EVE Is Actually Dying
"On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero." - The Narrator
I started playing EVE Online in 2009. The graphics looked dated, but still attractive. The UI was a hot mess. There were no tutorials in-game and barely any player made guides. It was impossible to make ISK and everyone was poor. And there were 40,000 people online.
I didn't become seriously invested in the game until 2011, when I created my current and permanent main character, Xuixien. But still, from the moment I started the game I fell in love with it's expansiveness and complexity. There was something about it that just kept me coming back for those 2 years. I would get frustrated and quit for a few months... but something pulled me back. Something in the grimy, dark grittiness of the void called me. Other games just weren't doing it for me. EVE Online just felt so big; there were so many star systems to explore, so much to learn and so much to do. And I was starting from the very bottom, in a world populated by some seriously scary veterans. There I was, in my little frigate, competing with people who were flying T2 cruisers. There I was, with my little Miner I's, competing against people in rare, expensive exhumers with T2 strip miners. And when I finally did get an exhumer of my own - it was suicide ganked that day.
While new players on the forums were constantly complaining about "catching up", I was loving it. There was something about starting from the bottom, competing with players more senior than myself, and having everything to aspire to that just made the game feel so magnetic. The freedom to play on my own terms, as the good guy or the bad guy, the depth and size of the university - it's complexity - had me glued to my computer screen for hours. The first time I went to LowSec, and how scary it felt. And then how scary NullSec felt. And then the thrilling sense of impending doom every time I left the POS shield in WH space. I couldn't get enough of it.
During those early years of my EVE experience, between 2009 and 2012ish, CCP made some seriously good decisions which I think led to the rapid rise in EVE's popularity. The removal of learning skills, extension of the skill queue, and some quality of life changes were a major. The removal of clone states was yet another much needed change. When CCP Rise (formerly kil2) joined the team, the first thing he did was a huge balance pass on subcaps, particularly frigates, destroyers, and cruisers. This was right after I started FW. Virtually overnight, FW became one of the most populated areas of the game, with dozens of people in each system plexing and fighting. CCP introduced a line of new destroyers and battlecruisers. It felt like EVE was really coming alive; there were people in space everywhere. Players were talking about adding new space to contain us all. The game was popping and the sky was the limit.
I have so many fond memories of EVE from back then. Griefing Russian bots in Tsukuras after they had gotten kicked out of their space. Trying to run my own industrial corp. My first ventures out into LowSec. The friends (and enemies) I made in FW. Just a few short years later I would even participate in what was, at the time, the largest battle in WH space ever. Which I actually didn't get to participate in, because my Revelation got stuck on the POS tower. These memories burn bright in my mind and in my heart. The nostalgia courses through my chest, aching with reminiscence and longing as I type these words out. But alas, you can't go home again.
There was a part of me that always thought, always just assumed, that EVE Online would always be there. There was no way this game was ever going to die. There were so many dedicated, hardcore players. Players who had been around since the release. Players who had been there for years. It was a game that you got invested in. All the devs would ever have to do is patch bugs, tweak balance here and there, add a few new cups of sand to the sandbox. Players were the game. There is no end to human intrigue and drama.
I no longer feel the same way.
Somewhere along the way EVE changed, under my nose and in ways that I haven't really grasped until recently. I would take long breaks from EVE due to real life or because of the "EVE doldrums", that intractable problem that plagues every veteran. Each time I would return to the game, I'd have to learn some things anew, which was fine. It was refreshing and kept things new and I was always looking forward to what CCP would come up with next. But I started to notice something. There were less people in space. Friends, who had always been waiting for me each time I'd return, were starting to go MIA for long periods of time. I'd check the killboards of people I knew - friend and enemy alike - and find huge gaps, or that their last activity was a year or more ago. Some people would announce a break and just... never come back.
And everyone was really angry. Like... more angry than usual.
I've been optimistic over the years. I've assumed good faith on the part of CCP as much as possible. I've given them praise when I thought it was deserved, and fair criticism. I always thought, whatever, the game will recover. Scarcity? Yeah, we needed it. We needed it years ago. The playerbase has gotten so fat and bloated with wealth, it's sucked the fun out of things. Shit's too easy.
