These forums are a toxic environment most of the time, it is as simple as that.
Eve has had balance issues, you make changes to balance and it upsets people, for example I used to gun mine in Stain and CCP massively nerfed the reprocessing rates, that screwed me over, followed up by removing the D-scan from Combat Recons, and yes I made my position clear and then dropped the game for a while. The entire reason I was in Stain was that the Dominion system of sov had made the game lop sided to benefit massive power blocks jumping from one end of the map to the other. Smaller alliances did not dare use their fun toys. They could attack when they wanted and often did in the TZ when the alliance they were attacking had no coverage.
So CCP made a change, they made the sov TZ related but with a spread based on ADM, it works, now perhaps it would be better to have something at the end to shoot, but it has set the scene for smaller groups. Furthermore they added fatigue and reduced range, that hurt me again in Stain, I found my logistics were too difficult, so got fed up waiting for suitable WH’s or having to use a single system with a kick out station for the JF. So I went to hisec waited for the sov system to work or not then joined an Au TZ alliance which best suited my game time.
The attacker has to form up in the defenders TZ, now recently my alliance went after Fraternity, they moved their timers so we could not attack them without staying up late at night, our objective was to punish them for attacking our Fortizr in MB, which we achieved. Have I got salty because they TZ tanked us, no, because other people could attack them and we had fun with some decent battles.
I have been in fights with some pretty damn good fleet compositions without it being ruined by bored PL players coming in with overwhelming force for example, in fact because of the current structure of sov we defeated PL, though I do recognise that had they brought their supers south we could have lost.
So a lot of people are moaning about the fact that they cannot attack people when they play, so if they cannot do it why do they expect the defender to defend when they attack. I accept that I have to look for content in my TZ.
The only thing that gets me is that the structures that are placed in sov space with TZ tanking, I would link the on-lining and initial two weeks to the defenders TZ.
Eve is absolutely great now for mid sized fleet combat, those not getting it need to move on and find what is currently great about this game. And I can tell you that using capitals now is so much better than it used to be.
EDIT: To say I have it backwards, I have seen too many past events when big alliances came in and stomped someones sov when they could not defend it at all as it was outside their TZ and then said arrogantly get better at Eve, well now the attacker has to do that and many of them don’t like it. The issue is that I have been playing since 2009, while I did not actually get involved in the POS based sov combat I was around enough to understand it. Dominion ruined the game, as did the Tech imbalance, and making mining ships so easy to destroy with a single destroyer. I want to play a hard game that is tough in all areas, not something that people can pretend to be hard core when they are not…
you take it personally!