The Seven Month Itch

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.

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.

“Is this all there is ?”

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.

So what can you do about this ?

Try something different than what you have been doing:
• Set a long skill and take a break, you’ll be back :).
• if you have been using missiles, get the skills for gunnery and a gunboat
• 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
• discuss the issue with your corp, maybe there are other people that feel the same way and make plans to do something else
• this is probably tough, as you might have grown attached to your current corp, but you might want to look for another corp that’s different from the one you’re in now. Might require some corphopping to find one that fits you
• go to 0.0 either with your corp or join an alliance / corp that’s in 0.0

What could CCP do ?
• Make missions / PVE more exciting. I know this is not the direction that CCP wants to follow. 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.
• 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.
• Make 0.0 more accessible. Too many gatecamps make it very hard to travel there, if you’re not part of some big alliance. But then when you’re there with no friends and no help, it’s hard to live out there. So I am not sure how to improve this situation.

So there it is, my thoughts on the seven month itch.

*update* : 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.

This post has been discussed on ep. 4 of the Drone Bay Active podcast !