When Hilmar became a more public figure, and started to take a more active role in the development of EVE, I got hopeful and even excited. He was saying things like "making the game really easy for newbies, but more difficult and complex for veterans" - yes! That's what the game needs. Make it easy to get into, increase new player retention, but keep it hard and challenging for us dusty old farts! "The existence of slots in NPC stations is a point of shame" - yes! Put it all in player structures!
But with increasing monetization, the sale of skillpoints (which CCP promised would never happen), the sale of a fitted ship (which CCP promised would never happen), the constant microtransaction advertisement in the launcher, the lack of storyline updates, the lack of anything from the lore team... I've started to lose hope. And after this FanFest, the first in years, and seeing the ubuquitous lack of... anything. I've started to get worried. I'm no longer ignoring the naysayers. I'm started to see that, honestly.
They have a point.
But it's worse than they think.
Doing research for this blog I've learned a very alarming fact:
!!No One Plays This Game Anymore!!
"57% of our players joined after last FanFest" - CCP Hilmar, 2022
Last Fanfest: 2018.We all know that the PCU has been declining for almost a decade now. A decade! A slow, steady hemorrhage of players. On the face of it, yes, the PCU numbers are bad. I've long mainted that PCU numbers are holding, on average, mostly steady. And it appears that way eyeballing the graph, until the past 2 years. But there was a problem with my assessment.
For one, I was wrong:
Second, the PCU numbers are actually much worse than they look because of a few key points. The first point is that of the proportion of players online, 57% started playing after 2018. When I started the game, there were 40,000-50,000 people online. Now we struggle to breach 20,000. And of those 20,000, only 8,600 started before 2018 (so now I know where all my friends went...). So EVE Online has a high turnover rate. Which could in part explain the recent downslope; eventually you tap out the market.
But that only explains a portion of the slope. It gets even worse than that when we factor in the proportion of PCU which is made up of alts. CCP released two graphs in 2015:
Proportion of players by number of accounts. Or rather, the density. It's too late for statistics.
Average number of accounts per player (estimate).
As of 2015, 85% of players had 2 accounts or less. The proportion just gets smaller and smaller as the number of accounts increases, in Pareto fashion; some minority of players control a disproportionately large number of characters (but that's neither here nor there). The average number of accounts per player was about 1.3 in 2006, and took 10 years to reach an average of 1.5 in 2016.
Today, as the PCU hits record lows, the proportion of alts has greatly increased. From FanFest 2022, the average number of accounts per player is:
2.6. A dramatic increase based on the 2006-2016 trend, which again, took 10 years to slowly creep up from about 1.3 to 1.5, a 0.2 increase. We would expect, based on that trend, maybe, at most, possibly, 1.7 accounts per player by 2022. But we have 2.6 accounts per player, on average. That's an increase of 1.1 when the expected increae was 0.2 or less. Now, in 2016 Alpha clone states were released. That may account for a proportion of that change, but I have no idea what the effect size of that might be. It's possible that CCP is only counting Omega accounts. I could go either way on the issue; Alphas are free and easy to make, so there's no reason they wouldn't proliferate, but at the same time, they cannot be played concurrently with either an Omega or another Alpha, so their use is limited. So at this juncture, anything I say would just be speculation.
Either way, 2.6 accounts per player on average. Up from 1.5. That's huge. This cannot be overstated:
There are more alts than ever as PCU drops below 2007 levels.
This is a major, fundamental point: right now, there are only a handful of thousand players logging into EVE, more than half of whom started the game after 2018. Another proportion of them will have started after 2016. And the further back in date you go, the smaller the proportion represented in the PCU. This is a point that will factor in later, when I talk about the cultural changes that have overtaken EVE. Changes for the worse.
(My own skills in math and statistics are unequal to the task of figuring out, based on the information at hand, the poportion of alts that make up current PCU numbers. I can do math forward, but reverse engineering is just a riddle to me. But my intuition tells me that it's not looking pretty.)
So in short: nobody is really playing this game. They might be subbed, but they're not logging in and doing things.
So how did we get here? I think I've pinned it down to a few root causes. We have to go back to 2014-2015, and try to figure out what happened there. As I write this, I'm not quite sure yet. I'm asking around about what was happening in that year to try to identify probable causal or at least correlational factors. As far as things post-2016, I think it's pretty clear cut.
