EVE Evolved: Getting new players to stick with EVE Online
This anecdotal evidence seems to mesh quite well with CCP’s own brutal retention statistics, as we heard back in 2016 that over 1.5 million people had signed up new accounts that year but just over 50% of them quit within the first two hours. Even after the free-to-play option was added to eliminate the biggest barrier of entry for new and returning players, retaining more of those players in the long term is still proving difficult. So what is it that prevents new players from really clicking with EVE even if they want to, and what can be done about it?
In this edition of EVE Evolved, I look at some of the factors that make EVE difficult to penetrate, the importance of joining a corporation, and a few things CCP could do to help with player retention.
What makes players quit in the first place
Last month I looked at some of the different factors that can drive EVE players to breaking point and make them quit the game, from the catastrophic collapse of a beloved alliance or corporation to major losses sustained during a war or suicide gank. Every player will eventually experience one of these natural jumping-off points where they lose the things that tie them to the game world or the community, and for many the option of quitting seems reasonable. You can see some of the more bitter breaking points (such as losing all your possessions in a suicide gank) spelled out in the comments of almost any EVE article online, and seeing those comments may be enough itself to turn some players off trying the game.
But what about that 50% or more of players who do try the game and don’t even make it to the two-hour mark? Excluding alt accounts belonging to existing players or accounts made by farmers, these are all people who saw something about EVE that attracted their interest. They put in the effort to download the client and register an account, and yet they give up shortly after coming face to face with the game itself. There’s a clear disconnect between the expectations some players have coming into EVE and the reality of the game that meets them. Perhaps they read some interesting article about a war going on in EVE and decided to give it a go, only to find themselves mining or shooting NPCs in a tiny ship with no clear path to the gameplay that interests them.
Joining a group is absolutely essential
The single biggest factor in new players sticking with EVE in the long term has always been whether they join corporations or social structures in-game, and CCP isn’t oblivious to this fact. In a recent Newsweek interview, Senior Game Designer Linzi Campbell said that “when new players find a group to play with quicker, they stick around longer” but also that “people don’t necessarily want to join a group immediately.” Recent group PvE additions such as Resource Wars mining sites and themed events have been designed with new players in mind and to encourage ad-hoc groups, but we don’t know whether these have improved retention.
It’s not necessarily the case that group-based gameplay is more attractive to new players, I think it’s more that EVE‘s most compelling hooks are all in the emergent interplay between players. EVE is not so much a game as a virtual society with spaceships, and finding a place to belong in that society is a powerful draw. That’s where the community comes in, with well-known organisations such as EVE University and Signal Cartel having proven track records of showing newbies the ropes. Many players who start life in a training corp will eventually leave and join one of the other thousands of player-run corporations across the game that focuses on their particular area of interest, finding a place they can belong in New Eden. Those players stick!
Would improving the tutorial help?
CCP has overhauled the new player experience several times over EVE‘s 15-year lifespan, but even its most ambitious and well-executed plans don’t seem to have made much of a dent in the retention problem. My introduction to EVE way back in 2004 was being dropped into space in a tiny ship with no instructions, set adrift in an unfamiliar universe and presented with an inscrutable user interface. I promptly shot a stargate and was blown up by the police, and if I had been just randomly exploring the free trial, then I’m sure my EVE career would have ended right there.
What made me stick around is that I was invited by a friend who offered to show me the ropes and invited me to join his corporation. Though today’s tutorial is incredible compared to the hammer in the head I received in 2004, all new players are still presented with an intimidating user interface and gameplay that’s now 15-years deep. They need something that compels them to get over that hump, and not everyone has a friend in the game to rely on for that. This could be an opportunity for CCP to use its new data collection technology that’s coming this month in the Into the Abyss expansion, which will give CCP an impressive granularity of data on all player activity and could open up some interesting new feature possibilities.
Could career milestones be the answer?
