I left Eve about 3 years ago. It had been getting harder and harder to find a reason to log in. Gameplay had become stagnant to me and the whole incursions then drifters and wormholes feeling like unfinished under utilized projects just felt like CCP lost its way. The game became about the infamous Fozzie sov and who could field the most caps and F1 Monkeys. I dont mind being an F1 monkey except for when some little Napoleon thinks his internet spaceships is so important that i should drop everything to station spin for 2 hours or sit on a titan waiting for the other side to make some move.
I just found it harder and harder to log in. After a decade of playing EVE blowing up space ships and ratting just wasnt cutting it anymore and the new content being offered was ridiculous. Hard/impossible =/= more fun. I didnt want something gravy, i just wanted CCP to think outside the sandbox. The sand was getting mighty musty and the box was feeling tiny.
So i left and for nearly 3 years i did not even consider playing eve again. But i did meet many people who were former players and we discussed days when Eve was awesome and devs listened to players and it was owned by people who cared about the game not how many numbers they could fit on the profit line. I digress but its ironic. These investors always buy companies that are doing well, decide they have these great ideas to make the company even more profit and then run it into the ground and sell the hulk for scrap metal and move on to the next victim.
Back to Eve. I obviously came back and was very disappointed in how little had changed in 3 years. Well besides actual players quit playing and the game has like 3000 people with 100 accounts each. There have been some improvements sure but its still the same boring sandbox with the same boring sand i left. Did you know all the same alliances are basically in the same places they are just more bloated now? Yep. Also hi sec is pretty much dead and no one does anything like run missions or …STOCK JITA. Serious what happen to Jita? Jita today looks like my regional null market hub 6-10 years ago.
People troll about it, but for the first time since i started playing Eve it actually feels like it is dying. I mean i know its dying, At its peak, 50k plus players online. When i left around 35-40k peak now it cant muster 30k logins.
But the quality and craftsmanship isnt there anymore. Obviously the once mighty CCP, the gaming company i actually stood on a pedestal and bragged all over the internet about has turned into those same crappy companies i use to lecture about how they need to be more like CCP and less like a wallet leech. What use to be the greatest game developer of all time with the best dev team of all time seems to have become a crew that answers to bean counters and takes short cuts and overlooks quality.
Eve feels clunky and buggy and under developed. The “new” launcher constantly gives me errors when i try to connect, I get disconnected a lot. The UI is horribly non responsive sometimes taking 2 or 3 seconds to respond to commands and thats if it feels like responding. I have to click on commands multiple times to get it to do things half the time.
I came back because of the moon mining changes but honestly Eve just doesnt impress me much these days. It feels stagnant already and i havent even finished my first month back. CCP has always depended on players to create their own content. While that is a cool idea in theory, CCP needed to guide us far better because we now are pretty a big blue donut with 3 flavors and we already broke Serenity with our content creation.
CCP needs to refocus on quality and getting out of the sandbox. I dont like the look or feel of Elite Dangerous at all but you know what it has? SPACE. Eve has thousands of systems, ED has the entire galaxy. Space games need to have areas that players can feel like they can go hide in a corner away from the internet spaceship bullies and do their own thing. Eve needs to get out of the sandbox and start making Eve about Space rather than blue donuts, krabbing, station spinning, and playing the obvious in game casino called hypernet.
But who cares…honestly? The vision of New Eden left with the founders. Now Eve is an ATM for a group of investors. Quick! buy some plex they almost have enough for their 4th vacation home!