What CCP Got Right
But let's start with an analysis of things CCP has gotten right. It's only fair. I'm going to focus on gameplay mechanics, without mentioning aesthetics too much. The art team has always done a stellar job, although I disagree with the "lightening" of EVE's aesthetic (I actually play with my brightness turned all the way down these days... but Jita 4-4 looks amazing and the AIR stuff is breathtaking). EVE is, without a doubt, the most beautiful game on the market.
This is by no means a comprehensive list, just things I remember from my long time playing the only game of it's kind:
- The removal of learning skills and the homogenization of attributes among the different races and bloodlines.
- The removal of clone states.
- Hull tanking viability.
- T3Ds and command destroyers.
- The "new" destroyers and battlecruisers.
- Higher starting SP, which honestly, should probably increase by X hundred thousand/year.
- The implementation of fuel blocks, which made fueling towers easier and later:
- The introduction of Citadels as such: While imperfectly implemented, Citadels in and of themselves were a good feature, and open up opportunities for more good features (even if a lot of them are eye candy, like hull variations, SKINS, and internal environment).
- Active moon mining. More ships in space = more content. Also, it made moon mining accessible to line members instead of just lining the pockets of the upper echelons of an organization.
- All the recent mining changes: The ship balance, introduction of mining frigates and Porpoises, Industrial Cores for Orcas and Porpoises, and now on-site, in-space remote compression. These changes have been phenomenal for mining. Almost all of the mining changes have been good.
- Resource distribution. Now each security class (Hi, Low, Null) is unique in what it can provide, and must be utilized for the economy to function. More ships in space in LowSec doing things is good.
- The launcher, although I miss the old login screens. I feel like the launcher could have had music and a theme based on the current expansion/quadrant.
- The introduction of item-specific haulers.
- The update to Epithals to allow 6 command centers in a specialized hold.
- ACLs that allow for Corp and Alliance bookmarks. Despite UI problems, this was an incredible change. People starting the game after their implementation will never understand what it what it was like to play the game without them. You used to have to click and drag bookmarks into your cargo/item hangar in order to trade them to other players.
- Homogenizing ship production requirements (for example, every frigate uses the same amounts of the same minerals to produce) and removing some higher end materials from the lower end ships.
- Mauraders and BLOPs changes.
I can think of more, but you'll notice a trend here, if you've been playing as long as me: most of the best changes were over 5+ years ago. With the exception of the overhaul to mining (I even like the "residue" mechanic), most of the recent changes, while very good, have been minor and mostly QOL improvements like the Epithal change. There hasn't been "WOW!" content updates from CCP in... well, years. Except mining. But that's... mining.
Here's where I think the fundamental problems are, post 2016. I will then outline the specifics contributing to each one, and why CCP's moves to rectify the situation are pissing players off who see the changes as major nerfs to their playstyles:
- EVE Online became too easy.
- EVE Online turned towards instant-gratification.
- Player expectations adapted to ease and instant-gratification.
- Setting EVE Online back on track feels like a gigantic nerf.
Major Issue #1: Skill Injectors
Skill injectors, in my opinion, are a cancer on the game. Some people will disagree with my assessment. For example, players who started post-injectors and used them - if there's any left still playing the game. Over the years I've met many newbros who injected themselves into various high-end ships. Almost none of them are left still playing. Their activity levels dropped and they vanished. They quit due to boredom. That tends to happen when you skip to the "end-game", and can just swipe your credit card to accomplish any progression goals. Imagine playing World of WarCraft and you boost to max level, and then you sell a couple of tokens and pay for gearing runs in the very latest, highest level end-game content. Overnight. Overnight you are max level and max geared. What's left?
Battlegrounds. And that's exactly what happened with EVE Online. It just turned into a big endless WoW battleground. The only saving grace was that, even while players were (legally) RMTing their SP and ISK, people still had to go out and mine minerals and build the ships they flew.
Some will argue that injectors are a way that younger players can "catch up" to older players, via the sale of SP from senior players to newbies. However, that catch up mechanic requires that the newbie have the ISK to do so. Most newbies are pretty poor, therefore, they end up using their credit cards to buy PLEX, sell the PLEX, and then buy injectors. More often than not, they make the logical conclusion: if I could use my credit card to get the SP for the ship, why not just use my credit card to get the ship too?