The upcoming expansion will add a new Activity Tracker interface showing detailed stats on everything a player has done in-game. I think CCP should go one step further with this, adding achievement-style milestones for each gameplay area. The milestones should be tiered and spaced incrementally further apart so that new players experience a lot of them, encouraging continued play to get over the two-hour hump. CCP could even add small rewards in the form of ISK or skill points, and incentivise joining a corporation by adding special milestones for doing things with corpmates.
I suggested a similar milestone system back in 2015, but a lot of the data it would have relied on to work may not have even been feasible to capture on the server en masse until now. Taking the idea another step further, CCP could also give corporations special rewards when their members accomplish milestones or even just make certain combined stats of all members publicly visible to provide visible corp milestones to achieve. Any rewards associated with these systems would have to be carefully selected to prevent abuse of free alpha accounts, but a system like this would be great because it only rewards corps that actively engage new players in activities.
It’s said that there are two very different types of player who come to EVE: The type who quits in frustration when ganked for the first time, and the type who writes the ganker’s name down in a little book and starts making plans. I’m always tempted to think that trying to retain the former player is an act in futility and that EVE will just never click with certain people, but then I think back to my younger self shooting that stargate in 2004 and wonder whether I would be one of those people too if I didn’t have a friend in the game.
While there are almost certainly things CCP can still do to improve the new player experience, the most important factor in getting new players to stick with the game in the long term will always be choosing to interact with other players and finding a place in the virtual society of New Eden. Maybe all anyone really needs is a friend to show them the ropes, whether that friend brings you into the game or you meet them there, and perhaps the best thing CCP can do to help new players is just to point them in the right direction and let the community handle the details.
EVE Online expert Brendan ‘Nyphur’ Drain has been playing EVE for over a decade and writing the regular EVE Evolved column since 2008. The column covers everything from in-depth EVE guides and news breakdowns to game design discussions and opinion pieces. If there’s a topic you’d love to see covered, drop him a comment or send mail to brendan@massivelyop.com!
I understand the complaints about not being able to fly your spaceship like a flight sim and Eve not providing that. However, having flown real spaceship sims, except for landing and the last few feet of docking, Eve is pretty realistic in that most of what you do is punch buttons on a computer and it makes the burns happen. At least, that’s how the Space Shuttle flew.
Landing was like flying a plane in a flight sim except you had no engines and the vehicle is very slow to respond and has lots of resistance to changing what it is doing. (So if you turn, you need to start coming out of it early.)
Docking is done with a joystick and some overlays on the monitors and takes real skill to do well and efficiently.
Honestly, EVE simply is not a game built for the more casual crowd. The typical “casual” player (1) isn’t much of a PvP player, (2) generally does not like committing to regular group play (i.e. guilds / corps / etc.), (3) is interested in games that can cater to a limited / flexible playtime, and (4) most importantly, does not threaten the player with LOSS of game play time in the form of loss of possessions or XP penalties.
EVE is none of those things.
I don’t think that’s a failing. EVE is exactly the kind of game it was designed to be, and it caters to a specific audience. I don’t think that updating the tutorial or “new player experience” can really change that.
Source(s): Was once “hardcore”. Grew up and got responsibilities. Turned “casual”.
In my 16 days of playing EVE, I was never ganked, I was pestered constantly to join a corporation, people answered my questions nicely, about a week in I discovered there was a 3D spaceship view behind all the spreadsheets, I wasn’t in any space battles, I researched some sort of abilities offline, and I spent most of my time on websites trying to figure out how to do the tutorial because what it told me to do didn’t ******* work.
What Id love to see in EVE is rich and complex missions unlike those that agents offer. I want to experience amazing EVE lore through solo or group PvE content, cut scenes, interactive chat with NPCs, memorable scenes. Just what CIG is doing with Squadron 42, but with EVE’s engine and budget.
As for what can keep players in a long term. Maybe they should organize world wide events on regular basis. Not wait when someone starts war or something interesting but initiate it. Just like GMs in roleplay MUDs organize events for players to participate
The learning curve isn’t an issue for me. It has always been that I don’t have a character, but I’m basically just a ship. I’ve tried several times and I can’t identify with the game because of it. If they ever add ambulation that is meaningful to the game, that might do the trick.
