BIG WALL OF TEXT TIME
So I thought this would be a fun little thing for me to do to pass the time and maybe someone else’s who’s bored and want something pointless to read. When you spend 8-11 hours a day driving over the road and you’re stuck at some truck stop or rest area out in the middle of nowhere, there’s not much to do. I first tried out EVE back in 2012, stopped playing for a fe wyears until about 2016 and then played until the start of 2020 when the accumulation of updates ruined the game for me. So grab yourself a nice hot cup of coffee, sit in that chair, and let me recite the tale of one mad Pole who came, saw, and retired from yet another fun online game turned irritant.
Before we start the show I am no stranger to playing online games that started off fun and eventually turned into ■■■■. The only exception to this would be Runescape. I left that game because I didn’t find grinding away for hours to be of any fun and I absolutely hated the PVP side of that game ever since they added the Barrows set (and that god damn ice barrage spam). My loss of interest was more of a change in my taste of entertainment than changes to the game itself.
Okay, onto the main story. It started back in 2012 with a new, lone capsuleer who joined the esteemed ranks of the immortals for the first time. His name was Kato, and he was eagar to strike out riches and fortune in the stars. Unfortunately the first few months were more akin to flailing about like a fish out of water than a grueling journey to becoming a competent captain of his ship. Especially when the first ship given to him was blown up on accident by him pressing the self-destruct button without realizing it and then staring at his pod floating in space after the inevitable big boom. Yes, that was my first fifteen minutes of the game. I unintentionally blew myself up because I didn’t know what the ■■■■ I was doing.
I had at least two aspirations when I began. The first was to fly a carrier. I guess it’s because I’m an RTS fan but the idea of ‘commanding’ small squadrons of fighters just appealed to me for some reason. How would I get to that point? I was going to be a space trucker and haul goods from station to station. Now that plan had a bit of snag of it’s own. I was dirt poor and didn’t have a merchant ship. I did have a navitas and a few mining lasers lying about so I figured I was going to mine the minerals and build it myself. I mined away until I could sell enough ore to afford a venture. I got chased away a few times by the local rats which prompt me to obtain a few basic drones to keep me safe from them and I was otherwise left alone to do my own thing. I never saw the likes of any of the galaxy’s scumbags which was a good thing. Had one of those jackwagons shown up during those early days I probably would’ve decided the game wasn’t worth the effort and quit before I even started. There’s much better ways to waste my time than competing with sweatlords who makes it a goal in life to be, well, assholes to everyone they meet.
Instead I ended up conversing with two random gentlemen of which one of them gave me an old retriever of his. The only catch was that it was stuck in a high-sec pocket but if I could get it out of there, it was mine to keep. So foolishly I skilled up to fly barges, flew out to the station, picked it up, and flew it back. There’s a guardian angle for fools because I somehow returned without being killed though one sleepy pirate did make a feeble attempt to lock onto the ship as I was warping away. I spent a little more time mining away with this ship before I couldn’t play anymore due to financial issues.
I didn’t have any desire to talk to or join other players just because I was aware upon joining the game just how harsh and unforgiving the playerbase was and I wanted to be left alone while I struggled with the game’s mechanics. This is kind of a running theme with me. I can play team-based games but if there’s a role that allows me to run on my own and otherwise be left the ■■■■ alone, I’ll be a happy camper.
Fast forward to 2016 and I was re-introduced to the game through an aquaintence in Planetside 2. PS2’s claim to fame is online, large-scale warfare and at the time I was an officer in a rather large outfit. One of the sergeants got the idea of gathering some fellow outfit members and starting a new corp in EVE. I was asked to tag along and since I had money and was interested in playing again, I took him up on the offer. I logged in for the first time in years and for some reason I was in Amarr space and all my stuff was in Gallente space and I can’t recall why the hell I would do that, so I gathered my stuff and headed to the Tash-Murkon region. The corp had chosen a dead-end system to start off, figuring it was far enough out of the way that nobody would really bother us and still close enough to a major market that we could still transport goods in and out of the area with relative ease. I mined away to earn a living while working on skill points. I lost quite a few mining barges due to setting up and then forgetting to deploy drones to kill the rats that would show up when I went afk to run other chores/jobs but I overall earned more isk than I lost. I thought I would be cheeky at one point and try to mine in the low-sec pocket next door, thinking I would be able to warp out if danger showed up. Then a stratios uncloaked next to my vessel. Didn’t try that stunt again.