When you can just buy everything you want by using your credit card, even if indirectly, what's there left to work for in the game? There is no more progression. Groups used to be desperate for capital pilots. If you had trained the skills, even just the skills, it was a big deal. Everyone wanted you. And if you actually owned a capital ship, you were in the 1% of EVE players. Not anymore. Now it's all commonplace and hence, meaningless.
Now, I know, yes, players could always use their credit cards to get ISK and buy ships before. But at least before injectors, players still had to wait to train the skills to fly the things. Not anymore. Now a day old player can not only fly, but own, capital ships. All it takes is deep enough pockets.
As I opined on Reddit:
I mean, we saw the problem with Rorquals and supercap proliferation. Or single man, multiboxed blobs of Marauders running C5 sites. Or ratting Ishtars everywhere, devaluing ISK. I don't think much of an explaination is needed. That shit created the problems that CCP has been spending the past few years trying to fix. Sure, without injectors, those same problems may have just been kicked down the road a few years - but CCP would have had much more time to notice and take action to gently steer things in a better direction, rather than jerking the wheel like they had to.
The fundamental problem with injectors is that they exacerbate and accelerate existing problems. They also allow bots, who keep enormous quantities of PLEX in corporate hangar arrays at POSes, to get operational pretty much the same day as a ban.
The other big problem with them is more philosophical. EVE is not an arcade game where you just get instant action. It's not WoW, where the end-game is something you grind for a few months and then wait for the next expansion and the new end-game (because content gets stale). It's not a MOBA.
EVE is not that kind of game. EVE is a long-form game. It was designed to reward patience and planning. There is no "end-game", and thank God, because the end-game is quite literally the end of the game. Blizzard has to basically make a whole new World of WarCraft every couple of years or the franchize would have died. But not CCP, because EVE was designed to a) take years to get into the bigger, flashier ships and b) not actually have an end-game, because the players and the relationships they form with each other are the content. That is what invests players in the experience and the product. You have to set goals, and then start working for those goals. You can't have anything overnight. This is what made EVE meaningful - when you accomplished a goal, it was an actual achievement.
Injectors destroy that because you can just swipe your credit card and have everything instantly. And it also encouraged the horrendous SP farming, where players made trillions by offering nothing to the economy or gameplay other than servicing the deleterious behavior of skill injecting.
Almost all of the injector babies I've known over the years since the feature was introduced... are gone. Why? They got bored. There was "nothing to do in the game". That's why injector babies are always whining for T2 Rorquals and T2 caps. So there's a new "end game" for them to inject into and have fun experiencing (until they get bored in 6 months).
It also encourages the worst form of monetization... the form of monetization where players are paying real money to gain in-game advantages and access to stuff.
Injectors are cancer. Sorry if you disagree. Sorry if you injected your way to where you are and feel defensive about it. But it's fact and I don't think there's any real refutation to my arguments. You can say "it made new players stick around" but as I pointed out... they've all left.
At a fundamental level, skill injectors promote instant gratification gameplay predicated on the idea that you can just spend real money for it. This runs contrary to everything EVE Online has stood for for over a decade. Injectors were also bad for the game culturally. Before, EVE was a game where things took time. You had to plan. You had to wait. This made things meaningful and rewarding. Making ISK was hard (but you know, back then, players still went out there and blew each other up regularly... it just meant something.). If you wanted a carrier pilot you either had to train one up (and wait), or buy one off the forums (which meant another player had to wait). Now people can just inject.
And where does the SP come from? From thousands of characters that do nothing except sit there and train 1 skill for the sole purpose of extracting it (and who eventually log in to the game, and become a blip on the average logins per day...)
The implentation of skill injectors promoted a player culture of instant gratification where EVE became more of an action game where wealth generation was expected to be easy and players expected to dunk Rorquals and capital ships on a weekly basis without even having to really work for it; just join fleet, take a few Ansiblex gates or cynos and boom, there's your "content" on a silver platter.
For the injector-babies who started post-injectors, they never knew anything different. But even for a non-trivial portion of veteran players, they also adopted these norms and expectations. And now, 6 years later: the injector bros are the veterans. This means that the entire culture of the game has changed. The "Overton Window" has shifted, so to speak. What was once radical - the idea of injectors and all-cap fleets - has become the new "center moderate", and the way things used to be is now the new "radical".
