The latest Blog Banter in action right now, number 52, is looking at the current average online user plateau in EVE Online and asking what lies beyond it. Is this just a breather in the game’s growth or is this a peak and are we now looking at the inevitable decline that afflicts all such games over time? The main evidence of a plateau has been presented in the form of the concurrent online users graph from EVE Offline, which has stubbornly sat at about a 30K user average through a time of subscription growth and peak concurrent player records.
The Graph
The answers from participating bloggers have varied. While the most common response seems to be along the lines of “nothing new to see, nothing new to do,” other ideas have bubbled up. There is no plateau. The graph is a lie. The pool of potential players isn’t big enough or MMOs in general have ceased to be a draw.
And there is my own view, which is the game is too hard and requires too much of a commitment to play for it to be a reasonable choice for most people. That came up a couple of times. And when you have to give lessons on how to play your game, that argument might have merit.
There is a reason I have been playing a lot more World of Warcraft than EVE Online lately. It isn’t that I don’t enjoy EVE. It is the fact that, with a limited time budget, I can log into WoW and accomplish something right away. I have very few wasted evenings. No hoping for a fleet only to find you can’t get to it or don’t have the right ship handy. No waiting on a titan for an hour only to stand down because the hostiles went home. No sitting on a gate hoping you’ll catch somebody coming through. I can log into WoW and run an instance or do a few dailies or harvest or work on an alt. There is a convenience factor there that is hard to beat.
So that is my response to the plateau question. The game is difficult and niche enough to the point that you really have to love it to put up with it. We ought to be surprised that at least 200,000 player can make that commitment. (Using the highest accounts to individuals ratio estimate I have seen, which was 2.5.) We are not going to find a large pool of new players. The best we can hope for is that CCP will add new features to the game that will get burnt out older players to return to the fold.
The upside is that I don’t think numbers are going to plummet barring any really bad move by CCP. With EVE, once you have accepted the commitment it requires, you hate to give it up.
But out of all the responses to this blog banter, there was one response I expected to see repeated multiple times. But only one post (now two) zeroed in on this. I expected to hear a lot more about the EVE Online community.
Because it is pretty much an accepted point of fact that EVE Online is a terrible game for terrible people. It is full of scammers and gankers and sociopaths whose sole enjoyment in life is ruining the game for other people.
So are we all blind? Is this Blog Banter a demonstration of cognitive dissonance or some sort of mass blind spot we share?
Certainly EVE Online allows behavior that would get you banned in other games. And you don’t have to go very far to find scams. Local chat in any one of the key trading hubs, Jita, Amarr, Hek, or Dodixie, will have a constant stream of “double your ISK” and “Contracts for Nothing” scams in them.
But all in all, after more than seven years playing the game, player behavior that one might reasonably consider “bad” has been no more prevalent in EVE Online than in any other online game I have played. I have never fallen for a scam. I’ve been suicide ganked once. And I had my mining can flipped once.
For the suicide gank I was AFK hauling expensive cargo in a cheap ship and the can flip happened in a system that was the equivalent of a dark ally in a bad part of town for miners. I basically stopped doing the former and moved over a few systems for the latter and was never bothered again. Everything else that has happened to me in EVE has been done with the knowledge, or at least the acceptance, that risk was involved.
Compared to “bad” player behavior over my time in World of Warcraft, that is nothing. People in EVE have, in general, been pretty nice to me. Even people that kill you will often engage in a post action discussion about what happened. But I also try not to be an ass.
So I went and Googled variations on the phrase “Horrible Community” and found that somebody out there thinks just about every game has a horrible community. Some results:
- This community is horrible – World of Warcraft
- Horrible community destroying awesome game – FFXIV
- Great game but the community is horrible – League of Legends
- DotA 2’s Horrible Community – DotA 2
- COD4 = Horrible community!!! – Call of Duty 4
- Great game, horrible community – Tribes: Ascend
- Horrible community – Rust
- Great Game… Horrible Community… – Path of Exile
- Minecrafts HORRIBLE community – Minecraft
- You People are a HORRIBLE Community – Killzone
- Rift community is horrible – Rift
- Horrible community – Heroes of Newerth
- pvp community is horrible – SWTOR
- Horrible People In GW2’s Community – Guild Wars 2
- The community here is something horrible – TERA
- Why is the TW community so horrible? – Total War: Shogun 2
- GTA Online has a terrible community – GTA Online
- Possibly a good game, ruined by the horrible community – Tibia
Not at all a scientifically valid set of results, just what bubbled to the top of searches.