Eventually the corp was invited to join an alliance in Null-sec, Hell’s Sirens. My first experience of null sec was not a positive one. We moved into a backwater station in dronelanes called the Stormcrow’s Nest, one of the rare sov space NPC stations at the time. I set to work obtaining the components for a simple ratting dominix and would spent most of my time dealing with the local drone infestation with few interruptions since we were apparently in a low-traveled system. There was one major battle that occured but I had no idea what the ■■■■ I was doing and ended up losing two ships without any idea as to what happened and it left me with such a bitter taste in my mouth I refused to respond to any other fleet actions. The rest of my time was spent quietly ratting way with one exceptional day.
At the time I would haul any salvage goods away to market in High-sec. I had a Nereus which I would use to make the risky journey, moving a load into high-sec and then transporting empties back. Was cautious enough that I never lost a merchant ship but I came close. During one of my trips, I had a sabre jump my ship. I called for help, deployed drones and began fleeing towards the gate. It should’ve been an easy kill for the sabre but for some dumb reason he got distracted by the shiny T1 hobgoblins poking at him and spent his time trying to shoot them down. Eventually the response fleet arrived, chased the sabre away, and I made the rest of the journey without incident. Once in high-sec, I decided to fit a blaster onto the ship, figuring if I get jumped again I could at least give the pirate a black eye. Lo and behold, I get jumped, by another sabre, in the exact same system. At this point I was pissed off so I pulled a Piorun, turned on the afterburner, and charged the sabre blasting away with everything I had, and the sabre turned and ran. I had no tackle equipment on the ship but I speculate he got cold feet and decided to play it safe because how often do you get an armed merchant ship in EVE, charging you, screaming and shooting away like a lunatic? The response fleet showed up but by then the action was over. The nereus would go on to serve various roles mainly as an armed merchant hauling high value goods until I was able to retire it with its covert ops counterpart. Now it’s sitting somewhere in a high-sec drydock having serving a successfull career.
Eventually the sgt. who brought us into EVE abandoned us without a trace and the rest of the corp would quietly move back to high-sec, figuring it’s better to get out now instead of under heavy fire. Those of us that remaind stayed in Amarr space, picking out a 0.5 system somewhat close to Amarr Prime and still giving us access to minerals and a low-sec pocket. There wasn’t much else that happened other than one random lone-wolf wardeccer who bothered to do his homework, figured out what system we were in and then wardec us with a hope of jumping a mining ship the minute the war. I guess it didn’t occur to him the miners he scoped out also spent time playing a different war game and were just as eager to fight as he apparently was eagar to score himself an easy kill. Long story short, he decided to camp out in Amarr and nothing happened.
We were eventually approached by a wormhole corp and invited to join their “unofficial” alliance. The wormhole was a C2 with a high-sec and a C3 static and the ‘alliance’ was actually comprised of several individual corps living in the same wormhole. This was done to avoid having the entire wormhole group wardecced at the same time so at least somebody could still get supplies without fear of gankers. It was in the wormhole that I was taught how to explore, how to properly fit ships and, more importantly, how to fight. I got my first real taste of blood in J-space and I loved it. Wormholes have a unique appeal to me. It was almost submarine warfare with everyone flying about in cloaked ship, using d-scan like a sonar to detect activity and if a ship is uncloaked there was always the what-if game of asking yourself is he alone? Are his friends nearby? I would get involved in numerous skirmishes and I’ll note a few exceptional or silly ones.
There was another time where we were involved in a fight in which I was the bait with a lone hyperion fighting sleepers. This escalated into a lenthy series of skirmishes for several hours and during all of this some random idiot in our alliance decided this was a good time to jump through the combat zone in an uncloaked merchant ship full of valuables, disregarding all warnings to stay docked until the danger was over. He somehow got through without being attacked. Guardian angel for fools.
