G’day friends
I havent really played properly since the war in fountain a couple years back. I hear EVE is F2P now which I kinda hate, but I dont really know much past that.
Could someone tl;dr the past few years and gimme their opinion on whether it’s worth returning or not?
Thanks xoxo
I would, but I’m busy pounding my toes with a ballpeen hammer atm.
(One MUST have a hobby!)
It is F2P. Find out yourself.
ROFL ! 
I too share your passion for the path less trodden
I forgot the thing that made me love eve online though, the community 
Guess i’ll hop in and try it again sometime
Welcome back.
Over the years there’s been lot’s of changes, too many to list but you can check them out here:
https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Expansions
One main change is that in 2018, CCP was sold to Pearl Abyss for $425mill, 225mill up front with a 200mill performance based bonus to be paid at a later date.
https://massivelyop.com/2018/09/09/eve-evolved-what-could-the-sale-of-ccp-games-mean-for-eve-online/
Since then, there’s been a lot of PLEX, game packs, skill points and ship skin sales happening. Skill Point’s are also offered quite regularly as reward for just logging in. Basically CCP now uses a very large carrot to entice players in but afterwards in-game it’s mostly stick they’ll get, especially in high sec space.
Oh yeah, the log-in numbers went into a steady decline around 2013 or so due to a lot of contributing factors. Supposedly CCP is working on increasing player retention, their studies show the worst cases are in new players with something like over 90% will quit within their first 7 days of playing.
As for recent and future game direction, CCP has been winging it for the most part, trying all sorts of different things to see which one sticks. They call it ‘Chaos Era’ or something like that which also includes diminished resources and higher costs.
CCP has also implemented all kinds of new NPC’s using enhanced AI to supposedly represent player ships. Issue is there’s an overabundance of them and they’re based on top line ship fits which makes them overpowered to average players. Basically it’s a nuisance and now when you undock, you consent to both PvP and PvE interaction.
Now there’s instanced PvE and PvP area’s in-game, also Hypernet gambling is allowed too. Lastly but most importantly, lot’s of little bugs, poor customer service and little to no interaction with CCP here in the Official Forums, however they do interact quite a bit on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc, etc…
Sooo having said all that, I think it’s definitely worth it for older players to return with their old characters. They’ll have a lot easier time surviving and thriving in Eve compared to brand new inexperienced players. Also Eve Online is still an excellent Sci-Fi space based mmorpg to play.
XOXO 
Welcome back!
I started playing after EVE became F2P, but in my opinion the F2P model in EVE is pretty good: new players can participate in a lot of activities to see whether they like it, but all those activities have specialised improvements that require a subscription. And F2P lacks access to a lot of the better sources of income and production, as well as the access to multibox, which means the impact on the EVE economy by free accounts is relatively small. It’s nice that people can keep playing EVE F2P and aim for a 20 million SP Alpha account if they wanted (although training past 5M would be done with injectors), but I became Omega pretty soon after trying out the game.
In the past few years we’ve seen the introduction of new upwell structures, new ships, a blackout and a mineral rebalance (which have shown that CCP isn’t afraid to make pretty significant (temporary) changes to stir up the game) and all sorts of filaments to abyssal space or random other places in the universe.
Whether it’s worth returning or not depends on if you want to try it. I come back to games sometimes when it starts itching, then play for a while and stick around longer if I enjoy it. I can’t tell you whether you’ll enjoy it, but you can at least try and see for yourself!
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