They do know why players log in. They are less clear on why players do not log in regularly (enough - from a marketing perspective).
Sure, they know common factors like wives, bastard children, mistresses, work and such. But there is a wide field between "active" and "inactive". For them it's rather important to figure out how to cater to challenges on that field. After all, the general consensus is that they depend a lot more on what players do (though not anymore so on "create"), which means they have to come up with means and ways to facilitate players for doing it more. At least more regularly. Whatever "it" is (pve, pvp, economics, meatspinning, etc). CCP is putting a lot of effort into this, but it's not something players really pick up on (NPE recent position change is also a new focus point on that same field).
Look, a lot has improved, but in many ways eve has had (and in many degrees still has) issues which more or less resulted in people sticking around inactively (fully, or partially - multiple accounts for example) in relation to how eve (still) suited them. The skillqueue is a clear instrument there, combined with ongoing training. The queue didn't come from giving in to wishes / demands (even though on a product level there was much advocacy for it), it was ultimately sanctioned because CCP managed to observe a measurable relation between letting shit lapse and what players described as "ze state of ze game". But it's one instrument. It's only natural for CCP to look for more, and that is what they have been doing. CCP is improving product features & content, striving towards facilitating player behaviour better than in the past, but it needs people exposed to that. They can tune & tweak, add and overhaul all they want, but they cannot grow it sustainably if old perceptions and hurdles remain dominant. And yeah, when they dropped the many balls, eve became structurally reliant on player created content - for which there were less and less stimuli (and let's be honest, something parts of CCP became a little allergic to). That's called an unstable dependancy.
Dailies are a least-worst resource-wise affordable "next" direct instrument, equally useful for CCP to gain measurable insights. That's where the second part of your statement comes in.
It is hard to "know" what keeps people logged in, more so to know what keeps them coming back and stay logged in longer / more regularly. I know, I'm sure a lot of players can throw out dozens of insights. CCP has learned to monitor signals, but has also learned to shield themselves from that. Unlike in the past, they increasingly aim to measure the madness, before jumping off a roof. It's a bit of a shocker, but they are learning that they can no longer base decisions on their awesome visions.
Back in the very early days folks like Oveur and Magnus "knew" a lot. Because they were within the trenches. That made early decisions rather practical. Once Magnus figured out he couldn't keep doing that, and Oveur lost himself in awesomesauce, they lost that. Later on nitwits like Torfi and cokenose filled the void with their private petty little untested visions, which in themselves were not wrong, but went wrong because the basis for decision was everything but measureable data and analysis. Heck, I'm sure many here remember CCP's questionnaires from those days. EVE grew because of word-of-mouth, exposure, being different (and yet similar to other games people liked principles of) and a relentless advertising and recycling battle of pulling in new subscribers and losing on average 94 out of a 100 trials. It came to a point where marketing depended on grand shit happening resulting in media exposure for retention and conversion alike. At that point CCP's pants pretty much came off with the tone of exposure changing, first with a bit of a sour taste of entanglements, then the bitter swallowing of the grind, later on drama like "we'll see what players do, not what they say". And during all that decisions were rarely based on actual data, even though on a product level there was an increased awareness of and push for exactly that. Anyway, from that point in time you can just pull up jester's weblog to see the graphs.
Shitty as people might think this daily thing is, I'm pointing towards it reflecting a fundamental - positive - change.
There's two main perspectives on dailies at CCP, both linked to potential use and control. You've got what's simplest described as product development, and marketing / sales. Both need data and insights. Only one of them can really (hello EA et alii people) be trusted with the feature focus itself.
I'd say that one deserves a bit of constructive feedback, you should know from the past how messy it can get. EVE's not simply a product or service, it's an inclusive venture. Worse, it's a tripod: CCP, game, customers. CCP has to learn that this is one of the most unstable forms there is. So my view is to let them build up measurable data, with constructive feedback signals from players, so that product development can make tangible use of that while marketing & sales can make use of the insights for retention / conversion without pushing devs under the table.
Just keep one thing in mind. CCP has figured out that while it should cater to invested customers, it cannot afford to not innovate the product towards proverbial next generations. A lot is going to depend on the NPE focus, much much more so than in the past. Which is why they're aiming to support invested players doing big badabooms with feature sets to create exposure (mittens was one of the first to figure that pattern out, probably why he strived so much towards status quo and revival of the brosef crap of old tbh), but that has been more a road of putting things in place so it can be done relatively cheaply in terms of resources post-citadel. The real effort is on innovating the product itself towards future new arrivals. Which, imo, is exactly what they should do. But those 18 months are EVE's second beta.