Another battle involved a nullsec alliance closing a wormhole. We decided to attack the rolling battleship which prompted a fleet response and in all this chaos nobody lost a ship, the wormhole collapsed and one of our ships got stuck on the nullsec side. Now this normally wasn’t a big thing for us because oh well, look for another way home. The nullsec guys made it such a big deal that one wormholer was stuck on their side that they created a huge scene about it, going to defcon one and pulling out everything you’d expect to be deployed to fight a capital fleet. Our wormholer found it so amusing he actually spent the next week trolling about in their space, never getting a kill but amused at the overreaction he got from the homesteaders every time he logged in. He did eventually get bored and worked his way back home.
The wormhole alliance would eventually fall apart and we left back to high-sec again. We found a different 0.5 system in Amarr space and set up a new home while we looked for a wormhole for ourselves. We’d eventually find a C2 similar to what we had before.
Once we were set up in our new home, we had a very simple operation going on with basic industry moving along and a plan to build larger structures inside the wormhole. The problem came with recruiting people into the wormhole, both with trying to vet who wanted to join and trying to convince people that wormhole life was fun. We tried to deploy an azbel but it was jumped by a larger fleet than we had the ability to fight, not to say that we didn’t try. Didn’t help that the scumbags we were fighting were equally dishonorable and called in friends to jump our fleet after agreeing to a ‘gentleman’s’ fleet duel. By random chance I managed to follow one of those bastard back to his home system a few weeks later and trolled their system for a couple of weeks. They were also not very competent at combat by themselves as I watched at one point a bunch of them deploy in random ships with half of them returning in pods. I later found out they tried to jump a ratting carrier in J-space and discovered the hard way just how much T2 fighters hurt. Back in our wormhole, things slowly declined until there were just three of us remaining. Some bastard with half a dozen alts eventually showed up apparently with the idea of kicking us out and setting up his personal feifdom in the wormhole. We didn’t have firepower to deal with his spider-tanked domnis so my corp leader sprung another idea. What a shame it would be if somebody was to let slip the location and time that spider-tanked fleet of his would be in action to a few wormhole corps eagar for an easy kill. The amount of ■■■■-talk and explosions as his alt fleet was anihalated was glorious. I went with the remainder of my corp back to high-sec.
My time back in high-sec was spend mulling about, running some excursions to gain experience in large fleet battles and logi support practice in a semi-controlled and high-stakes environment and occasionally harassing pirate ships. We kept looking for new wormholes to settle in but with just a handful of us left, unless our numbers increased, there was no real plan to return to J-space only to be kicked back out again.
We’d eventually get back into nullsec under the wing of Intrepid Crossing. There I got to be taught some of the more intricate things about industry and began to learn proper fleet battles which I never experienced during my wormhole time. I still had an itch to explore and hunt so I spent much of my time as a wormhole scout, seeking out routes to high-sec and looking for targets of opportunity. I also had my favorite battle at this time. There was a Praxis roaming around and I was bored and looking for something for my old blaster-fit proteus to fight so I chose to hunt this ship. I would be the first to make contact with the ship and a battle ensued. The fight turned out to be a close one. The praxis was armed with rapid heavies and a compliment of berserker drones which nearly killed my ship. I was running a double-rep fit proteus which could repair itself indefinitely and was almost impossible to neut out. The problem was the fit had a massive explosive hole and the berserkers took full advantage of that. I was able to kill enough berserkers to allow my repair modules to catch up and began to win the battle when a fleet including a nid showed up to hog the glory. Nonetheless, it was a close battle and it was one of the rare moments where I had genuine fun in an all-or-nothing, in-your-face brawl mano-a-mano. There was a second battle like that I had with a thorax vs my vagabond. The thorax was well-fitted and well-flown because we brawled at point blank range for nearly twenty minutes until the thorax ran out of cap boosters and couldn’t keep up the repair. You don’t get good brawling battles in EVE. Everyone’s too busy kiting each other, flying around at 1200 km/s, trying trick-shots and yelling dumb things at each other while staring at each other’s ships.
