Setting The Stage

Over the next month we find out if EVE gets a new lease on life or faces the reality of a terminal decline.

Despite a year so far of extreme changes, future promises, vibrant lore, new ships, and continued balancing, 2015 looks abysmal from the 50,000 feet view.

From Eve Offine

As I've said before, players logged in is the best measure of health of the game and right now it has a very disturbing trend. CCP is trying everything to get the excitement in the playerbase and for certain segments like high sec and low sec I think they have succeeded. I suspect a lot of the decline is coming mostly from null sec and a little from wormhole space, the former wither holding its breath in wait for Fozzie Sov coming next week or giving up altogether and the latter really languishing from inattention over the past year (last I heard, no new Down the Pipe podcast lately to update me).

The question of whether those null sec players are merely waiting for the changes before logging back in or have left the game entirely will be answered when Fozzie Sov lands next week. We will either see a significant uptick in logged in player numbers which doesn't have to be large but merely sustained to allow null sec vibrancy to recover, or we will see an uptick as people check it out followed by a return to low numbers (or worse, increasing decline) soon thereafter signalling that EVE is entering its twilight years.

To end the post on a positive note, eve in EVE is entering the twilight years it does not mean that the game will not continue to be fun and engaging for years, if not decades to come. There might be more ghost towns out in null sec space but people looking for action will move to where the action is, a kind of natural server consolidation. There can be decades of PvP and exploration left in the game for current and future players, just not at the concentration and locations of the past.

So don't despair, just prepare.

2014 Review of EVE's Logged in Player Numbers

Let's take a look at our favourite status monitor site EVE-Offline and see what the concurrent players numbers look like for 2014.

Overall, 2014 has to be considered a disappointment in comparison to 2013 which saw higher than average numbers except in August and September. It started strong and fell quickly in spring, and September was really dismal for the population averages of the game.

But as the fall came on we saw an uptick that moved the averages back towards respectable and so far has continued in the first month of 2015.

First, let's speculate as to why numbers were declining in early 2014 despite a steady stream of spaceship content development. In April of 2014 I wrote about the CSM 9 campaigns and how a lot of null sec candidates and other commentators were running around claiming null sec was stagnant.

Here we are, about 15 months later, and nothing has changed. Even worse, if we take Sion Kumitomo as an exemplar of high level sov null sec opinion, the current leaders of sov null sec can't see that they themselves are to blame for the stagnation, not CCP's mechanics. Sure, the Dominion mechanics do not help in the matter but the fact is that the professional gamers in the null sec coalitions' leadership have min-maxed those mechanics to the point where they have built a great wall around sov null sec to keep everyone out but themselves and then sit around complaining there is no one new to fight. And should someone new try to scale that wall, the incumbents use those same mechanics to strangle the life out of them.

In a nutshell, null sec pilots, from the top to the bottom, were in a morass of stagnation of their own making and seemed reluctant for any of them to put the guns down to each other's heads and break the logjam. As I concluded: 

In the end, I fear the only way the wall will come down is for the current null sec residents to quit from boredom. Any change that CCP introduces will be consumed and gamed by the entrenched professionals whose investment in the status quo ensures that only their desire to stop guarding the wall will see it breached.

So as 2014 progressed I believe we started to see my fear come true as pilots in null sec began to leave and the changes to industry in Crius did nothing to alleviate the deflation. However, something did change: Phoebe release was announced with a little thing called "Nullsec force projection" as a feature and it radically altered the environment that null sec was festering in. As I said in a post titled "The New Coming Reality":

This Great Jump Nerf of 2014 is the gift that keeps on giving. As the playerbase moves from resistance and/or shock at the coming change to acceptance we start to see people thinking about what the new reality is going to be.

What it meant for null sec was a number of migrations, plans, and doctrine shifts as they adjusted to the new reality and a future planned wars. While some pilots may indeed have unsubscribed in displeasure at the change, many more started logging in to help their alliances adjust and reposition themselves. Hence the bump in average concurrent players over the fall as that mechanic change continues to play out. 

Coming hot on the heels of that radical shift has been the new Tactical Destroyers and Tech II rebalancing changing the theory of ship designs, a renewed interest in moving the lore forward in exciting directions by CCP, new space with new mechanics in Thera and the other shattered wormholes, and the promise of new space and player built stargates. These have all served to galvanize a playerbase in different ways that had become rather indifferent to the changing game around them.

The only question now is: Can CCP keep up the excitement in 2015?