Incidentally, wtf. Since when do I advocate CCP. Back in a few, going to get my head examined.
J'ai violé votre vaisseau spatial. C'était amusant....!
EVE once was about internet spaceships. Then those became serious business.
Now all that is left is serious business, and spaceships are docked for two years till after the Dust of Incarna.
I would, CCP have a lot of catching up to do.
To quote part of your sig
Dollar signs have replaced vision in CCP's eyes. If CCP don't know why players don't log in regularly then they have become a lesser version of CCP over the years.
People have always had life but what makes them choose to play another game over eve. People like variety and game fans will always want to play new games.
But why play Warframe or Planetside 2 instead of Eve? Because they offer gameplay that eve hasn't got and can be a quick blast while achieving something. This is nothing to
worry about, its only natural. I reckon it can also be that eve has turned away from its principles and has forgotten who it is catering towards. It wants to be a jack of all trades
which will make it a master of none. Appealing to everybody appeals to nobody in the end. Neglecting your core product over the years chasing rainbows of DUST 514, Incarna
and WOD has resulted in customers neglecting your product. Instead of testing this in Tranquility in order to get 'Data' which is something I don't believe for a second is their
primary goal, do it on Serenity because everyone is chasing the Chinese money, and apparently people wish to cater to Chinese impatience, so why not test it there? Of course
chinese are not western and have a different culture, probably something CCP won't pick up on.
Do CCP still want to appeal to the hardcore gamer or do they want to appeal to the pve new money gamer. If its the latter they may as well make high sec totally safe
and forget all about being harsh. I think CCP out to flesh out their lore to new players more when they start the game [theres nothing like Team A versus Team B to get the blood going],
make mining interesting, bring back the evelopedia in some form because relying on 3rd party information sources will NOT cut it, bring back some harshness [no more insurance],
expand isk making opportunities and exploration, stop catering to people who will never GET eve and start remembering what the vision for EVE is. Cos folk like Fozzie and Rise seem to
be lacking in that department, good sov not withstanding.
It isn't hard to see why people do not log in regularly, or why people let accounts lapse. But it's one thing to have general ideas on this, quite another to drill down on conditions and dependancies for this or that category, or how change X or absence of change Y correlates to conversion rates. That's the big point: CCP have gone through stages in such processes, now they're getting towards basing decisions on what they can measure. That's a double edged blade, since it also cuts into the lolvisionairies and their convictions still present. But that's hardly a bad thing, no?
As for dollar signs, nah. It'll be a while before that flares up again. EVE runs well enough, but it faces certain risks. The time where some had dreams about selling off and cashing in passed. In truth, they missed those moments entirely - and in terms of main cashcow, being profitable is not the same as being a stable venture.
Interesting observation though, there's been some edge around where it comes to things like discussing other games, or playing them, preferring them. CCP had a few moments of stumbling with that even in social media, not the finest moments. In sharp contrast to when the old crowd burned themselves out and started to spam around other games. CCP tends to kneejerk a bit when reacting to something they gave momentum. I do however think that the time where Grand Nitwits wanted to expand the core product into a multiverse of different games is over. Lessons were learnt from Dust, but more importantly from Incarna. Though it took years for them to admit that (fuck, even last year at two5six Torfi whined about grand visions shot down, and of course it was someone else's fault to underestimate how large player organisations would grow).
Funny thing is, even he back then was aware that increased organisational complexity and scale has consequences, one of which is the development of behavioural patterns where decision points (aka, alliance leaders, fc's, etc) don't log in. Even pride themselves on logging in. Instead engaging in C3 means & methods out of game, inserting themselves only conditionally. Something you can also observe on a group level.
Stupid of him to compare that to the Roth character in one of the godfather movies, but hey.
Anyhow, enough on the guy who should have been fired eons ago, but as an example it does show why CCP focusing on methodologies and data collection for research is a trend which should be stimulated, even if monitored, because this kind of idiots are still around. I mean, he sees the problem, shrugs it off, uses it as example of both how big assholes players can be and ends up trying to push that as a half assed sales pitch.
Thank fuck the damage he can do is mostly limited now. But that kind of crap needs constant counterweight from the product level. Without something to show for, demonstrating how fucked up or feasible something is, idiots always roll over productive people.