Now I was enjoying myself out in nullsec doing a little bit of everything, occasionally going back to hi-sec whenever there’s no wardecs to run epic arcs, wormhole diving, winning fights, losing some, just having a generally good time. Then CCP decided they’ll start making changes to the game which changed the whole experience from enjoyable to frustrating. So I stopped playing.
I had a few things going on which I’ll give a little more detail on. So first is combat ships. I had a unique mix of combat-ready vessels. Some of them were alliance fleet based, usually the cheap ships that I didn’t care about losing. Then I had a couple higher-end combat ships that were my primary exploration vessels. I had an astero with 12 confirmed kills on its hull and a stratios with a few of its own. There was the proteus but it rarely saw combat especially after the numerous nerfs the ships recieved (you know that whole idea of losing skill points when the ship dies? Yeah, not appealing in the slightest when the ship had been significantly weakened by the devs) and a few other odd-and-ends which were more experiments than anything else, like the vagabond I mentioned earlier. I also made an effort to equip most of my ratting vessels to be ready to fight an intruder if need be, with the only exepction being a railgun-fit battleship because the fit was so unusual and required so much space there wasn’t room to equip modules needed to fight other players.
Next was the ratting side. Yes, I had a carrier, which was one of the goals I had in EVE when I started back in 2012. It just took 6 years to reach it. I did rat with it and I actually enjoyed it due to the increased difficulty of managing the fighter squadrons to both maximize their firepower and keep them from dying and the reward from that made the challenge a good pay-off. I just almost never used the thing due to the frequency of pirates roaming the area. Instead, I had a few battleships for ratting purposes. It started with a railgun fit hyperion and eventually became a laser-fit armageddon when resources for ammunition became an issue with the hyperion. There was also a rattlesnake I owned which underwent several considerable modifications after a very close call with a loki and two sabres to the point where it was actually a pvp ship being used in a pve setting.
Then there was mining. I didn’t directly participate in alliance mining ops because they almost always happened when I was offline and the few times they coincided with my play time I was usually away on scouting missions or idling about in a combat ship waiting to respond to threats. That being said, I had a porpoise and an orca along with one alt in a procurer. The porp and orca were both combat-fits along with the procurer with the idea that anyone who did find and catch the ships would at the very least get a black eye or even get themselves killed. The duo would go to obscure belts and mine away for a few hours once a week.
The minerals mined would go to the little industry I did. So since drone lands don’t drop modules that can be recycled into minerals, I have to mine my own if I want to build things. What did I build? T1 hybrid ammo for myself and to seed the local marketplace with simple ammo, and various other random T1 modules and drones which I would put for sale at the local marketplace. The whole idea of that was to seed the market with cheap and basic modules, drones, and ammo so players who needed them didn’t have to travel so far to buy them. It gave me something to do during downtimes and I had some satisfaction in producing these goods with minerals I mined myself and producing goods that other players were buying to use on their ships. I mucked with PI for a bit in Null but decided it wasn’t worth the hassle and stopped because I was having absolutely no fun whatsoever running PI colonies.
So what changes happened that ultimately made this game no fun anymore? This wasn’t something that happened overnight or with one update but due to a multitude of updates that, by themselves, weren’t a big problem but when combined together, they became more trouble than it’s worth. We’ll start with industry and mining. So I wasn’t running a multi-billion isk operation here. It was essentially the equivalent of a mom-and-pop store, mining small amounts of minerals to create simple goods for sale or use on my own ships, as was the case with the hybrid ammo. When the mineral composition of the rocks themselves was changed, all of a sudden I had no ability to mine the minerals needed to produce the modules or ammo myself. Doing so would require adding the following steps;
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- Scouting out and establishing opertions in high sec and low sec, establishing ships and either clones at an accessible clone bay that I know I won’t be shut out of or taking the time to fly out there myself.
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- Establishing the necessary ships (and spares for lowsec) to mine minerals.
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- Mining in low-sec areas with absolutely no friendly support nearby.
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- Now figuring out how to get the minerals back to my home station deep in nullsec without losing the merchant ship and the cargo with it.