And so, when CCP returns to their design philosophy of a game that's actually hard and rewards patience and planning, where money is hard to make but easy to lose, where capital ships are actually expensive and difficult to make... it feels like a nerf. It feels like a regression to some archaic dark age where people had to walk uphill, both ways, in the snow to get to school, where the highest tech available was little solar powered calculators and analogue clocks.
But really, it's just a return to what made EVE great: the fact that it wasn't easy, because easy is boring, even if it's temporarily exciting at first. People do get a rush when they figure out a cheat or a shortcut. When they can have it all right now. But that rush disippates quickly, because that's how the brain works. We habituate to it rapidly, and need increasing stimulus. This is why some people are constantly shopping; to keep getting that little rush which becomes less and less each time.
Neuroscience teaches us that dopamine - the chemical that the brain's reward system uses - peaks in anticipation of a reward or valued goal. There is another, significantly smaller, peak in acquisition of a reward. As it turns out, it's the effort and delay in gratification that is most rewarding for people, not the actual acquisition of a goal or reward. The acquisition, the reaching of the destination - yes, it's rewarding. But much less, and for a shorter period of time. That's what injectors are. The cheap and easy quick way to get small dopamine hits. EVE was predicated on the long game; the long, consistent, but effortful meaning that comes from working on a valued and hard-won prize.
Major Issue #2: Capital Ships
As mentioned above, skill injectors (combined with Rorqual changes), exacerbated and accelerated an existing problem in the game: capital ships. Capital ships were supposed to be rare, aspirational, and alliance level assets. They were supposed to be flagships. CCP thought, due to their expense and the long skill training required to sit in them, people wouldn't use them a whole lot. Which was true - for a while. Due to their expense, people didn't just throw them around willy-nilly; but people kept building them and buying them, because they were aspirational and status symbols. So they got stockpiled. Before injectors, a huge proportion of the playerbase went years before seeing their first dread or carrier. And when they did, it was a big deal. It usually meant their side was about to get wiped or forced off field. Or, they'd get a dank frag, because capital ships had some built-in vulnerabilities that could be exploited if they didn't have adequate support. Which is why they were mostly used in specific scenarios in NullSec with lots of people supporting them.
The problem with capital ships currently, and especially supercapitals and FAXes, is how much of an IWIN button they are. How more powerful they are compared to subcaps. From frigate to battleship there's a mostly smooth progression of EHP and DPS. Then you reach capital ships and the power curve becomes a sheer face. A seiged dreadnaught puts out tens of thousands of DPS, compared to a bastioned maurader at just 2-3k. A seiged dreadnaught can rep tens of thousands of HP per second, compared to a maurader's few thousand. FAXes have such powerful remote repping that a single one can turn the tide of an engagement, with very little counterplay except "blow it up" - and if you can't, game over.
And then CCP had the genius of idea of implenting HAW, which meant that a couple of dreadnaughts could chew threw gangs of subcaps with ease. All while being immune to EWAR and having a massive tank and huge local rep power.
The power of capital ships forced people to consolidate into blocs. People have a tendency to group together for mutual advantage in the first place; disparate tribes come together to form a "tribal nation", tibal nations conglomerate into a state, state's form alliances and fall under a hegemony, and eventually a nation of millions is formed. This is ineveitable. But caps accelerated the process and gave more incentive for people to come together: Groups who didn't have any caps, or couldn't afford to just throw caps at engagements, couldn't compete with those who could. So they joined up with alliances that had caps, or were part of coalitions that had caps. And then the supercapital became the standard, and everyone huddled together, even more conslidated in even bigger blocs. I haven't done the study myself, but I'm sure if someone tracked the number of caps and supercaps in game, it would correlate nicely with the consolidation of players into ever larger and larger blocs.
When injectors were introduced, along with Rorqual changes, people could mine the entire material requirements of a dreadnaught in a few hours and inject a capital toon overnight. This soon became the norm; players expected cheap, easily replaceable dreadnaughts. Players expected to be able to fly the most expensive, most powerful ships in the game as if it was an entitlement that came with their subscription. It was fun. But fun in the nihilist and self-destructive way that rioting and burning down the city you live in is fun. But afterwards you've got nowhere to go except to move to a new city.
