After writing the last post about jumping back into EvE last week, I started thinking about EvEs longevity and and how unique of a game it actually is. Which lead me to being concerned with what can CCP do to bring the player numbers up, if anything at all.
The last time I played EvE more or less seriously the player count was around 35k to 45k. Yesterday I was logging in and the player count is at around 16k to 18k. That’s a pretty dramatic decrease if you look at it percentage wise. I am sure for games like World of Warcraft that wouldn’t be a very noticeable drop, but for a game like EvE it is very noticeable.
I don’t want people to get the wrong idea here, I am not saying EvE is dead or anything like that. I would hate for a game as incredible as this one to die. I am a fan of the game, but you can’t ignore the obvious: less players means less income, which in turn means less potential for improving the game. Not going to lie, I am a little worried.
Like I have said before, I like the game, however the setting of the game can get monotonous pretty quickly, I mean you are in space, looking at a pretty colorless universe. It has its charm to be sure, but it gets old quick. There isn’t any concrete way to follow the story of the universe or the player events. You get into the game, if you know how to play it, you go back to what you know, which in some cases is the same thing that you got bored of last time and left. You do that for a while and then you quit again because there is nothing to go towards. Nothing to really entice you to keep going.
You could set goals for yourself, things like learning how to do the thing you don’t know how to do. For example, I have never lived in a Wormhole Space… I am strongly considering trying that out, after I get my next set of skills trained up and try to do level 4 missions in a Golem. I don’t know if living in WH space is going to be different enough for me to keep me interested, but I will try it. However setting goals for yourself is a tricky thing, this is a video game, and I want to play something to relax and get away from the real world. It can be tough to keep goals for yourself in EvE, when for example other games set those goals for you. I am thinking about quests or gearing up for a raid or something.
I know that sounds like complaining and whining and with that, the world is moving towards instant gratification more and more nowadays. There is a whole generation of people growing up, looking for shinies to keep them interested. For example most MMOs are trying to provide as much content in as short of a time slot as possible. So that if you only have 10 minutes to play, you have something to do and feel satisfied and then move on to whatever you have to do in real life.
I know that CCP is working towards that being the case while still having the long term goals being available to players too. I do, however, think that by trying to do that, EvE online is going to ultimately change from what it was intended to be to what the market demands. If it happens quickly enough it might save the game from shut down… But most of the old players will move on. And if it doesn’t do that, than the game will most likely die a slow death… So basically damned if you do and damned if you don’t. I do not envy CCP in this situation.
The one thing I have noticed that brings a lot of players back and gets the numbers up, is a some big war going on in EvE. That’s where the whole saying that EvE is more fun to read about than play, comes from. I don’t know how to get these types of events to happen more often, but I would like to think of some ideas of things that would be fun to do.
This post is kind of a short one, just my musings about EvE.
Next article I want to throw around ideas or more like dreams I have for EvE, that I think would save the game or at least improve it(for me). That should be fun.
Leave a Reply