All of this will take many hours of time to scout, set up and, more importantly, would prevent me from participating in alliance ops (due to being so far away from home) along with making me unnecessarily vulnerable to every sweatlord in low-sec looking for an easy kill. There’s no fun in it for me so I refuse to play along CCP’s new rules. Buying minerals is out of the question since I still have to figure out how to transport the stuff back home safely. It also adds considerable cost to goods I was trying to sell relatively cheap because I was trying to seed the market to encourage players to use it instead of doing it just for a profit (because there’s little profit to be made with T1 items, especially when compared to ratting, it was just something I wanted to do). In the end, I’ve actually sold off all my mining ships because I can’t do what I want to do with them anymore, which is mining the minerals I need to use locally, and CCP has made it abundantly clear they won’t do a damn thing to reverse it. So (once again), Devs doing a better job killing off my industry side-show than what even the most determind troll and sweatlords couldn’t.
Then comes ratting and pvp combat since they’re both intertwined with each other. Normally I would be ratting or mining nearby in alliance space so that if a threat was spotted, I could quickly return home and hop into a combat-ready vessel that the acting FC called for and await further instructions. More often than not, I would take the roll of a scout in an astero or stratios and not be directly involved in the fighting, or the fighting would be done by the time I get there. While getting into a battle was nice, I also preferred to be able to operate independently from the rest of the fleet, and taking on a cloaky scout role fit the bill. If there was a wormhole in any alliance-held system, I would be eagar to explore it to find targets of opportunity or an easy path to high-sec. There was one time where I jumped into a fresh wormhole to find a fleet forming up on the other side. My unannounced appearance threw everything into chaos as the enemy fleet first tried to catch my astero and then jumped the wormhole to try to catch any unsuspecting ratters or miners since they knew I was already sounding the alarm. Nobody was killed and they shut the wormhole, resulting in a two-hour long journey back home for me. I ended up in every corner of New Eden jumping into God knows how many wormholes before finally finding one close enough home to slow-boat the rest of the way.
The change to the ratting mechanics became an issue for both ratting and pvp in several ways. The obvious beef ratters have with the whole ESS system was that their isk was being arbitrarily stolen from them and put into a random vault that anyone could access. This vault also created issues for everyone because if a raider shows up and nobody wants to fight him or nobody is capable of fighting the raider, everyone ends up wasting a ton of time with the raider idling in the ESS hoping somebody will show up, getting no fights and wasting both his own and the ratter’s time instead of moving on quickly to find other targets. Most raiders will also flee the moment they see a response fleet showing up because they have plenty of time and warning to do so, being that the reponse fleet still has to waste time using an accelleration gate which allows even the dullest of raiders plenty of time to flee from the fastest of tacklers. ESS also creates an issue in that the new meta I saw forming was even more extreme forms of kiting and sniping since some groups will take full advantage of the fact that everyone entering an ESS will appear in the exact same spot and cannot warp away so they’ll intentionally jump into one, set up a trap, and just wait. It became very quick and obvious who and what was being used for these scenarios, which results in even more time wasted for all parties involved.
Part of the reason I do ratting is to waste time and also to obtain isk needed to fun other things. It also gave me something to do until something shows up wanting to fight. The usual way it used to go was an enemy ship or fleet would be spotted roaming around, a quick decision was made with alliance FC on if we would engage or not, and then players docked up, a fleet was formed to intercept the enemy fleet, or in some cases a bait ship would be placed. I personally loved the bait ship routine since most raiders want an easy kill and aren’t actually interested in a fight. What the ESS did was change this dynamic, often for the worse due to the aformentioned reasons listed above, resulting in fewer battles due to either one side having an easy time fleeing or the other side spotting an obvious trap and unwilling to pointlessly waste ships flying into it.
This by itself was a nuisance but I didn’t consider it an issue. However, combined with the filaments, it becomes a toxic combination that kills encounters with players raiding a system. If I can use one comparison, it’s just like the combination of the Promethian Knigh’s fast shield recharge rate and the ability to ■■■■■■■ teleport whenver it wants in Halo 4 in Legendary difficulty. Both problems by themselves can be handled without a huge hassle but when combined it created an infurating enemy to fight and it artificially extended encounters with promethians unnecessarily and the whole thing is not fun to play.