So yes, you're right. Years long neglect. Awesomesauce drama. Coke at the pool table. Fights over actually having a seperate toilet for women. CCP is CCP, what can I say. But they have begun running into walls. The necessity to innovate has been recognised, and that - in my book - counts as progress. Only however as tangible progress if - unlike in the past - decisions can follow based on drilling into the dynamic itself. That's been happening, and the more the product level (devs) can demonstrate on correlation and causation the better they can ward against the abovementioned.
Innovation required, but they can't rewrite the conditions of the human dynamic which the product is. A new game could be made to cater to - for example - those new money gamers. Or they can encourage invested players with knowledge and monies to get suckled into a capital era of conflict where plex isn't shortcut, nor does it provide a win, but where it enhances revenue streams and smoothes conditions for higher levels of activity. Or they can suck in monies from elsewhere to use experience built up with a discarded product somebody else mostly paid for to make use of brand and mythos to add a revenue stream catering to more recent player groupings. EVE should be an umbrella, not a multiverse, so to speak.
So yeah, they fucked up. Repeatedly. It's a miracle the oldies haven't all gone fishing to be perfectly honest. That's not on them, it's still sailing on what was originally created (without fully realising consequences at the time). So ofcourse datacollection is not the primary purpose. This kind of instrumentation by default must serve multiple purposes. The only question is who benefits where, how and what behaviour follows. Dailies are such an instrument, which is my I made the point on preferring the product level to manage that, not marketing / sales.
I'd love to see CCP focus more on the storytelling potential. Right with you there. Lore, mythos, narrative, connections to activity. There's interesting roads there to explore with dailies as instrument. But keep one thing in mind, at its core there is a ton of trauma at CCP. Particularly where it comes to the fine line of dealing with and depending on customers creating the actual content. It's recognisable in the increased focus on providing feature paths players can do things with(in), as opposed to CCP always trying to catch up with what players create / push. But I do not think that CCP's management is ready, perhaps even not able, to deal with what goes hand in hand with that: players creating content. Old trauma dies hard.
That said, I agree that CCP should not try to cater to - or even try to attract - people who will never "get" (or be compatible with requirements) EVE. I think marketing has dropped a bit of a ball there. Often, particularly when dealing with complex products or services, it makes much more sense to research who will not hook in. It's as if they've been trying to identify exceptions among rules, rather than identify rules and compatibility (picking up the exceptions along the way too).
But it is as it is. It still counts as progress that there is an active foundation for not swallowing awesome before it's gone through the labs. But hey, only logical, if you see where some folks previously worked ....
One thing though, can you seriously blame Fozzie and Rise for (lack of) vision? What vision? The old, the new? The design vision? The next IPO visions? It's not that simple. And don't underestimate that many pretty much grew up in times where it would not matter what you put on the table, cause the closed circle rolled right over you anyway. Things have gotten better, but the new "divide" comes with its own consequences.
Let's be honest for a moment. There is NO tangible vision for EVE. EVE is an abstract. It's a subjective concept of experience and perspective, while also being a software & services product. Worse, it's nothing like the standard types and models of products & services, not even in a software or games industry. There is a ton of irony in this, because EVE really is the whole of customers, product and CCP. That fucked up unstable tripod. As long as CCP at a management level cannot overcome old trauma's and half broken aspirations so they can recognise that they're an integral and behavioural part of that bloody cocktail there will be no "vision" for EVE that can be translated into some unified mystic grand perspective on How Shit Works And The Next Bowel Movement Will Be Demonstrably Awesome. There are ideas for that EVE. But if the recent years have demonstrated anything, it's that ideas need firm feet in (not on, in) the ground.
Instead you get a hands-on set of roadmaps, one for the venture, one for the product level, where as a company CCP has learnt to be more careful and where they are learning to chew through things before swallowing (regardless of whether it's their own, someone else's or any kind of shit or sauce).
There is plenty room for spaceships, but only after serious business. As I said at the time, in truth for spaceships to be fun and sustainably profitable CCP will need to figure out serious business. There currently is no room for what players consider "vision", for many reasons. I agree that it will have to be reestablished, reaffirmed. But what is a horizon if you have no path towards it.
And fuck, advocating again. I'll be damned.
J'ai violé votre vaisseau spatial. C'était amusant....!