More generally speaking, the game just feels disconnected for me, as someone who has been playing more traditional MMORPGs since the beginning.
I tried EVE, pretty sure I’m in the 2 hr or less mark of the people who quit it.
I just don’t have that kind of time to invest in a single game anymore, I’m too interested in multiple experiences add to that while the random PVP isn’t dreadful, I’m not into it enough to play a game where that’s almost it’s entire focus. I get it, it’s that gritty realism that draws people to the game but I suppose I have enough of that IRL, I don’t necessarily need it in my games too.
EVE is a game that is fun to read about, but after kicking the tires I know I’ll never play it and that’s just fine.
I’ve never played but have seen all the stories about it so was leery. Then I met some co-workers and people who have played it in other games and all of them (anecdotal of course, it’s a small sample overall) tell me that it’s a great game but they hate it and left and I probably wouldn’t like it based on our conversations.
An interesting assessment!
Eve needs a fresh start server.
EVE needs a complete rethink.
Exactly.
They building on formula that was able to catch interest of a player ten years ago. And that’s a very different crowd compared to current majority. If they want to move forward they have to.
My personal favorite was NPC that will have their own goals and will work towards them. Sounded almost like a virtual world to me. Never heard about it again.
I don’t think they can do anything that wouldn’t fundamentally change the game and alienate the vets with 2, 3, 4+ subs. They’re kinda stuck. For me, the day to day gameplay just wasn’t that interesting.
There isn’t one single reason why EVE isn’t keeping players around. There’s many small ones which combine into a big turn-off for anyone looking to join.
– The game itself is stagnant. No actually new content has been added since wormholes in 2009, almost every single other piece of new content has been geared solely at nullsec players. The content that there is which new player can engage in without being forced to join a nullsec alliance is content which is *at least* 9 years old. The recent 2018 EVE keynote was utterly embarassing in this regard. Their recap video of AN ENTIRE YEAR OF DEVELOPMENT went like this: Balance patch – Some random PvP battle – balance patch – some random PvP battle – and this ad nauseam. It’s even worse than Bungie is doing with Destiny 2.
– Even worse, most of it is content which is only relevant to the top end of nullsec players. There is no real sense of doing anything together, you’re just a cog in a machine being controlled by a few bittervets. It’s the same people under different names deciding what happens. More stagnancy, but this time in its intra-player relationships. There is nothing for a newbie to do except dance to the pipes of the oldies: The snowballing effect of contacts and isk means you’ll never even get a foot in the door if you’re trying to start something truly new.
– Most of the marketing focuses on events which happen maybe a few times a year: A lot of playtime is necessary for that one hour where your ship moves REALLY SLOWLY and is then blown up, with nigh zero interaction needed. This just doesn’t happen often enough to be actually interesting.
– The game itself is being marketed as ‘internet spaceships’ but it doesn’t fulfill that expectation. What EVE *actually* is is a hero unit RTS, where you control one unit and everyone else in the field controls one unit. For combat, anyway. The combat itself is a convoluted mess of arbitrary spreadsheets, statistics and a meta which is based on ‘whoever brings more shit, wins’. The core gameplay has not been touched since beta and feels truly old and outdated, the moment to moment experience is boring AF.
– The “extensive crafting” side of the game is a mess of spreadsheets and windows where you look at numbers going up or down, nothing else. It’s busywork disguised as gameplay. The crafting is functionally identical to crafting in WoW, where you gather/buy the items necessary and then click to magically create the end result, just with far more pointless steps added. There’s no engagement in that side of the game.
– Mining is one of the first things a new player does. How this is a bad thing is something i should not have to explain to anyone who’s ever played EVE, and to those who didn’t: It’s literally more boring than watching paint dry. It doesn’t help that CCP has promised to overhaul mining for nigh on a decade now with absolutely nothing to show for it.
