I’m fine with Eve dying a slow and agonizing death. I’d rather it die and it not be turned into some abomination than to have it live for another 10 years as some cash-grabbing playground with no player-made content.
This is a competitive pvp game and for some the stakes are high with the time, effort, and real life “investment” they’ve put into this hobby. It is exactly these aspects of the game that have created a reputation as Eve being a game that is very different than others.
So let the casuals and cry babies leave. If I wanted to play a game with a huge playerbase and just farm all day I wouldn’t be playing Eve Online.
It is an interesting dichotomy amongst Eve players though. The simultaneous glorification of Eves unique gameplay, and how every individual has merit and possibility, with so many possible playstyles, so many different ways to succeed…
Coupled with such an intense, unyielding hatred of anyone who wants to play it differently, anyone who doesn’t find Eve compelling is a “carebear/crybaby”.
Eve is a universe of thousands of separate individuals… So long as those individuals agree with things precisely as they are. So long as those individuals continue to agree that Eve is the best game.
It is interesting to see the difference between a player base that feels that their game is “dying”, or that they’d rather see it die… And one that has such a sneering disdain for anyone different.
I can only speak for myself, but I can maybe put it like this.
Eve Online is like your grandparent or something. That grandparent is sick and has been sick for a long time now. You know that their death is imminent, but also that in their last days of living they are hardly the person you remember. You know that the sick and sad person they are now is not how you want them to be remembered by.
That is exactly how I feel about this situation. Eve is both a game and a serious hobby for many people. There are lots of different kinds of people that play this game for various reasons, but one thing is universally true within the game and that is the type of game that CCP has developed. I can’t think of too many other games that boast as many player-driven gameplay features as Eve Online. We’ve slowly been losing a lot of these features throughout even my time playing since 2012.
The reason you see a lot of negativity and trolling from specific people is that for a lot of people, we’ve seen what the power of the mob mentality can do. You get too many people that start to play and intend on trying to propose their ideas to change the game to make it less like Eve Online, and we feel an obligation to tell them to HTFU or GTFO.
Add to that a layer of newer CCP developers that are in charge of the games development and moderating, when these people clearly know infinitely less about mechanics and the meta than it’s own players. So you can see how very real it can seem for some that CCP implement some “Anti-Eve Online” change that was suggested by some braindead casual player that wants this to be more like World of Warcraft.