Oddly difficult to find for that particular term was EVE Online and EverQuest. The top variation I came across for EVE was on the site I Hate MMORPGs, which is a great idea for a blog, but I wasn’t sure how much weight that should be given.
And EverQuest… well, I know EverQuest had community problems. I think its absence is just a matter of that game having peaked so far back that we’re all sporting rose colored glasses on the topic to a certain extent. We certainly saw a return to bad behavior on the Fippy Darkpaw server with players and guilds resorting to all the same tactics that were used back in the “good old days.” And SOE had to fall back on the same responses it did back then.
Basically, all communities are horrible, if you define horrible in all the ways that were used in my list of results. The reasons communities were called horrible ranged from “nobody will do my heavy lifting for me” to “people say annoying things in general chat” to “somebody told me I was bad at the game” to “my personal, unpublished, and anything but universal set of etiquette rules was violated” to “people insist on speaking languages other than my own.”
When people are allowed to interact, there will be friction. Don’t get me started on the local PTA, homeowners associations, or cross-functional project teams.
And while there are legitimate gripes about gaming communities and what we sometimes tolerate when perhaps we shouldn’t, the most common complaints sound like a bunch of old ladies complaining at the grocery store checkout. Sorry, was that misogyny? We seem to gloss over a lot of that.
Or such is my view of the world. I am sure somebody will come by and tell me I’m wrong. That is part of the whole community thing.
Here are some of the other responses to Blog Banter 52:
- Faction Fit Pod – Steady As She Goes
- Sand, Cider and Spaceships – Eve is in a Coma
- Roc’s Ramblings – The Other Side
- Golden Crusade – What’s on the Other Side?
- Warp Drive Active – Falling Down
- Freebooted – Homeostasis
- Eveoganda – The Graph is a Lie
- Morphisat’s Blog – Over the hills and far away
- Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah – Limits
- Life on the Bubble – Art of War Alliance – Enjoy the Ride
- In Local, Everyone Can Hear You Scream – There Is No “Other Side”
- Mabrick’s Mumblings – Causalities of War and Industry
- Evehermit – Are we at the base of the mountain, or on top of it?
- Pilgrim In Exile – The EVE of the Future
- Oz Ox In EVE Blog – But Will It Tick?
- Fua Consternation – Just another day as an astronaut
- Jester’s Trek – Another way of saying “never”
- A journey through the mind – Flogging a Dead horse
- A CARBON Based Life – Live Fast and Die Young, or…
- Mad Haberdashers – Most Plateaus End In Cliffs
- Diaries of a Space Noob – EVE Mentality
- Khanid Kataphract – Living Space
- High Sec Carebearing Extravaganza – The Other Side
- Intellimoo – Gee I Wonder
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
I like the idea of EVE in some ways, but I’ve never seriously considered trying it because I have an impression of it being both extremely time consuming and relatively expensive. I’m dimly aware of stories of people losing thousands of dollars worth of stuff as well, but so dimly that it doesn’t really come into the equation.
Not being a player, I have no real idea what the community is like, so that also doesn’t factor into whether I would try it or not. If anything I would have guessed that being more demanding and more expensive would filter out some of the more childish parts of the MMO playerbase, making it a bit more pleasant of a place to be.
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@Pasduil – I am not sure about expensive… when people throw around those estimates of ship losses in dollar amounts, that is more sensationalism than a measure of how much anybody spent on the game. It is a $15 a month subscription, same as WoW.
But to get involved with the game does take an investment of time. If you are used to being an active member of a raiding guild, it won’t seem like a big deal. But if you are somebody for whom any play beyond a couple hours over the weekend is a lot, it will be too much.
And one of the ironies I forgot to mention on the community front is that, in order to get into the game, you do need to get involved with some aspect of the community. Forced grouping and such interaction is often viewed as a high point of EverQuest in the old days, but seems to be consistently viewed as a low point for EVE.
We like having grouped, not having to group I guess.
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Bad Community = constant swearing, belittling of other people for no reason other than to inflate an ego; high-levels mobbing the quest-givers in low-level areas, solely to “play with” (read: annoy, irritate) the lower level people who are just trying to enjoy the game; high-levels ganking people who are still trying to see if a game is worth it; incessant political chat that demonstrates only how utterly ignorant people actually are; adolescent sex-humor that wasn’t funny when we were adolescents ourselves. An utter lack of shame, pride, humility, compassion, thoughtfulness, thinking things through, sense of sharing or helping… take your pick.
