(allow me to correct your spelling)
Sorry for wall of text - This is my last answer on this thread - for that reason I'm out.
How many of them have FORCED PvP for those who do not want it?
Nobody has said PvP should be made impossible, but rather CONSENSUAL.
So if you want, you can fully opt out of all PvP content without losing any other content.
Your above answer shows you do not know what I am talking about, so I'll explain :
NONE ARE FORCED it is as you say consensual - ARENA'S and BATTLEGROUNDS are PvP specific area's that exist in ALL servers; PvP, RPvP, RPvE and PvE - that you can join and leave as you please and also from 7 years experience of WoW I can assure you there is a great deal of people who take part on the NON PvP servers.
360k is the amount of people we KNOW to be willing to shovel up money in constant stream for sandbox space MMO.
All else is completely unknown.
Unknown to you maybe, but I have a lot more experience of this - every single one of the
private servers that I mentioned, and I know for a fact there are dozens in freelancer alone for the various flavors of mods, are paid for by people willing to run them to ADD PvP flavour to the original PvE only game. There are X-universe mod servers, Freespace servers, etc etc etc, are they all here? I doubt it.
Which is why emulating Eve is bad idea, it tries to fight for same marketshare of sandbox PvP-players. Better opt for larger audience and make it possible to disable PvE for those who do not want it.
Really? Wing Commander Prophesy, which sold well for spacesim, sold about 700k IIRC.
Spacegames have never been "we sell millions of copies"-style.
I didn't say they were, but if you accumulate all of those that bought all of the games I listed (which btw a lot of them have a great deal in common with ED - space based, flight, trading, piracy, questing games - which is what the core of the Elite franchise is all about), even if you include the crossovers of people buying more than one on the list, you WILL get a number in the MILLIONS, not copies of the games - PEOPLE.
I didn't know about this kickstarter campaign (which was already over 6 months old by that point) until one of the others here emailed me after he remembered a reply I posted almost TWO YEARS ago on this forum, on his thread about the fact I am one of the few - an original Elite player badgeholder - and I only posted that reply by chance (I had to register to do it) as I had googled again about the badge and got his original post about being the competition winner. Point being I am a diehard FAN of the Elite franchise and I still had no idea E4 had gone from "once upon a never" to "give us some cash and we'll make it".
I'd given up on ever seeing E4, which means that there's a high chance there are other previous spacesim fans who have moved on, grown up, got lives and kids n such who are utterly unaware of ED's development, but who might buy it once it hits the mainstream press in a fit of childhood (or otherwise) nostalgia.
Your dogged determination to cling to the fallacy that 360k is all there is for the spacesim cake, while laudable, is frankly borderline OCD and still wrong. Now that's the last time I'm going to try to say this in the politest possible way I know how.
Except nobody has wanted that. Have you not read the bloody thread?
We want three Frontier delivered MAIN groups. Ironman (is there already) and "All" split into PvP and PvE.
Moving between groups PvP and PvE should be possible, just not instantly in flight but for example on station or whatever. But first there needs to be split of "All" into PvP and PvE.
"Just PvP" group will turn into a "bring more" arms race or be killed. When game death has a penalty you won't get those cannon fodder PvE'ers that are ok with being killed over and over and over and over, such as you get in battlegrounds and arena's. PvP servers will become the domain of the blob, players that band together for guaranteed superiority - I've seen that and it's not good for anyone, PvPer's feel they have no choice but to do it or die, and PvE'ers who are trying a bit of PvP action won't come back more than a few times, if that. It will stagnate.
By the way, growth of Eve Online has been quite static lately. And it has lots of multiaccount players. So amount of people and subscriptions can lie quite a bit.
Eve might have been static in very recent times, but I know that even during the shortish period I have been away, reports of population have gone up. Is CCP lying? Who knows;
but you do know that exaggerated claims in advertising is illegal right? Something I'm certain CCP will be aware of and thus avoid - at worst it's a minor stretch to include ALL accounts including the multiples; although multiple accounts have been active in Eve almost since inception, and thus factored in on all previous population reports too. The percentage of alternates has gone up of course, but I greatly doubt if there has been a sudden massive surge of existing players buying ever more accounts - thus leaving just ONE option, that the higher numbers are from NEW players (because even old inactive accounts are still in the system already), a limited few of which may be running alternate accounts, but think on this; even if you went at breakneck speed and managed to get to a stage of having monthly sustained disposable income of 300 mil isk, (the cost of the plex to pay for the alternate account) inside of 6-8 months normal playtime (which I can assure you is an almost superhuman feat without expert help), only a few out of every hundred manage it, and running just 1 account in Eve can become a fulltime job on it's own.
I believe you should have read this thread more closely, as your facts have been mostly dealt with repeatedly.
I've had to repeat myself as some seem to have not read or fully understood the thread, or points made therein *cough*, plus I've continually tried various ways to make my points in the hope that one of them might actually get through - Like I've had to again in this one.
I understand some won't like my comments or ideas, but the longterm survival of the franchise is all I'm interested in, now that the dream looks to become a reality. Whether you believe and understand what I write or not, regardless of if you agree or not
all of it is based on truth and experience - I have been a gamer since the binatone machine - to mean I started playing Pong and "shoot the dot" on the TV at home in the 70's and didn't stop, through the Intellivision console machine, BBC Micro and pretty much every console since - with "modern PC" (intel 80486 machine lol) gaming running alongside that for .... 22 years since the days of F117 Stealth Fighter sim (1991), Transport Tycoon by Chris Sawyer (who later worked on Frontier) and X-Wing.
I have made an almost lifelong career of sorts out of playing games, I have played all types extensively, I have been involved in the multiplayer scene for almost 15 years now; I have been involved with almost a dozen different MMO's, some of which I have played for many years; several side by side, and was there at the launch of many (right now on my machine I have WoW, Lotro, Rift, Evochron, Fallen Earth, Eve Online and Age of Conan installed and up to date). I have personally met hundreds of RL human players and witnessed the full gamut of what they are capable of when they are in a virtual world whereby almost everything they do harms none.
This is the experience I bring to what I say and from where I can look across the horizon to see how things might go - I've seen all the paths and the endings before, Humans are, after all, pretty predictable and while all the basic ingredients are the same the only Souffles that rise are the ones baked properly, the rest...... pffft.
How I've never worked in this industry is something I often ponder. But there's still time, I hope.
