I would love to see honest EVE advertising! Not the completely false “Star Wars battles in real time” videos they keep showing, nor the slow-paced, majestic sound-tracked ones: “EVE… it’s a vast universe… filled with danger… and excitement… and many factions… all doing things… are you still awake? How odd.”
Instead just man up and say “EVE. It’s a harsh and unfair world. Everyone is against you. Everyone wants to take what’s yours. Only the clever, strong and persistent survive. Can you rise to success in an unforgiving galaxy? Or will you be one of the frozen corpses drifting forever in space?”
Some changes were good, some very bad. However for a game primarily based on the player economy, making industry harder, slower and more complicated was a really dumb move. Classic CCP - “We want people to play more, so we’ll just introduce more complexity, confusion and grind to a primary aspect of the game.”
Cheap and accessible ships and fittings make for more gameplay and more PvP. (See my thread Ganking and PVP: Numbers in perspective)
Complicated manufacturing and expensive ships only slows everything down.
Yes, CCP created a problem with excessive resource mining and cap production. However that problem was actually an opportunity. The proper solution would have been:
- Adjust supercap/cap/subcap balance so each has a separate role.
- Create content for each of those roles, eg. Resource Wars, Triglavian Conduit type spawns, “dynamic bounty” system balancing.
- Encourage the use, conflict and destruction of those assets.
Instead, what was CCP’s solution? “Let’s crush the economy, stifle manufacturing, and make things too expensive to risk losing. Because that will stimulate more gameplay!” It’s hard to imagine how CCP can so consistently be so stupid about their own game, but then, the same people have been making the same bad decisions for years.
This is a big one. From what I can tell with the vets I’ve talked with, the primary reason for leaving isn’t because of nerfs, or monetization, or ganking. It’s simply because they’ve given up believing that CCP is committed to making EVE better and adding more to it. CCP has clearly indicated that except for tweaking and the occasional event, EVE is finished. And they’re using EVE money to try to build “the next big thing”.
There are many other issues of course but if CCP could just focus on 1 or 2 main points like Wadiest’s or Dunk Dinkle’s, and honestly fix those issues, they’d restore a lot of interest in the game. And then they could focus on the next big point.