– Walking in stations might seem like a meme to most veterans, but i’d argue that it’s absolutely necessary for the game to be able to grow again. New players are faced with an extensive character creator, a character they *never ever see again* in their entire time playing EVE. Again, expectations which are not fulfilled. There’s no attachment to your character possible in the game. Having meaningful gameplay outside of your ship would go a long way to holding a newbies interest for more than 2 hours since they have something they can identify with. EVE is far, far too abstract for its own good.
– Passive skill training used to be a neat idea, until you realize that simply to fly the ‘cool’ ships in the game you have to *wait* for months or even years at a time. Just wait. Character progression in EVE consists of *waiting and doing nothing*. Brilliant! Even worse, the game has turned this on its head by making it quasi P2W with skill extractors/injectors when going “F2P”, making this aspect of the game even more bewildering to newbies. Let alone that you can buy ISK with cash straight from the developer, making almost every single bit of personal progression in the game feel utterly and completely pointless. Granted, this is something a newbie won’t figure out in the first few hours, but it doesn’t help.
– Hilmar talked at the 2013 fanfest about how he realized the players were making the game better than CCP could themselves. These couple of minutes are well worth your time (no need to watch the entire keynote): https://youtu.be/VXYu5oUc0p4?t=998 – The thing is, CCP forgot the actual meaning of this story, and has been actively working to curb any kind of creative thinking its community does with nerfs, patches, fixes, balance passes and anything else. They don’t want to empower the players, despite their claims, they want to limit them to “play their game”. Sure, that’s a developer’s prerogative, but it’s exactly what *didn’t* make EVE popular back in the day.
And so on. There’s plenty of more reasons i can come up with for why EVE isn’t doing as well as one might think. In general though, CCP has lost the plot, and is now desperately trying to save a game which they themselves have run into the ground with bad business decisions and bad design decisions. Unless they turn the company around and actually focus their efforts on what is supposed to be their cash cow, i honestly don’t see EVE surviving for very long anymore.
It doesn’t help that they now want to enter the shooter market – again – on PC where they will be directly competing with all manner of other, already succesful shooters. Given that they’re refusing to link the new game directly to EVE itself, it’ll be a small wonder if it even will be released at all. If Dust had been released on PC back in 2011…..
+1000
Brilliant, thorough, thoughtful comments, should be stickied, engraved in bronze and sent to CCP.
TLDR: dull, unengaging gameplay. The only “excitement” is playing cannon fodder for bittervets because there’s zero chance you’ll ever compete with them in a game where simply time-served = advantage.
The reason most players leave after 2 hours? Because it takes them that long to really understand that yes, “space ship combat” really IS that clunky and dull, forever, and no, it really doesn’t probably get any better.
I agree with you.
I am now trying Eve again,as two friends told us to join them in a new corp.
These two friends are explaining to us all the stuff, fitting some cheap cruisers to PVP close to high sec, giving ISK to buy ships… They have even made a guild-station and they are doing their best to keep us amuse (blowing up planets to mine included)
But.. one of our friends have already left the game, not in 2 hours (he managed to get lvl 4 missions), but in one week. I have arrived to lvl 4 missions to realize that, with real risk of losing my 300 kk ship, I have to spend hours to get 100 kk isk. I’d rather play Teso or Pubg than Eve, I haven’t quit because I don’t want to let my friends down.
Mining is boring and disappointing, as you know you are wasting your time, as you could do it quicker and better with a better ship. The objective is to motivate ppl to get the money and the skills to own that better ship, but it does the opposite.
My two cents:
– Allow groups into ships, all ships. You could choose the boost control or the turrets control or the target control. Give a 10x bonus for having someone in your ship (10x speed, 10x damage or 10x target speed). Why not, let us pilot the drones!
– Traveling through acceleration gates and looting should be instant (or at least quicker) if there’s nobody near you. Give a 10x speed boost if no one is looking…
Fantastic discussion and observations, I’d like to respond to some of them and add my own experience here as a long-time player:
I won’t argue that the Apocrypha expansion in 2009 with its headline wormhole feature was the last massive gameplay and content expansion the game has had, to this day I think it’s still the biggest and best expansion in the game’s history. I will say though that there’s been a ton of new content and features over the years not geared solely toward nullsec players, it’s just been slower and more incremental than the colossal focused content dump in Apocrypha.
