tldr: New design principle should be: Don’t bother the carebears, meanwhile cater real players and content makers to come back to EVE.
As we all can see now after failed but instructive Blackout, EVE has two big groups in her society. One is “carebears, nullbears, botters, multiboxers” and the other one is “pvp-ers, normal players, content makers”. What carebears want: farm big piles of ISK in the biggest possible safety without creating any meaningful content to the game. What “normal” players want: challenge, content, and impact.
As we saw, carebears just left the game with all their multiple accounts after they should and couldn’t do some adaptation, being on comms, organize a bit, etc. They just left because they are not interested in such things, they just want farm ISK peacefully and safety. They sometimes drop titans and supercapitals to each other in meaningless wars if they are so bored. These wars have no real inpact on anything. In the future, if CCP try to introduce any big change again that harass them, they will just leave again, because they completly not interested in EVE’s philosophy and what EVE is about really. And because they have multiple accounts and they are the majority nowdays, they will make CCP to kneel again and revert the changes.
We also saw that with the Blackout, old and new adaptable and challenge thisty players came back to the game. They tought now it’s time to come back, because there is a chance they can make impact.
But CCP just reverted Blackout because the massive drops in carebear accounts. It’s understandable in financial viewpoint. However the same time they admitted that krabs can defeat them and disable them to add any changes to the game that they won’t like. So in other viewpoint CCP made a stress test to the players of EVE to see how far they can go. Result: they can not go so far because majority of EVE are just carebear hellokittens.
The solution for this problem is to leave the carebears alone, and focus on pvp-er, content maker, challange seeker part of the society. Design new content and rewards, that can only be reachable to people who actually can organize, adapt and play clever. By these new rewards give effective weapons to these people to help them fight against big nullbear groups and defend themshelves from the swarm of F1-kitty online players.
Meanwhile introduce environmental changes to the universe, that has no direct and cruel effect to nullbears, like Blackout had, but what makes them to fight. Carebears like meaningless supercapital wars. For example if a big nullbear block depletes trillion tons of minerals from a part of space, make them to move elsewhere, because they burned their resources. The goal is to force these big dumb nullblocks to move around, and meanwhile they do it, they just burn their money in territory wars, and enjoying it, plus spinning the economy.
As nullbears fighting each other to get territory for farming ISK, the smaller and clever organizations of players getting impactful weapons to their hands by fulfilling challanges that unorganized blob groups can’t do. These can be new materials from hard to make abyssial sites, wormholes, other hostile environments, etc. From these new materials they can build weapons that making impact in and against the nullbears big wars. The important thing is that these new weapons and stuff should not be useable by any trillionaire/rich players, no matter how much money they have. These things should only be used by groups of people who can play really well together organized. (For example a device that can be runned by X or XX number of skilled pilot for 30 minutes and making a big impact on the environment or the hostile fleet.) So at the end, big blocks need these clever players to help them in their big fights and also these small clever groups will have impact in EVE politics, etc. Also small goups could make themselves defensive weapons that not letting big alliances to erease them from a territory just by dropping a bunch of titans on them. Finally the strenght of an alliance won’t just be in their numbers, but the quality of their players.
So at the end, EVE can welcome farmer type people and challange seeker type people also, and both of them are happy playing and can make impact, can be important, etc.