EVE's been slowly dying for a while now, and in retrospect, the mass proliferation of skill-injected toons flying in all-capital fleets feels like an end-of-days festival. It's all going to hell, so let's party like it's 1999.
Fixing it Feels Like a Nerf
Players have gotten used to this status quo, or never knew anything but, so fixing it rightfully feels like a nerf - because it is a nerf. But it's a much needed nerf. CCP rightfully recognized the problem with capital proliferation. It was creating a boring, dull, homogenized form of gameplay that was strangling all the real content out of the game. After years of trying to rebalance and rebalance caps, and being too pussyfooted to just remove caps or hard-nerf them into a sensible progression with subcaps, they did the next best thing:
They changed the production process of capitals and supercapitals to make them more expensive and more complicated to build. They decoupled a large portion of their cost from the cost of subcaps by making them utilize materials subcaps don't use. This gives CCP much tighter control on how expensive capital ships can be to produce. Now, I don't agree entirely with the *specifics* of the production changes, but I do agree with decoupling capital production cost from subcapital production cost, and making them a more involved and difficult endeavour to build. This is a good thing. For the naysayers: EVE Online went over an entire decade with capital ships being rare. Wars still happened. People still fought. There was still content. People still got DANK FRAGS. EVE then went another 5 years with supercapitals still being rare, and everything was okay.
To the people who say that the large fights with big expensive titans gets players in the game: that used to be the case when it used to be newsworthy. When titans were rare and prestigious. Back in like 2013 when the Battle of Asakai happened. But now we're at a point where titans were so cheap, for so long, that solo players have them and solo drop them in LowSec willy-nilly in drive-by doomsdays. Back in the day that would have been a baller move. Now it's like - meh whatever.
I will say one thing though: the pussyfoot production changes were still mostly ill-conceived. There was a huge stockpile of caps in the game. That stockpile is still there, perhaps somewhat diminished, but now capital ships are much harder and more expensive to replace. So this only maintains the status quo; if you don't have caps, you'd better join a group that does. A day late, a dollar short. We'll see how it plays out.
What CCP should have done was just bite the bullet and piss people off even more for the health of the game: "Sorry guys. We really screwed up with caps, injectors, and Rorqual changes. So what we're going to do is give capital ships a really hard nerf, so that they're in line with the same progression subcaps enjoy, and we're going to make them 10x more expensive to build. The game needs a break from capital ships. Also, we're disabling excavators for the time being. Please go back to subcaps for a while."
Injectors + Rorquals + Cap Proliferation = EVE turned into an instant-gratification battleground where the most expensive and exclusive class of ships became commonplace and disposable. The player culture shifted to adopt these values and now the very suggestion of returning to a game dominated mostly by subcapital warfare is met with the refrain: "there'd be no reason to undock". I think that is the major problem with EVE post-2016. Players who weren't on board with this left out of frustration. The game they knew and loved was dead and gone. Challenge and prestiage removed. Players who were on board with this ending up leaving too, because they got bored with it (hence the current high turnover rate of the game, where 60% of players started since 2018).
So now we're left with a small (and dwindling) enclave of hardcore, dedicated, long-term players who have just been around forever, or at least since before 2018/2016... and a larger and growing proportion of younger gamers who demand instant-gratification without realizing how harmful it is for them.
Major Issue #3: Monetization and Side Projects
Over the years CCP, to the detriment of EVE, have funneled resources into various side projects. Two notable side projects were World of Darkness (or whatever it was), and DUST514. Both projects failed miserably. And both projects took time, money, and resources away from the development of EVE. What CCP "Games" seems to fail to realize is that they are not a "gaming company". They are not a "games developer". They are an EVE Online company. They are an EVE Online developer. EVE Online is CCP. Without EVE Online, CCP vanishes. CCP needs to focus on just making a spaceship game. They have the market cornered; there is no game like EVE. Some games, such as Albion Online, and Starborn (both of which I believe have former EVE devs on their team) come close, but still fall short.
At this point in EVE's history, CCP needs to wake up and redouble their efforts. They need to dedicate all of their time, attention, and resources into EVE Online. The game is nowhere near a healthy enough state that CCP can start branching off into side projects.