In terms of content relevant outside of nullsec since Apocrypha we’ve had planetary interaction, Sansha incursions, new hacking content and mechanics, ghost sites, shattered wormholes, the Thera wormhole hub, burner missions, roaming drifter AI, pirate FOBs, moon mining belts in highsec, Resource Wars, and all the recent Agency events. That’s not including new ships such as the tier 3 BCs, navy BCs, T3 tactical destroyers, the Bowhead, command destroyers, t2 mining frigs, logistics frigs, navy EW frigs. That said, I do think we should have had another Apocrypha-scale expansion by now.
I’ll agree mining is definitely not something a new player should be pointed toward, but thankfully new players today are railroaded more into combat since the latest tutorial overhaul. It’s no longer one of the first things a new player does. EDIT: Just tried out the tutorial again to make sure, it does give you a mining ship but now steers the player toward Resource Wars instead of asteroid belt mining. That’s definitely an improvement.
The other thing is that I don’t think CCP ever actually promised a mining overhaul, it’s just been something players have been begging for since around 2006-ish. In particular, there’s been a lot of resistance to making mining gameplay more active or adding a minigame, and there is a section of the community that enjoys the passive pace of mining in the background while doing something else. In terms of mining updates, we’ve had a load of new ships and the mining barge overhaul to combat suicide ganking, and of course the biggest change is the moon mining overhaul that landed in Lifeblood. But a more significant mechanic overhaul is unlikely.
Absolutely agree on this, I think getting rid of walking in stations was a huge mistake. I have a friend who tried EVE once before for an article years before walking in stations, and then again for another article after it was introduced. He found the introduction to the game far more compelling, was more invested in his character and gave the game more time because of that.
It also importantly introduced him to his character as a person first before sending him out in a ship to accomplish tasks, and he naturally saw ships as tools rather than as his character. That’s a HUGE stumbling block for new players to overcome, many of those who don’t manage it will quit after losing their ship as they consider EVE to have permadeath even though ship destruction should be viewed as a simple financial loss. CCP got rid of WIS after stats showed usage was extremely low, but I think it was important for new players and the low usage was surely due to the fact it hadn’t been so much as touched in 8+ years.
While my feelings on skill injectors are well-known and I don’t consider them pay-to-win any more than PLEX (a model which almost every sub-based game has now adopted), I can’t argue with most of your assessment here. You’re right. Passive skill training was a great idea in EVE’s early years and I’m sure it led to a lot of people signing up due to fear of missing out, but today it’s a road block between new players and the things they want to do.
CCP can’t and shouldn’t get rid of it though at this stage, it’s such a defining part of the game. They also can’t just give new players more skills by default as the free alpha clones mean devs have to worry about players scaling up characters/activities infinitely. I think the answer here may involve letting new players gain skill points in particular skills through active gameplay in some manner (other than skill injectors). Something like the milestone system I suggested in the article.
I agree and have actually written about this a bit before ( http://massivelyop.com/2015/06/28/eve-evolved-is-eve-becoming-less-emergent/ ). As EVE is developed more and new features and content are added onto the now 15-year high pile, developers have slowly codified and constrained aspects of gameplay that had until that point been player-handled or emergent. EVE may be becoming arguably a better game as a result but it’s also losing emergence in the process, and it’s the emergence that made EVE big in the first place.
Partly this is the unavoidable consequence of having to add new gameplay to a game as old as EVE, but it’s also a result of the game design style at CCP. There seems to be a high-level idea across the company that gameplay must be directly created by developers and they should have completely control of it. Classic examples I’ve often complained about would be jump fatigue, damage caps on citadels, or the artificial capture event gameplay in the Aegis sovereignty system. It all seems to have been designed to be played one preferred way by developers, and to constrain players into that mode of play.
