Oh but that’s been obvious for years. It’s been a short track profit optimisation focus for years, following from CCP’s venture level figuring out that it doesn’t matter how much they spend per user on a product level with the return being the same. Increasing the return meant changing the model. Quite simple.
Doesn’t mean there weren’t alternatives. There were decision points however. Part of the sad truth is that on the venture level CCP quite simply stopped caring about EVE, and to a degree (although house cleaning has removed most of those who willfully created problems through personal delusions and/or uninformed aspirations) actively started to dislike it.
I think you are misunderstanding something here. I’m not saying CCP has a focus on quality, I’m saying they have a very limited amount of room for that because they decided it doesn’t pay enough to have more room for quality over time.
In simple terms, CCP made the choice to not engage in long term investment paths but in the short track focus with a model change. It’s not like they could walk away from EVE the cash cow, and every other venture failed - brutally so. They were unable / incapable / unwilling of determining the right kind of long term investment and their preceding efforts to increase userbase (roadmaps of Ascension, Incarna, to a lesser degree Rubicon) were used as evidence of that method not yielding required results to match venture directives.
In a nutshell: CCP’s venture level states that it serves no point to spend more on quality / depth of content and after 3 experiment cycles complete with old and current trauma plus the signals from venture relations it became clear even more that a model change was a necessity.
Now 2 of the 3 efforts were arguably undermined from within, Jon Lander’s departure didn’t help as his insights into the cost of technical debt and the long term risks of asset sweating and minimum product viability as operational directives went out the door with that, Torfi finally leaving cleared a lot of air as even in a parked state the old internal oddities kept instigating internal negative spin, external consultation uppend the ante in making clear what direction was expected of CCP, integrating said external consultation gave that momentum - and so forth.
At the end of the day, do not expect any quality focus from CCP. That door was closed quite a while ago. Doesn’t mean the product level doesn’t strive towards delivering quality, they’re just extremely limited for what they can do.
It all bleeds through in everything. Choices in directives for game design, choices in restrictions imposed on services and infrastructure, even in how CCP approaches challenges players signal as problems. Like feature creep, technical debt derived bugs and content faults. Decrease of content depth, the move away from emergent behaviour to niche guided play, etc.
Heck, even how CCP handles the bots issue follows from it. For players who can’t pull up CCP’s financials now they don’t carry publication requirements that’s maybe the simplest exploration to figure out the underlying changes at CCP. Getting rid of bots potentially resulting in decreased profits is not a relevant argument for CCP, it’s just that getting rid of them through any possible options would not increase profits in relation to the investment required. As such, the investment required to get rid of bots is determined as something between unnecessary and unworthy of attention.
Unnecessary because every few months you can do a bit of marketing and buy some media bias. Unworthy because it isn’t about the game, the player or even about the dev, but about the bottom line.