I started playing MMOs before MMOs were MMOs—when they were MUDs. So, speaking as someone who was there when ‘back in the day’ meant ‘the 1980s’… you clearly haven’t understood the first thing about EVE.
Yes, you can buy almost any item, and even SP, with a transaction chain originating in RL money1. That won’t get you anything in EVE except the feeling of ‘I’m a damned idiot’. Items don’t help you. SP doesn’t actually give you any skill at playing EVE, and EVE is a more complex system than any other five MMOs combined.
And no, when you can throw every penny in the world at the game and ultimately, it won’t help you do anything but give everyone else a ridiculously-expensive killmail… that’s not p2w. That p2L.
Don’t believe me? Go ahead. Spend $1000 on blinging yourself out a ship. Come put it on either side of the T5ZI/1DQ1 gate. See what happens.
EVE is F2W. The real ‘cheat code’ to success in EVE is friends. People. No matter what path you choose, it’s all about people, not payments.
No. EVE’s population decline isn’t the result of bots or PLEX. It’s the result of a large number of factors. Some of them aren’t even part of the game. They’re things like an aging playerbase having a lot more demands on their time. Or people just finding games they liked better over the last eighteen years. Peoples’ tastes change. They get tired of things. They want new experiences.
And EVE, being eighteen years old, isn’t actually attracting a huge number of new players. The marketing for the game’s pretty damned weak, too. They put EVE on Steam! But when’s the last time EVE-on-Steam had anything on the front page? When’s the last time they did any kind of Steam deal to get press?
All that aside, there are in-game reasons for the decline, too. The high-water mark comes in 2011-2012. Then changes started coming that were targeted at breaking up nullsec, rather than letting nullsec’s internal pressures break groups up and cause cascade effects the way they had. Each time they pushed, they pushed players away.
AEGIS sov in 2015 was an attempt to fix it, but by making large, sweeping things small, and that was never going to work. 2017, they mucked with Rorqs, and ignore us telling them ‘this is a bad change and it will cause problems in the long term’. Well, it caused problems alright. And we’ve basically had 5 years of that pattern, where CCP’s ignored the things the players have told them were problems, and problems just got worse.
That has been a massive contributor to the loss of active players… PLEX… has not.
1. pssssst That’s true of old-school subscription games, too: everything you get originates in you paying money to the game company. Shocking!