I get why flaments were added to begin with. It allows a raiding party to potentially bypass all of the early warning devices a nullsec bloc might set up without relying on wormholes and striking at otherwise untouchable targets. The problem is that the raiders instead use it as a ‘get out of jail free’ card. Basically, you’re an idiot not to have a filament when raiding because under normal circumstances you shouldn’t be dying due to mistakes that would otherwise spell the doom of your ship. It basically turned any potential PVP encounter for me into a boring game where either it’s a fleet the current available ships can’t handle or the enemy ship/fleet simply runs around the system until their filament timer runs its course and they teleport away scot-free. It creates one-sided fights where one side can simply whip out this card and run away, leaving the other side feeling cheated out of a battle or a kill. Getting cheated out of a kill. It’s the reason why there’s rarely battles between war-decced groups in high-sec. The wardeccers often abuse the living ■■■■ out of the high-sec mechanics to the point where nobody wants to fight them because even if you get the upper hand, they’ll find something else to abuse and get away scot-free. It’s comparable the whole observation of mice playing. If one mouse keeps winning and doesn’t let the other mouse win now and then, the other mouse will eventually not want to play anymore.
About the only thing I had left going for me was exploration but it was becoming obvious the more I explored that wormhole life was dying. I almost never ran across even a glimpse of life outside of the big-time sweatlords in their C5 wormholes with Nullsec statics. Hell I was far more comfortable flying an unarmed, slow merchant ship ladened with billions of isk through a wormhole chain four to five jumps long than I was flying a covert-ops equipped one through the lowsec corridor leading in and out of the area I lived in, that’s how bloody safe I felt in wormholes which wasn’t something I ever thought possible when I began wormhole life. The best perception I could get from what I gathered is that wormholes have been suffering from a mix of a decreasing population base and a cabal of what are really just wannabe-nullsec assholes ‘claiming’ various wormholes and aggressively defending them while putting up no structures of their own or demanding tribute for somebody to ‘rent’ the wormhole. Basically, a bunch of tryhards turning J-space into a crappier version of Nullsec, contributing to the decline of activity in the galaxy as a whole.
I never went to any of the new triglavian space because I see absolutely no fun in the endeavor. Fighting triglavian rats plus a bunch of sweatlords at the same time without any of the comforts of no local like I can get with J-space does not sound appealing. I’d rather play Halo 2 on Legendary with all the enemies turned into jackal snipers than deal with trig space.
CCP also decided to muck around with stuff that just makes me ask the question “Okay but why though?” Things like changes to the UI such as moving the scanning button from right to left. Okay, what the ■■■■ was so wrong with it in the first place (that wasn’t addressed for the last decade) that suddenly warranted this change? Other changes I was seeing with the UI were simply throwing up red flags in my mind because a lot of these visual changes or swapping of menus to things like the character sheet (or that bloody agency crap) just screamed “mobile game trash” in my head. It’s got to be a personal preference thing with me but shiny and flashy menus that add more clicks and waste more time just to reach the same information I could’ve accessed faster and easier in the past becomes very annoying very quickly.
When all these things become combined together, it created the question in my head “Am I really having any fun with this game anymore?” After thinking it out, the answer was a resounding “No!” There are so many other games out there that are challenging and fun that I’d rather play on my free time than the rotting pie that was forming in front of my eyes. Hell, if I want that space game itch, I can go play older games that I still have the original CDs for. I play games for the challenge, for the fun, and pulling off a victory by overcoming a challenging obstacle in such a way that I don’t feel cheated due to ■■■■■■■■ game mechanics is a reason I play the games that I enjoy. In general I can expect most older singleplayer games to be stable and not change over the years, letting me return to enjoy another fun session. Multiplayer-only games like EVE, Runescape or Planetside 2 are very often subject to change to the point where I could return far later and find changes that’ll either intrigue me to stay or convince me to never come back. So far, EVE is turning into the latter for me. A real shame.
So there’s my story, hope you enjoyed it. Go away now.
