To me, the entire (apparent) philosophy behind what CCP is doing is the thing that is flawed. People are debating WHAT CCP should do, but not whether or not they should be doing anything.
For the entire time I’ve been playing (since June of 2007), yes, CCP has made changes to the game with outcomes in mind. But to me, it really did seem like CCP was as hands off as any game developer could be. The very 1st “CCP-ism” I ever heard was “Here’s a space ship, go ■■■■ yourself”.
It’s probably what I loved about EVE in the beginning, there was no direction, no one (from CCP) telling you what you should do. They gave us tools (ships, weapons, POSes,) and places to use those tools (space, and the market) and except for adding new stuff or tweaking stats of ships/weapons for balance’s sake, that was it.
We took it and ran. We fought wars over space so poor 2 guys chaining belts on one system let to drama on voice comms. We ran the same lvl 4 missions over and over without stopping to ask WHY that damn Damsel couldn’t hire a freaking bodyguard We grinded POSes and dealt with black screen (no tidi then) issues. And yea we complained about it, because we are human.
Now it seems like they are trying to make us do specific things. Every time I hear the words “conflict driver” I want to scream. Because it means CCP hasn’t learned anything from almost 2 decades of EVE.
That lesson is simple. You can’t make us do anything. We don’t fight over isk or moons or space, those are called excuses, we fight because “screw those other MFs , I’m down for my people”. Putting our isk in some MWD-killing space bubble in every system does jack for us. ’
Changing the rocks around doesn’t do anything either. OTEC and the TTT should have taught everyone that people in this video game don’t fight over anything they can just buy from someone. Blackout and the failure to increase participation in low sec after YEARS of adding rewards to low sec should have taught CCP that no amount of risk makes loss averse (“risk averse” is a stupid saying btw) players suddenly become people who shrug off loss. DBSing space just means no one uses space, period.
IMO CCP should try to (somehow) go back to making cool tools (when was the last time we got something like the MJD?) and the environment to use them in, and let US worry about “driving conflict”.
Give us enough ways to screw with each other and stop thinking that we care about who has what goo or what rock or what rat. We will take care of the rest.