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I actually quite like the “wild west” aspects of EVE, both when I was (briefly) playing it and when reading the amazing stories that come of that. I’m glad there’s an MMO where griefing and scamming and stuff happens and I hope that never changes.
That being said, based on anecdotal evidence, EVE is the mooooost unwelcoming to women of any MMO I’ve ever played. By far! If EVE is facing a subscriber plateau or loss and wants to change that, it strikes me that changing the community to be less actively hostile towards women could possibly almost double that pool of potential players.
Ladies like to scam people out of ISK too! :)
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You can do mining or trading or PI or a mission in EVE if you just have half-one hour. You can’t raid or do rated BG in WoW if you have half-one hour.
The difference isn’t about progress, it’s about the ILLUSION of progress. You can gain a level or some ilvl in WoW, and it feels like progression, while mining veldspar does not. However in both cases you did not progress and only gathered some materials that will help with later progression.
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i tried EQ2 a year and a half ago only got to about 25 because I got tired of running through empty zones. But the forums and people I talked to in game were just a better class of gamer than any other game I’ve played in the last few years. I”m just not willing to solo through the game to the end to play with them.
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> having to group
Good group experiences are wonderful, but bad group experiences can be awful. So grouping when my friends are around, and I have the time to run with them is as good as it gets in an MMO.
But being forced to group means a lot of times ending up with an unpleasant experience, or not being able to do anything you wanted to do at all.
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As for the expensive side of things everything a person reads about EVE strongly suggests if you don’t have at least 2 accounts you are doing it wrong. EVE is the only MMO where you get that impression.
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Somewhere on an old hard disk I have the best part of two years of chat logs from Everquest circa 2001-2003 including reams of “conversation” in /ooc and /shout from Lake of Ill Omen and Paludal Caverns, to name the two sink-holes of Norrath of the day. I have it in mind to post a few extracts one day (with the names removed) just as a reminder that there really never was a golden age when everyone discussed Kierkegaard while killing kobolds.
To bang a dead warhorse, it’s not only games that have good or bad communities, it’s servers. I’ve switched server more than once for no other reason than that I didn’t like the tone of the conversation where I was. I dread the coming of the One Server MMO more than almost any other innovation partly for that reason.
In terms of open channel conversation, I have to say that I have never seen anything even approaching the depths that I saw in the main cities during the time I played WoW. Frequently, indeed routinely, things were said which would get you arrested if said in public, or for that matter on Twitter, in the jurisdiction where I live. Sexual, racial and every other kind of abuse was commonplace, especially in the Auction channel for some reason. It didn’t cause me to stop playing but it did make me turn all the open channels off so that playing WoW felt a bit like playing a single player game with a lot of hyperactive NPCs running around all over the place. Then again, a lot of MMOs feel like that nowadays.
As for why I’ve never played EVE, it has nothing to do with the community, which I have always imagined to be no worse than average. Certainly some very intelligent, articulate and thoughtful people blog about it. No, it’s because it’s internet spaceships and I’m not interested in that. I never wanted to play Elite when it was the Big Thing back in the 80s, I have no desire to play Chris Roberts’ upcoming leviathan and I doubt I’ll play EVE. Not my kind of thing at all.
If I do ever give EVE what I’m sure would be a brief run it will only be because I feel I probably ought at least to have some personal experience of it just in case I ever want to comment on it. Not that I’m all that likely to want to do that either, I guess.
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@Mike – That is certainly a list of bad things. Is there a gaming community you think doesn’t have any of that to some degree? And if they do, are they automatically bad communities? Do the bad players automatically define a community?
@Liore – I would very much like to see a post on your experience relative to other MMOs. I realize that might be difficult, as it will invite people to pick apart your own experience based on their view of the world. But in a general sense, were you not take seriously, did you hear the “make me a sandwich” thing a lot, was porn linked in fleet chat constantly, and were you going in completely cold or did you know somebody already playing?
EVE is heavily male and, being male, I know I have blown off or ignored things that probably would piss you off. On the other hand, I have been in fleets with women, even with a female FC, where we haven’t acted like complete apes, so I know it is at least possible not to offend half the human race.
@Gevlon – It is more a matter of I cannot do the thing *I* want to do in EVE on demand, which is go out in a fleet and get in a fight. I accept that as being part of the nature of PvP. I can however do something I want to do in WoW pretty much on demand.
