar take access can do what they like with it. There’s even a warning when you do this that you might not be able to get it back. Corp CEOs don’t have access to your character’s personal hangars, where 99% of your stuff should be.
If you’re the CEO and want to give people access to your blueprints through corp hangars, you can also lock the blueprints down so they can use them but not take them. I’ll be the first to admit that the corp hangar and access role mechanics are old and in need of a serious revamp, but there have always been tools to protect against theft if used properly. This is something that just doesn’t affect most players.
This is true, if you’re not playing actively then the office bills can add up in high-demand star systems and your stuff can be impounded and you’ll have to pay a small fee to get it back. Personally I just leave a load of ISK in the corp wallet and don’t worry about it, and today there are other options such as setting up an office in a public citadel.
Elizabeth Amortis.
There’s a public database of characters by creation date, so that info can be looked up. And for the record, I don’t gank people or grief anyone. Mostly I potter about the Faurent system mining and exploring, and occasionally poke my head into lowsec.
So basically if you have level three and four agents and you don’t do any missions for them they drop your standing at a set rate over time. I have agents there is no way to get standing with if you did not have enough standing with to talk to them. I know half the player base does not deal with agents for that reason but your standing on a cow.
As to my character well if you want to be that way I will leave you to the meta. There are a dozen ways to prove it and likely all could be faked except sending an ingame mail and no thanks your not my type.
That said the assets you have in game devalue over time, sure if you have thousands of tons of ore it might still be in demand six months later but for the most part it was tritonium then ice mining then something else for building the lastest and greatest. corp hangers are not the only thing you risk when you join a corp all of your public hangers can be accessed by the corp leaders when you join a corp. but a good point was I was creating blue prints for jitters years ago. they were in my hangers in the station, not a pos but a npc station the corp ower pulled all the blue prints that were being run, all the blue prints I had in my hanger that could be run, and everything but my ship that was not packaged likely to pay the million isk rental fee for high demand stations. I have hundreds of millions of isk on the character and in the corp and they can not cover six months of fees at say at Amarr Prime. The main one not the one with the school, both are extermely expensive. Like I said people who actually play understand that it is like shoveling water out of a sinking boat to come back to eve if you have made any progress at all.
I promise, this is simply not the case. There is no standing decay in EVE Online! I have level 3, 4 and 5 agents that I haven’t done any missions for in 9 years and they can still offer me missions. I have about 9.68 standing with Roden Shipyards and over 8.0 with several agents and it has never decayed despite not running missions for them for periods of several years at a time. I’ve even been unsubscribed for periods of over 6 months, and not once did any of my standings change.
This is absolutely not the case, a corp CEO can look at your public hangar in stations there’s a corp office in, but he can’t take anything out of it.
This isn’t possible under the game mechanics, the only way that could happen is if you shared your login information and they logged in and stole everything. Both sharing login info and using it to steal are bannable offences. I’m telling you, a corp CEO did not have access to empty your personal hangars in an NPC station. That’s not how it works.
Given your confusion over standings, is it possible that someone got your password and stripped your account of assets, deliberately ruined your agent standings etc? Because I promise there’s no way for your CEO to steal your assets in your personal hangar, and standings don’t decay.
You’re talking about having an office in probably the highest demand station in the game other than the Jita 4-4 trade hub, most stations have negligible office fees. You can also just set up your own Upwell structure to get unlimited free offices or use someone else’s structure that’s open to the public. The worst case is that your structure gets blown up while you’re away, but then the Asset Safety will save your stuff.
I cancelled 25 accounts and quit eve when they banned broadcast multiboxing, played all 25 subbed w plex for 2 years before that. If they don’t want my $6,000 in sub payments per year, their loss. I know others with 25-100 accounts also who took that opportunity to quit.
I don’t like games that force me to play alts, or even multi boxing, so I’m glad CCP got rid of the most extreme actors. Maybe one day bots will see their numbers severely dwindled, and the gameplay is changed so capital ship pilots no longer requires a second account for cyno and scouting.
Er…good?
I think a big problem is Eve’s time and timeframes are out of sync with 2018. If a grunt can play two Overwatch , a Wot, a WoWs and a LoL match in the time it takes for something to happen in EVE, then EVE is never going to be close to mainstream. This is exacerbated by EVE deliberately marketing to the most impatient. You might find some industrialists or explorers who wouldn’t mind a slow pace but the pew-pew xxXBeeXxx “i want to blow someone up” pilot is not as tolerant over the long term.
My pet peeve is autopilot. Even if you are not wardecced and in hisec, people tell you not to autopilot. But spending a couple of hours to relocate slow ships from some pleasantly uncrowded edge of one hisec empire to another is something I find absurd.
This is true, and CCP themselves have remarked on this phenomenon. EVE Online requires very long play sessions of several hours to get anything substantial done and there are plenty of other games out there that you can jump in casually for 30-60 minutes. Which one are you going to fire up after a long day at work? I don’t know that this is something CCP can or even necessarily should solve though, EVE is just the type of game that fits into this part of the market.
Re “WHAT PUSHES EVE ONLINE PLAYERS TO BREAKING POINT?” I think a lot of times the “what pushes them” and the breaking point are two different things. It hadn’t been fun for a while; logging in was a chore to be dreaded not looked-forward-to entertainment. So the gank, the theft, the corp disintegration are not the reason just the trigger that enables the player to give themselves permission to walk away (in vet speak, “to win EVE”)
I took a break from Eve because I started a new job and didn’t have the time and energy for the solo industrial operation I’d been running. By the time I was ready to come back, CCP had committed to making hisec industry far less viable. I made a couple of attempts to find another play style that appealed to me, usually when I resubbed to vote for CSM, but never found anything that made me want to stay subscribed.