Usually, the move of an established MMORPG to some sort of freemium or free-to-play business model results in an initial surge of new players flooding into a game. So far, all indications available to the public show that EVE Online is experiencing the same phenomenon over the first three days of the introduction of the Alpha and Omega clone sets.
The source of the following information is Chribba's Eve-Offline.net. According to the site, EVE's Tranquility shard has seen over 10,000 characters created in a single day six times. Those dates are:
16-Nov-16: 26,543
17-Nov-16: 19,463
15-Nov-16: 17,815
06-May-16: 14,157
30-Jan-14: 11,696
20-Aug-16: 10,109
Note that the top three dates are the first three dates of the Ascension expansion. But the list also shows that a lot of character creation does not necessarily result in long term concurrent usage, as two more of the top six character creation dates also occurred during 2016.
But the number of players online is up. Here are the peak concurrent usage numbers over the past four days.
14-Nov-16: 29,117
15-Nov-16: 36,620
16-Nov-16: 38,221
17-Nov-16: 39,496
Anecdotally, I can report from the numbers in Rookie Chat, which is made up of all characters online less than 30 days old, that new characters seem to make up 10-15% of all logged in characters. This, to use a technical term, is a good thing.
Personally, on Sunday I expect the PCU number to exceed the mark for 2015 (45,637) and exceed 50,000 for the first time since around March 2014. The question is whether CCP has improved the new player experience enough so that a sizable portion of the players stick around.
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