@Random Poster – There is an efficiency you get from multiple accounts in EVE that you just do not get from other MMOs. That said, everything I have done for the last two years has been pretty much on a single account. That second one has been training “just in case” for all this time.
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@Bhagpuss – Your observation about WoW general channels, which I turned off so long ago that I sometimes forget there are such things, makes me wonder if there is a correlation that could be charted about the popularity of an online game. My timeline would suggest:
TorilMUD – A few hundred players over time, difficult and unforgiving game, admin staff ready to ban anybody who steps out of line or behaves like an ass. General chat, not horrible.
EverQuest – Thousands of players per server, easier but still unforgiving at time, not mainstream but popular, GMs unable to watch everybody. General chat, subject to horrible behavior.
WoW – Thousands of players per server, easier still and quite forgiving, as mainstream as an MMO gets, player to GM ratio miniscule. General chat, pretty much horrible all the time in town.
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Mike’s list describes EVE perfectly… coincidence?
I think the key difference is that in other MMOs acting like an asshat is generally recognized as “acting like an asshat” and shunned by the general populace. In EVE it’s just business as usual, it’s NORMAL to encounter total tools, or be ganked / griefed.
You mention that you’ve hardly been ganked/griefed/can flipped in your years of playing, but that’s because as a blogger you’re already relatively well-informed and have taken precautions. That’s like playing a game where general chat is full of obscenities 24/7, but you’ve turned on the profanity filter and afterwards saying that you don’t think there’s much profanity in the game.
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@Pockie – I am relatively well-informed? First time I have been accused of that.
And you are incorrect. I did not realize that can flipping or suicide ganking was possible until it happened to me. Did you not read the post I linked about being suicide ganked? Only afterwards did I take precautions. And hey, they worked. Go figure. Or are you suggesting that the average person won’t take precautions after something bad happens to them?
As for Mike’s list, it hardly describes EVE perfectly, any more that it describes WoW perfectly. But I have accepted the wild west nature of the game and don’t stomp my feet and complain when somebody does something within the rules of the game. Nobody harvests my tears because I don’t cry about it. But I also understand that it isn’t for everybody.
All that said, can I take it as read that you feel that more people do not play EVE because of the community?
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As a (fairly) long time player, I’ve almost always found the community pretty good. Yes there are tools and idiots, but then, take any group of folks where you don’t control the demographics and you’ll get that.
In fact, I will also say that the ganking/griefing stuff that does happen, makes the us vs them idea work well, causing the group that you belong to, bond even better. I see on a regular basis, older player supporting/mentoring/gifting/teaching newer players. I hear stories of folks scamming other folks, but to be honest, I’ve never paid the scammers much mind. A little common sense goes a long way.
I will honestly say, that if it wasn’t for the great folks I fly with, I wouldn’t still be playing.
If our host found different folks to fly with, specifically getting away from the massive war front null-sec game, he’d enjoy himself much more. The caveat that, is that he would need to take some of the people he likes with him. As its the community of people you interact with that is the glue that keeps it all together.
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@Knug – I can’t leave null, I own freaking capital ships now. Plus, it isn’t null that sucks (my opinion), it is our current war that is boring. I enjoyed the war in Fountain no end. This mucking about in Curse just isn’t going anywhere.
And, as you note, my friends are in my corp which is why I am sticking it out in the first place.
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@Liore
“That being said, based on anecdotal evidence, EVE is the mooooost unwelcoming to women of any MMO I’ve ever played. By far! If EVE is facing a subscriber plateau or loss and wants to change that, it strikes me that changing the community to be less actively hostile towards women could possibly almost double that pool of potential players.”
EVE is no more or less friendly to women than any other game. Sexist and abrasive attitudes to the opposite sex exist in all MMO’s. I will admit though the ratio of male to female players is completely skewed to the former in EVE. I think the percentage was 94% to 6%. My own corp has three female members out of 170 members (real females that is and not males with female characters).
Yet my old WoW raiding guild was mostly female players. I am not sure why this disparity exists. Maybe internet spaceships are not that appealing to female players?
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@Wilhelm
Yeah, but the point is you have to take precautions because otherwise you’ll get ganked/griefed. In other words, it’s not that ganking/griefing is not prevalent, it’s because you took steps to prevent their occurrence.
You, as do I, accept the presence of asshattery (or maybe a better word would be the harsh reality of EVE) which is why we still play. But others who do not accept this and try in some way to combat it will inevitably discover that you can’t fight back against a griefer, the only solution is to not be around or not react to him. Which I suspect does not sit well with the average gamer, hence EVE’s niche status.
