So here’s the thing, before we go into the point of me being here I want to paint a little picture for you all.
In terms of “EVE” I am a casual player, I do not claim to be professional neither am I any good. What I play for is the community/playing with your mates environment which mainly related to fighting and disrupting all things “Power Bloc” as people seem to put it. The game itself offers a learning experience, you understand how to manage ships better, a few people (not everyone) are incredibly helpful in terms of offering advice and help to progress at the game and most importantly the company of people from all over the world through.
Now onto my point. I wanted to offer a more light hearted and less involved opinion which is devoid of stats, pie charts or graphs.
You come home everyday from work/university/being unemployed and you look for your source of entertainment, you look to EVE online. You are a member of one of the dominating corporations, you log in to find yourself sitting in an Avatar, you then await instructions to drop into a situation where a capital industrial ship that has been attacked by a small group of bombers, the rorqual ignited the cyno and you press two buttons, you subsequently bridge yourself into the position where the attack is taking place and the gang of stealthy vessels calmly withdraw from the field. The bombers move to attack somewhere else, a 200 member harpy fleet is mobilised to deal with this threat, they are able to achieve this objective quickly due to positioned ansiblex gates allowing easy movement, the location of the bombers is easily tracked due to the monitoring local chat. The fleet of attacking ships have to quietly withdraw from the situation due to all these factors being stacked against them.
CCP claimed that there was a concern that this aspect of the game was rapidly becoming stale, the above certainly serves as evidence to justify the concern.
What would be a solution?
Cynosural changes were implemented which was a start, a point of excitement that got the communities attention, then came the drifters and blackout, both experiences offered hope that the stale was soon to be written into the history books. The drifter attacks created genuine worry, owners considered the violence problematic at first then once a resolution was found it was concluded that they were simply an irritation. Then local was withdrawn, finally an opportunity to capitalise on the stale environment, this created an authentically dangerous time in null sec, limited ways to track locations of enemies and weak responses by the dominating alliances as the stale routines left them void of decisions as the mindless simplistic bridging option at a seconds notice was no longer an option. A gift from the heavens for someone like myself, who very much enjoys being part of a fleet, the teamwork and collaboration to achieve the larger objective to ruin someone’s quiet day in their capital ship.
Finally a decision was made to change direction, a solution to a long standing problem for a developer who has a reputation for lacking in long term planning. Personally I found it strange that there was such a contrast in opinion, but when there is such strong reaction then this should have served as a warning that players were getting too used to what they were doing every time they got into the driving seat.
Now the dreaded local chat has been restored, so the question I would ask is what was the point? You now find a significant percentage of a player base that have enjoyed the excitement of a fresh player versus player experience only to have it sharply taken away, industrial groups of dominating alliances having their safety restored and now more acutely aware of other tools in game available to improve their safety further
So dare i say that this game, which takes great pride in its long term existence, has inadvertently signed its own death warrant.
