Posting on my 2005 toon for proof that I am old.
This game has gotten progressively safer for new players over time, and yet we have less engagement, not more.
When I first started, this game was hella difficult. Anything you warped to landed you 15km off unless you had bookmarks, then you just had to slowboat the rest of the way. There were no gate cloaks so if you lagged you could die before you even loaded grid. A POS was basically a near invulnerable death star fortress without timers so you’d have to just sit there blapping at it for literally hours until it finally died. There were so many cheesed mechanics that in pvp 99% of the time it felt like you’d die to something broken rather than really learning anything. You had to spend the first 3 months training learning skills otherwise training took forever. IIRC skill training required way more frequent input and basically daily maintenance. If you got pod killed you’d lose skillpoints. There were no warnings on anything at all, if you were about to do something stupid then oh well sucks to be you. Corps had almost no security options whatsoever so if you recruited the wrong person they could just run off with billions in assets and isk with zero recourse and that’d be the end of your little community forever. The game UI gave you basically zero information so you’d have to do napkin math all the time.
That’s just a fraction of it, I know for a fact that I’ve forgotten a bunch of other shenanigans about those days.
If a totally safe hisec was what would save the game then right now we should be living through some of the best years, not lamenting a past golden age. The problem that people like FirestormCarnage/Eve Tutorials have is not that there is something wrong with the game, it’s that they have the wrong attitude and mindset.