EVE once was about internet spaceships. Then those became serious business.
Now all that is left is serious business, and spaceships are docked for two years till after the Dust of Incarna.
I must say you posts a good post, Virtuozzo.
Regarding Rise and Fozzie, in part it seems that they have good beginnings in Eve but the feeling of them compared to someone like Seleene, is that
they have become slightly sycophantic in nature within CCP over a period. They just go along and I don't get the sense that they can admit if they are
wrong, they are too cocksure. The lying from Rise on the Skill Injector blog does not warm me to him, if a couple of months later everything is contradicted.
FHC daily quest: read virts wall of text. That is pretty close to barth amounts of wall..
Reading-only-the-first-sentence-and-last-paragraph-of-a-Virt-post crew checking in
Speaking as a former carebear, I will say this: daily events are by no means a way to panda to carebears. If you want to see an example of said pandering, look at all the screaming lazy players did when CODE. first started their campaign of hisec destruction: players who do not get EVE at all, cruising around on autopilot in untanked freighters carrying PLEX to god knows where. The kind of player who will not listen to advice or reason and just wants CCP to make haulers and freighters untouchable. Fortunately I was never one of those players, nor have I ever given into CODE's extortion. The idea of daily events is more to cater to the day-old wide-eyed newbies tooling around in their rookie ships who have yet to fire a single shot at another player and are looking to get any advantage they can. Remember, we were all noobs at some point and it behooves us to be kinder to the new kids, even in EVE. I make a point of teaching PI to noobs looking to make easy isk, for example.
It's only 10,000 SP for crying out loud. Besides, there are still other benefits to ratting like increased sec status, increased standings, loot (especially in null) and isk from NPC bounties.
TL;DR there are defined correct and incorrect ways to play EVE but not everyone plays EVE your way, deal with it
edit: I'm totally up for building an evelopedia replacement, who's with me
Last edited by MexicanJumpingLlama; April 27 2016 at 11:02:45 AM.
One entertaining aspect to all of this is that we're going to see the first patch-specific rise in the logged-in player counts in quite a while. It will be very measurable.
Say there are 275,000 active EVE players with 1.4 accounts each. And say a third of them do dailies religiously for the first week that aren't already missioners or ratters or whatever. Say it takes them ten extra minutes to find a rat each day over and above what they already play (whether 0 minutes or 500 minutes) then they log off.
275,000 * 1.4 * 0.33 * 10 minutes = 1.27 million extra minutes on-line. Divide by 60. Divide by 23.5.
...and you get an average logged-in player count spike of 900 extra people per day playing EVE.
So if those estimates are even close to accurate, in one day the average logged-in player count (currently around 22500) will go up by 900. Like I said, it will be very measurable, right from day one. And it will also be pretty easy to see if it maintains any kind of momentum.
Ripard Teg (among others)... what's our new alliance called again?
I was once Deemed Worthy To Wield The Banhammer, to good effect. Or at least, that's what most of EVE believes.
On a side note my capital alt is still training a FAX skill. Wasn't the plan that the SP and the book would be reimbursed?
Ripard Teg (among others)... what's our new alliance called again?
I was once Deemed Worthy To Wield The Banhammer, to good effect. Or at least, that's what most of EVE believes.
Be conservative, and keep in mind the daily junkies can and will fluctuate. But yes, it should (!) be measurable. I'm not so sure a third will find religion though, perhaps a tenth - at most. It may very well be more interesting to compare data post-introduction to a next iteration of the concept (tied to meaningful content / activity).
Anyhow, I'm sure you can see the temptation for a marketing perspective, no?
J'ai violé votre vaisseau spatial. C'était amusant....!
EVE once was about internet spaceships. Then those became serious business.
Now all that is left is serious business, and spaceships are docked for two years till after the Dust of Incarna.
Remember, I said for the first week. For that first week, I expect the participation rate to be higher than a third, particularly among people like myself that want to skill up alts a little. A few weeks of effort to get from Cyno 3 to Cyno 4, stuff like that. Longer term, I think your number is likely to be accurate.
Actually, I can't. From a marketing perspective, this is a loser. "You have dailies? So what? Everyone has that."
No. Next release. Probably in a couple of weeks. It's on Sisi now.
Ripard Teg (among others)... what's our new alliance called again?
I was once Deemed Worthy To Wield The Banhammer, to good effect. Or at least, that's what most of EVE believes.
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