{"id":73,"date":"2008-03-12T09:38:15","date_gmt":"2008-03-12T08:38:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sobaseki.com\/wordpress\/2008\/03\/12\/the-seven-year-itch\/"},"modified":"2008-03-29T00:09:55","modified_gmt":"2008-03-28T23:09:55","slug":"the-seven-year-itch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sobaseki.com\/wordpress\/2008\/03\/12\/the-seven-year-itch\/","title":{"rendered":"The Seven Month Itch"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From studies it seems that Eve players start to drop out after seven months. Some people probably never make it past the trial period, but lets forget about those for a moment and examine why this might be. Around 6 \/ 7 months of skill training, the average player will be able to fly a Battleship competently, and\/or might be mining in a Hulk. As has been shown from the Economy studies (which only confirmed what most people had already seen in game) 80% of the players dwell in Empire. This probably means they are running missions or mining \/ trading.<\/p>\n<p>So around the 7 month mark, they have a T2 fitted Raven, a few hundred million in the bank, and have seen every Level 4 mission multiple times. They might be in a nice corp of similar players, maybe do a mining op once a week, and then the boredom sets in.<\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8220;Is this all there is ?&#8221;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The player starts to log on less and less and eventually fades from the game. The same thing happened to me after about 8 months of playing enthusiasticly and being in a nice corp with a great group of people. I took a long break but eventually came back after a few months.<\/p>\n<p>So what can you do about this ?<\/p>\n<ul><strong>Try something different than what you have been doing:<\/strong><\/p>\n<li>Set a long skill and take a break, you&#8217;ll be back :).<\/li>\n<li>if you have been using missiles, get the skills for gunnery and a gunboat<\/li>\n<li>get some jumpclones, buy a thorax and pew pew in lowsec. This might be tough as lowsec is usually empty or there are other pirates and your corp might not approve of your evil actions<\/li>\n<li>discuss the issue with your corp, maybe there are other people that feel the same way and make plans to do something else<\/li>\n<li>this is probably tough, as you might have grown attached to your current corp, but you might want to look for another corp that&#8217;s different from the one you&#8217;re in now. Might require some corphopping to find one that fits you<\/li>\n<li>go to 0.0 either with your corp or join an alliance \/ corp that&#8217;s in 0.0<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul><strong>What could CCP do ?<\/strong><\/p>\n<li>Make missions \/ PVE more exciting. <em>I know this is not the direction that CCP wants to follow<\/em>. Although they do try a little by adding some new ones every now and then. It seems there is a high demand for this kind of thing, as we can see by the 80% empire dwellers.<\/li>\n<li>Give lowsec a better reward \/ risk ratio. At the moment, there is a lot of risk and not that much of a reward. This would give corps that are not ready for 0.0 more reason to do something more exciting, ie. have mining ops in low sec, do lvl 5 group missions (that need to be more fun \/ profitable) there etc. What I would not suggest is moving lvl 4 agents to lowsec, as has been suggested numerous times on the forums. People will just speedrun lvl 3 missions, or quit all together.<\/li>\n<li>Make 0.0 more accessible. Too many gatecamps make it very hard to travel there, if you&#8217;re not part of some big alliance. But then when you&#8217;re there with no friends and no help, it&#8217;s hard to live out there. So I am not sure how to improve this situation.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So there it is, my thoughts on the seven month itch.<\/p>\n<p><strong>*update* : <\/strong>In episode II of the Drone Bay podcast there is a nice section on how to look for a corp, what to look for in a corp etc..  A good corp will make you enjoy Eve a lot more, so make sure to check that out.<\/p>\n<p>This post has been discussed on ep. 4 of t<a href=\"http:\/\/www.virginworlds.com\/podcast.php?show=17&amp;ep=4\">he Drone Bay Active podcast<\/a> !<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From studies it seems that Eve players start to drop out after seven months. Some people probably never make it past the trial period, but lets forget about those for a moment and examine why this might be. Around 6 \/ 7 months of skill training, the average player will be able to fly a &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sobaseki.com\/wordpress\/2008\/03\/12\/the-seven-year-itch\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Seven Month Itch<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pXll4-1b","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sobaseki.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sobaseki.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sobaseki.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sobaseki.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sobaseki.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sobaseki.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sobaseki.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sobaseki.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sobaseki.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}