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I don’t think the community is actually any worse in EVE than in many of the other MMO’s I have played. But the game is pretty horrible all on it’s own. Combat is improbably simplistic unless you get into small group PvP. Large scale PvP is actually only dependent on the playing skills of a few people. The UI is unbelievably complex and counter intuitive and some aspects of it seem to actually be built towards enabling scammers. For instance when you look at the details of a ship on contract you see the ships icon and the given name of the ship, not the actual name of the ship model, you have to dig down into the various tabs to actually see what the ship is. I won’t even touch on the abomination that is the overview window or whatever that lists nearby objects and poi’s.
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@Wilhelm The porn in fleet chat (and related actions) was obnoxious but harmless in a general way, but I used voice comms once in a semi-pug fleet lead by a friend and.. whoo boy. To be fair I have a pretty low tolerance for that kind of thing, but it was enough to make it not worth it for me in the long run. I think if I was in a big corp of like-minded folks it would have been better.
@Zaphod
“EVE is no more or less friendly to women than any other game.” … “Yet my old WoW raiding guild was mostly female players. I am not sure why this disparity exists.”
Zaphod, it seems to me that the answer at least partially lies in the premise that you dismissed in your first sentence!
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i think the OP has invalidated his own argument by showing that “horrible community” is found to be a complaint of any online game.
We need to focus on what ‘convenience’ means, and i think the OP has misplaced his criticism. A mmog, unlike other online games, needs no lobby to wait in or group to join (ignoring OP’s disingenuous references)…you can start up where you left off, and be instantly in the game.
Remember, we are focusing on the segment of the gaming population that CCP hasn’t fully tapped. And it isn’t about NEW goddamned this or that – it’s fixing beta level programming for ‘social connections’ that’s languished for over a decade.
The OP should focus on describing the differences in how ‘convenient’ grouping in “guilds”(?) is in WoW compared to the corporation mechanics in EVE
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@Wilhelm – In my eve career I have been in goon fleets and I was sick of the talk and the porn so I left – but to have the fun/work of 0.0 is hard to find without that kind of things in it.
To be honest, I love Eve but the commitment in time is huge – I actually resubbed back to Eve this month, but the setting up all the comms (3) and the jabber and moving all my stuff etc, it really sucked the “do” out of it, and I will just finish training on my accounts I subbed (4) and continue playing Wow.
I think I had missed some of the social aspect that Eve had, as my Wow friends had sort of taken a break but then I realized that I can find another guild and continue doing my “things” in Wow which makes it fun and easy to do.
Its how Wow makes it easy to do something and to feel the accomplishment that I did it, rather than another project which I have to manage, which is a day to day thing at work rather than an escape from work.
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@ordoministorum “i think the OP has invalidated his own argument by showing that “horrible community” is found to be a complaint of any online game.”
I don’t think you read the OP then. You must have come over from Mad Haberdashers, since he failed to read the post as well. My conclusion was pretty much that EVE is no worse than any other online gaming community.
My actual argument was that EVE’s peak is related to the commitment required by the game, but that I was a bit surprised that only one person in the Blog Banter said it was the community since EVE has a reputation for having a bad community.
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While I think that the language and chat channel verbal abuse is the same across most MMOs, creating a ‘horrible community’ in almost all of them, the key difference for EVE is that people can and do act horribly to each other. The ‘don’t break my ability to grief noobs, this is a sandbox!’ crowd stands out to me. Most current mainstream games have some sort of ‘safe’ area or must flag for pvp or something similar. (Taking mainstream to be large enough or important enough to get regular gaming media coverage.) EVE actively encourages ganking and awoxing and outright theft in game by having minimal repercussions. This is what I think makes EVE a step up on the horrible community list for many. That being said, protecting myself against that activity is one of the things that I find interesting about EVE, so there is something to its existence, too.
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I really don’t understand why everyone claims EVE has a horrible community. I just don’t see any of this ingame and I am a pirate that lives in lowsec. When I blow someone up or am blown up it is always a mutual “gf” (good fight) to each other and often leads to further interesting conversations about ship fits and tactics. I get the occasional tears from over entitled miners that I gank but this is a rare incidence.
I think too many people form their opinions based on the EVE forums which are used for propaganda and epeen talk. Most of us who play the game don’t even read the EVE forums.
