its a very interesting article
and i agree with it, we all change as we play. its interesting to look at the different stages. i've been thru most of those stages and its a fact that the eager enthusiastic fanboys of today will be the bitter pissed players in a few years, thats the way of teh cycle i guess
i dunno if the real cash economy separates us from other games from a timing pov, i know plenty of peeps who have played wow for over 3 years and a couple of ppl who have been into eve for a couple of years. thats not wildly different to ppl here playing 5 years etc, but as a ratio of active players/time played i am sure
eu is much much higher than other games due to the much smaller playerbase
of course the big difference is how we are tied in, as all our items have real value its actualy a clever way of keeping ppl in the game. it certainly makes leaving
eu harder(and longer) than other games imo. they just cancel a subscription and we have to launch a sales campaign so the higher skilled ur avatar gets the more u are "tied in"
overall i think the content updates are a massive plus for
eu. of course vus are a lot less frequent than they used to be(we were once told 2 per month). but still there are generaly a lot more updates than ur average subscription game
the flip side is player retention, while
eu tends to hold players longer its retention rate is shocking, mostly due to the inacurate marketing imo, i honestly think if
eu was marketed for what it is, instead of what it could one day be, then ppl woulnt leave as fast... or at least they would know what they were letting themselves in for when they arrive at pa... but thats another issue for another day
i love ur last comment tho, about monopoly money
makes me think maybe its not just the player content i mentioned, i know when i play poker with real cash or with play money my style of play is totaly different. so playing
eu with play cash would sound great but prolly become pretty boring pretty fast