I wouldn’t ever count EVE out on that basis as I know how fanatical parts of the community are, I think even if the playerbase shrunk by a huge amount the game would keep ticking over and you’d still have enough people playing. I do disagree with some of the high-level decisions made about EVE over the years, but to this day there’s still nothing that scratches the same itch out there.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens as each new sandbox MMO comes out, but EVE has typically always been insulated from new releases due to its uniqueness inside its niche. Given current trends, the future for EVE will likely look more like a steady state or possibly slow decline with the occasional spike at expansion times or after big news stories. It’s also worth noting that EVE is doing better than ever financially even without a revival of activity levels.
Project Nova is kind of planned to be linked to the EVE universe directly, but it’s looking like that will happen in stages after release. CCP is essentially hedging its bets here, not making EVE dependent on Nova so that if it flops there’s no fallout, and I’m not sure if that’s the best plan after what happened with DUST 514 and its practically non-existent link to EVE.
They want Nova to stand on its own feet first, and I honestly don’t see it happening without some incredibly solid hook. Perhaps persistent battlefields, base-building and territorial warfare mechanics, and a solid PvE mode would be enough of a hook, but I wouldn’t bet on it launching with any of those.
I would make skill points come in two varieties: extractable and unextractable. With player-created skill injectors giving 100% extractable SP, passive training giving roughly 50% of each, and skill gains from active gameplay being 100% unextractable.
That might not be totally feasible, unfortunately. Skill points invested in a skill are just a number, making some of them extractable and some not would be a significant dev task for very little payoff, and it would probably confuse new players more.
The problem is more that new players feel like there are things outside their reach and the only way to realistically get to those things is waiting. That encourages them to log off and not actually play, and many don’t bother logging on again. It might help to have some active way for new players to obtain certain skills so they can work past those roadblocks, even if it’s just the ones in the alpha skill set and even if it’s only in the form of achievement-style rewards.
Thanks for the reply.
Just to be sure, nothing was aimed at you, just at the game itself. I’ve played it since 2003 (like you!) up to 2009 almost constantly, and somewhat casually up until last year. I’ve been to a few fanfests, i’ve got the eve source book (the limited one) as well as quite a few other physical doodads (your EON articles were always insightful). I’ve been involved in almost every aspect of the game to some degree except high level alliance politics (which i am glad for).
I’m just so fed up with the constant excuses and promises. The game i’ve played for so long – my first MMO – just feels like it’s completely lost its way, and i can’t see it finding its way back again any time soon.
I’m just going to reply to some of the points you made to (hopefully) make my opinion on those a bit more nuanced.
– Incursions are mostly a plaything for the already rich. You’re not going to contest for the actually good stuff unless you already have a tricked out BS or logi to join the ‘cool’ groups.
– planetary interaction is a matter of clicking for 5 minutes a day. I’d lob this in with the rather pedestrian crafting of the game more than anything else.
– Hacking/archeology/exploration sites is the only genuinly interesting content they added, but it’s far too shallow to make up for the remaining 9 years. You get tired of it before you get the relevant skills to level 4.
– Thera is…. Underused. It was popular for a short while until it kinda just died off. IIRC there’s a few corps/alliances running the show for a few years straight now.
– Burner missions standard PvE missions with arbitrary stat requirements. Once you figure them out they become as boring as level 4’s.
– People just avoid drifters iirc. Nothing really worthwhile drops from them anyway.
– New ships are almost all geared towards nullsec warfare: None of the ships you mention lend themselves well to anything else. Logistics and EW frigs especially feel like slaps in the face of the old ‘you can always tackle’ meme, now you can just do it in a fancier way. Given how obscenely rich the alliances are where those ships would actually have a use case there’s no real reason to not use a T2 EW cruiser instead. Or, just get a capital ship. Carriers and auxes are handed out like candy nowadays.
– Moon mining in high sec was kinda snatched by the big boi alliances or their alts on the day of release. You’re not going to get a foot in the door as a newbie, nor does it really bear any real relevance to what you can or will be doing when not in a nullsec alliance.
