CCP, Wake Up — You Can't Sell a Sinking Ship

Communications Center General Discussion
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CCP, Wake Up — You Can’t Sell a Sinking Ship

I’ve been playing EVE Online since 2008. That’s over 17 years of my life poured into this universe—not just grinding missions or building ships, but becoming part of something that felt bigger than a game. I remember when PLEX cost 386 million ISK for a month’s game time. I remember belt ratting in null-sec, warping from belt to belt, popping battleships and leaving the frigates behind. I remember when you could steal from jettisoned cargo without getting suspect flags, back when ninja salvaging was a whole playstyle before CCP overhauled the crime system. I was there when Goons bought up Jita after their leader got banned for out-of-game behavior.

EVE was never just another MMO for me. It was this incredible living organism where player actions actually mattered, where politics and economics felt real, where you could spend months planning something that would reshape entire regions. Watching what CCP is doing now just breaks my heart.

EVE Frontier: Missing the Point Entirely

Look, I tried Frontier. Really tried. Spent about fifteen minutes with it before I realized this wasn’t made for players like me. It’s not the graphics or bugs that bothered me—it’s that the whole thing feels soulless. Like someone took a checklist of trendy gaming mechanics (blockchain! survival! physics!) and mashed them together without understanding what made EVE special in the first place.

The resource grinding feels tedious. The crystal gating is annoying. The whole thing screams “we’re chasing the latest trend” instead of “we’re building on 20 years of player stories.” And they want me to pay $30-40 a month for this? After I’ve already invested nearly two decades in their other game? Back when PLEX was under 400 million, that felt reasonable. Now they want premium pricing for a disconnected experience that ignores everything that made EVE work.

It’s like CCP forgot that their strength was never flashy mechanics—it was creating a space where emergent gameplay could flourish.

Where This Is All Heading

I hate being the doom-and-gloom guy, but I’ve seen this pattern before in other games:

Next year or two, Frontier launches to mixed reviews. The blockchain angle doesn’t catch fire like they hoped. Players try it, get bored, leave. CCP starts frantically patching things that should have been designed properly from the start.

Meanwhile, EVE Online gets less attention. Fewer updates, smaller teams. Those of us who’ve been around forever start getting frustrated. The community that took decades to build starts fragmenting.

Eventually Frontier either becomes this tiny niche thing or just gets quietly shut down. CCP tries to win back the EVE playerbase, but by then trust is shot.

Without some serious soul-searching about what they’re actually good at, CCP becomes another studio that had something amazing and threw it away chasing quick money.

What They’re Missing

Here’s the thing—EVE worked because it respected us. It trusted players to create their own content, their own drama, their own meaning. It gave us tools and got out of the way. The best EVE stories aren’t about game mechanics; they’re about human beings doing incredible, terrible, beautiful things to each other in a virtual universe that felt consequential.

Frontier doesn’t have that. It’s just another survival game with cryptocurrency sprinkled on top.

I’m not even angry at this point. I’m just sad. I know what EVE Online could still become with the right focus and investment. Instead, I’m watching CCP chase trends that’ll be forgotten in two years while the thing that made them special slowly withers.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Frontier will surprise everyone. But right now, it feels like watching someone sell their childhood home to buy lottery tickets.

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Another great essay by ChatGPT.

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Thankfully EF is funded by investment money, CCP were just paid to make the blockchain abomination, mainly because hilmar has probably the longest lasting crypto boner that i have witnessed in any man

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Maybe you are poisoning the well…and ironically it is posts such as yours that deter people. There’s really nothing fundamentally wrong with EVE, so perhaps you should be talking it up rather than talking it down. That is how you get more players.

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you remind me of a certain guy that was famous to using chatgpt and not playing the game while ratting about it :slight_smile:

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This is Eve. Our ships are in space. They can’t sink.

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There’s only so much that can be done to expand EVE, it’s not like in WoW where they can design new zones, sprinkle them with quests and call it an expansion, forcing you to grind it after suddenly being demoted to max level minus 10.

I started this game in 2004, took a very long break and was surprised with how little they created since I left. Abyss, wormholes (genius idea btw, too bad it’s under developed), PI, upwell structures, you name it. All in all, it’s not a lot. Actually, it’s very little for a studio with so many resources.

The reason is the most scarce resource in the industry is imagination. It’s incredibly hard to come up with new ideas. There are other reasons why all other CCP projects failed but creativity, IMO, is the main one.

Now, to prove me wrong, all they have to do is create a post-capital ship class, meaning it eats dreads for breakfast, which can only obtained with a new currency, putting everybody on a level playing field. Hmm… that kind looks like the WoW expansion thing, doesn’t it?

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curious how you think its underdeveloped?

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People seem to think OP is talking about EVE, he is not.

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You are wrong.

I live in a small waterfront town. Lots of fisherman hit the marker buoys and sink their ship. They still sell them.

Welcome to Eve Online!

Hmm ok then … Welcome back?

I remember when gas cost 69¢ per gallon. I am on the same page with you there.

Never talk politics, since my girl lost the last election.

Good! I hate all those guys telling me the world is going to end in 2012.

Maybe after this October, it won’t be theirs to sell. Somewhere around the end of October is the Korean national corporate tax deadline. My friends disagree, but I think that is when Pearl Abyss will officially announce what they plan to do with CCP in 2026. When they foreclose on that massive loan, it will be either put up on the block for sale or liquidated. At that point, CCP can’t do much but look for jobs elsewhere. I understand the tourism industry is very good option in Iceland.

Go play the game and have fun!