Now if people are forming their opinions based on the possibility of their ship being blown up or the fact they may get scammed well all I can say is get over yourself. EVE is a no holds barred full PvP game. PvP takes many forms in EVE including AWOX, market, combat, scamming, and politics. It is easy to survive and enjoy EVE. It simply takes a bit of commonsense, logic, and intelligence.
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I think there are MANY reasons EVE isn’t popular. I subscribe and I really, really find the economic aspects of Eve interesting. But it really defeats itself if CCP is trying to grow their subscriber base. I say that recognizing that their subscriber ship has grown steadily (very slowly, but steadily) over the years. I question how much of that is actual growth given what PLEX has done to the economy.
But I digress. Some reasons I think Eve remains niche (no particular order):
1. Community: As others have mentioned, the legitimacy of criminal behavior, scamming, and other anti-social gameplay will simply drive the average MMO gamer away. We can say what we want about how good or bad the community is, but players repeatedly cite community as a core reason they play these kinds of games. Eves community is especially difficult to become part of because you cant trust anyone for any reason; that is the games #1 selling point. That there makes it impossible for a new player to get into the kinds of corporations and situations to bond with people.
2. PvP: Think of any pvp MMO that has a large community. Those communities are about as large as Eves subscriber base. My point? World pvp, in reality, is an extremely dull gaming experience punctuated with superb moments of elation. Open world pvp is NOT very exciting content excepting the rare moments it actually occurs. This has also been noted by several here, that griefing and ganking and general world pvp encounters in Eve are rare enough that most of the time there’s nothing to do except prepare for such rare moments.
3. Time: Others have mentioned this but the amount of time this game requires is simply unheard of in the modern MMO. This exacerbates point #1 and #2, because when a community has nothing to do but loiter around waiting looking for rare action they will resort to tearing each other down in other ways. In this case, players have both too much time on their hands and not enough to make the game as exciting as it needs to be to attract a larger audience.
4. Fees. Why endure the previous 3 points when you can get an exciting MMO experience for free these days?
5. Sandbox: I think this is possibly one of the major reasons it remains niche. I meet players all the time new to Eve who cant figure out what to do. I don’t mean that in a “they can’t understand/need a tutorial” sort of way, but rather they just don’t *get* why the game doesn’t send them on an adventure, direct them to what they are supposed to be enjoying instead of finding something enjoyable about it for themselves. They *require* some instruction, some quest, someone telling them what to play with next, telling them what is fun to do. The sandbox environment completely devours them and they quit because they need the direction other MMOs give.
I think Eve is a really special game, i still love it. But it doesnt have a lot to offer really. All in all, you have to be patient, ambitious, and highly tolerant of violence (not just combat, but the violent texture of the game from player attitudes, to the rules themselves), all for a few moments of real excitement. Naturally, people arent flocking to that sort of game.
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“I think Eve is a really special game, i still love it. But it doesnt have a lot to offer really. All in all, you have to be patient, ambitious, and highly tolerant of violence (not just combat, but the violent texture of the game from player attitudes, to the rules themselves), all for a few moments of real excitement. Naturally, people arent flocking to that sort of game.”
I think the problem isn’t really EVE. It is more that people have become lazy due to the hand holding of other MMO’s and therefore would never consider EVE anyway where a bit of effort is required. It may be that the 200,000 to 250,000 real players in EVE is all that this type of game will ever attract.
But you know a space sandbox spreadsheet PVP MMO isn’t everyone’s cup of tea – nor should it try to be. That is why we have other MMO’s like WoW to cater to an audience that wants easy quest treadmills and pet battles.
For anyone that wants a more user friendly, medium difficulty, space action-based MMO – maybe they should check out this link – https://robertsspaceindustries.com/
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It could be that the Eve community is so horrible that people offended by us don’t feel it’s worth complaining.
I mean in WoW, Swtor, people complain about ninja looting or whatever because they feel the game would be alright with a small improvement in player behaviour.
If your bike gets a puncture you fix it. If your bike falls into the sun, gets eaten by dinosaurs and is shot by the entire US marine corp full auto there’s no point reaching for the puncture repair kit.
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I thought I would check the data on Eve subs relative to other MMOs. The graphs on mmodata.net seem to tell a rather different story than the graph in this blog post. Also there’s a press release from Feb 2013 that talks about reaching 500k subs, and having the fastest growth rate achieved yet.
Don’t know which data to believe, but maybe it’s not so clear cut that Eve has flatlined.
Even flatlining wouldn’t be that bad as it looks like overall MMO subs have declined quite a lot, if you believe mmodata.net. I have no idea how they gather their info or how trustworthy it is.
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