– Shattered wormholes, pirate FOB’s, resource wars and agency events i have no experience with (not entirely sure what you mean by them, i could just be misunderstanding).
Yes, they added content, but when you consider that this is spread across 9 years of development by a developer who has had *at least* 50-ish people on the game at any given point? I’d call it rather dissappointing. Even moreso when you consider all the work CCP basically threw away entirely. I remember their expansive talk about the Carbon framework which would power all their games: Neither Dust nor Valkyrie actually used it. Dust only communicated with the main game through a completely seperate API. A complete waste of resources. Since CCP has removed CQ they now also have removed all traces of their work on WoD. I won’t mention the numerous prototypes they have made for a lot of game systems which were perfectly workable and even entertaining, which they threw away because of simple indecisiveness.
I don’t think i have forgiven them for the period where CCP had ~650 employees, of which only 70 were actually involved in EVE (including CS, if rumours are to be believed). *None* of the projects they were working on at the time saw the light of day or survived for very long.
I think i’ll just shove this in with ‘mismanagement’.
It was low because they never released the functionality that would have made it useful. I was there in 2008, i played the prototype, and it was glorious. So much was already there! And it was just dropped like a brick. They didn’t even attempt to develop it further! They just offloaded it almost entirely to the Atlanta studio so they could have their cake and eat it too, but we all know how that turned out. They kept deleting their work over and over and were suddenly hit with pressure to actually do something about it, so we got Incarna. Released when there was zero work to show off. Remember how it was released with only one single CQ?
After Atlanta was closed, WiS development was closed as well since all of the people doing it were there and let go. Stupid decision, letting all that work die off.
I agree with the first, i disagree with the second. That might sound odd, but hear me out.
The passive skill system, as it is now, is completely and utterly broken. Skill injectors bypass its very principle, as do daily skill point rewards. New players will be bewildered why it works that way, and there is no solution to make it work without it making even less sense.
However, they can’t remove it, since there is no way to appease to the vets and create a decent new system in its place. EVE is now completely stuck in the mess it created for itself 15 years ago. Character progression is and will always be broken and completely detached from the player (even less to identify yourself with).
Oh, EVE won’t actually die. That might have been hyperbole. However, i can see it shrink back to release levels of activity (3000 people on at most) in a few years because of decisions being made currently. Eve-offline stats already say enough: Despite now being “F2P” actual online numbers have stagnated, even dropped. I don’t know why they were saying at Fanfest that Alpha has been such a success, since it clearly hasn’t been – Unless they were talking about microtransaction profits. This could imply that they are more happy to have whales playing their ‘passion project’ than actually involved players.
In other words, the exact same gameplan they had with Dust. I’ve talked to people at FF 2013 about this, and they had grand plans for Dust, to link it more with EVE down the line in stages after release… It just never happened, because they never figured out how, or were even willing to given Dust’s suspicious absence from that FF, relatively speaking.
I just don’t trust CCP with this, even moreso given who Nova will be competing with within the genre. 90% of its players will likely just be EVE players, and not the new demographic CCP might be chasing. I’d be happy to be proven wrong, but their track record indicates that Nova will not get a happy ending.
Overall i can’t help but be extremely pessimistic about EVE’s outlook. CCP has no idea what they’re doing, what they did and what they want to do. They’re stuck in their own little, Icelandic world, away from everyone else, unable to see other developments simply going past them, thinking that a game designed in 2000 will be able to keep growing without significant changes to its core gameplay as it stands now.
They had a shot at greatness with WiS, Dust and Valkyrie all being part of the same environment, but they squandered the first and never even attempted to (properly) integrate the latter two. They made bad business decision after bad business decision, and somehow they seem to think they’re still ‘the best in the business’. I fear that there’s a level of hubris there which they can’t shake off.
Just for kicks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ0k0ioROUo (2009!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFTUazuGdTw (2014)
This *needs* to happen for EVE to remain relevant. If they can’t follow their own ‘future vision’ and ‘prophecy’, EVE will be condemned to the niche currently occupied by Ultima Online and Everquest 1.