I’ve come and gone with EVE over the years. There have been long stretches where I played almost full-time with half a dozen subbed accounts, and there have been long stretches where all my accounts were Alpha, and there have been long stretches of something in-between. I’ve done everything from hisec industry to lowsec FW to piracy to nullsec alliance military fleets and POS management to mining to mission running to living in wormholes to playing solo across a wide swath of different areas. I’ve given some thought to what actually draws me into the game and what turns me off.
I enjoy fleets. In fact, fleeting up with other pilots is pretty much the only way you can get me into PVP and even then I prefer to fly logi. I enjoy logistics and reconnaissance. There’s something deeply satisfying about all the planning and scrambling necessary to provide strategic support to fleet and alliance assets, particularly when those fleets or assets are in a spot of real danger. The coordination with other pilots, and not just your own accounts (although the more the merrier) lends these activities the same satisfaction as combat fleets. Wormholes are fun for all the same reasons. I’ve considered joining Signal Cartel more times than I care to count. I also enjoy mining fleets, in fact I loved boosting mining fleets with my Rorqual back in the POS days while I mined on my alts with a fleet full of like-minded combat ready krabbs. It makes you feel like a contributing member of a team who is happy to have you with them. This feeling is the beating heart of every MMO, and the game’s success or failure is largely dependent on how well and how often it facilitates players experiencing that feeling.
This is the real reason so many pilots are citing the death of the Alliance Tournament as a reason they finally left EVE. The AT was team-building gudfights rut rut rut for the home team in a nutshell. It was the EVE version of e-sports when e-sports is eating the gaming world alive. Who in their right mind would kill it? I understand that CCP hates casinos and gambling and wants to kill it with fire, but really guys, despite what the Goons believe is true deep down in their souls, casinos are not the devil that’s stalking EVE. Casinos were actually a good thing for generating “content,” and if the Casino War didn’t demonstrate that with flying colors, well, I don’t know what to tell you.
The truth is this: the devil that is killing EVE is bots. The Botting Menace is the antithesis of everything that is good about EVE, everything that makes people want to play EVE, and if CCP does not kill it with the same fire with which they killed the casinos then in a few years all this game is going to be is Botting Online. This makes me sad not because I dread the loss of PVP, but because I actually enjoy activities like running missions or ratting or mining, and I don’t want to see these things ruined by bots when they should be something which is enjoyed by players.
On a more personal note, nowadays I mostly login for Incursion fleets, because that is the most reliable, easily accessible way for me to go explode some stuff with other players who need my dank reps. It helps that it rewards me with dank ISK, which enables me to pursue other goals in the game such as building my own little industry empire in some far distant wormhole, perhaps. For the record, I rage quit EVE the last time when CCP reduced the number of hisec incursions from 3 to 1 to make room for Invasions, which are an inferior gaming experience. Incursion fleets pay better, and more importantly they require participation by more players. In an era when EVE is dying I understand providing fleet-based PVE for smaller groups…but really, you could have just fixed FW/losec and done a much better job of this that would have been exciting to more players and not taken something away from people who still regularly play. But I digress.
My real life precludes me from dedicating serious time to the game in the way I once did, and besides that there’s only one nullsec alliance I would even consider joining, and even then I have serious reservations about participating in that aspect of the game despite the fact the mechanics are probably the best place for me to find the feel goods I’m looking for. The politics, which has ended in an inevitable detente between a half dozen or so Super Dropping Super Important EVE Celebrity Coalition Leader FCs, is killing the game second only to the botting. It’s a major turn-off to me investing myself in such goings-on. I would enjoy watching all of nullsec burn to the ground. I guess that’s one good thing about the Triglavians.