And CCP needs to stop monetizing the game and farming it's playerbase for cash to fund their side projects.
CCP introduced monetization in the game many years ago, before DUST514 was released, during the so called "Summer of Rage" which older players know as "Monoclegate". The playerbase stood up solidly and said "NO". Cosmetics only! CCP promised cosmetics only. They would never sell in-game items such as ships and modules, and they would never sell SP. This was Hilmar's solemn promise. And for a while, they stuck to that. Until, of course, they introduced injectors, a way of buying and selling SP. Sure, CCP wasn't directly selling SP to players. They were just facilitating the sale and purchase of SP, and making money from the extractors. But then, one day, CCP started selling SP to players in the form of "starter packs" which, despite the name, were available to every account regardless of age. And then they started selling "destroyer packs" until, finally, they started selling mining barges.
Today, when you start the launcher, there's no dramatic music. There's no visuals. There's nothing thematic. You have your accounts on one side, and a sleuth of advertisements for PLEX and packs on the other side, with the occasional news bit.
So this has been CCP's pattern: Introduce monetization. Receive pushback from the playerbase. Roll it back. Wait a year or two. Try it again. What CCP is doing here is taking advantage of EVE's turnover rate to see what the current playerbase is willing to accept. They said they wouldn't sell SP. Then they introduced injectors which, despite much controversy, was a feature the playerbase adopted. The playerbase got used to the idea of swiping their credit card for SP. And then CCP started selling SP directly to players in the form of limited-use "starter packs" and "training boost bundles".
I honestly feel it won't be long before players are able to just buy SP the way they buy PLEX. But perhaps not, because that would compete with injectors. I'm sure people on the marketing team are trying to figure that one out as you read this.
Major Issue #4: Lack of Lore and Story
Remember the Hydrostatic Podcast? They're done. Their last Youtube video was six years ago. All their material now exists as archives. Ever read any EVE Online chronicles? Last entry 2018. A lot of players will say "lol lore", but the lore was important. The lore and story was something a huge segment of the playerbase lived for. They were actively involved in it, roleplaying within the lore, speculating, having hours long podcasts discussing the lore and hypothesizing what was really going on (cuz something is, or at least was, going on in EVE). But lore in EVE Online is effectively dead. The Jove are dead (for reasons unknown) and no one at CCP is working on anything as far as we know. Here's some Triglavians and some instanced PvE. Thanks.
What started as a very long, very detailed, and very complex story arc - starting with The Empyrean Age expansion (and book by the same title), continuing through with DUST514 and Templar One in 2012 and finally Caroline's Star and the emergence of the Drifters in 2015, involving the Amarr, the Minmatar, the Jove, Sansha's Nation, CONCORD, and the Sisters of EVE, filled with intrigue and mystery... fizzled into absolutely nothing, and ended with the go-nowhere, no-conclusion Triglavian storyline released in 2018.
The lore used to be a huge part of EVE. It drove the game in the background. The Devs, roleplaying as lore elements, would interact witht he playerbase, giving them riddles and puzzles to solve. Some riddles and puzzles were never solved. Some were, and player choices influenced the direction the story would go in. But now that's all gone. What we have left are scripted events with set outcomes in mind, the player choice accounting for very little of the effect size. Triglavians were always going to take a certain number of systems. Player choice only decided which systems.
Players want to participate in the lore. But not in scripted events with a set outcome in mind. They want to interact with a CCP Dev who's roleplaying a character from the lore. A Dev who is working on a living, organic, developing story who is dropping hints and crumbs for players to chase. Not some garbage where you warp to a stolen stargate and kill the same dozen NPCs 100x for a SKIN.
Players mostly run those event sites for the rewards. No one really cares about the story anymore. If those sites affect the story, it'll be garbage, because players will min-max it and the sites and events that offer the most intriguing rewards will drive the story - not player interest and choice.
The 2014 - 2015 Exodus
I still haven't figured it out. I think maybe that was a mass quitting of players who were just fed up with how candyassed EVE was becoming.
In Conclusion
This post is getting long and I've got other things to do. Here are my conlcuding thoughts:
We are now entering the third decade of EVE Online. EVE Online used to be a grimdark, dystopian game set in the far future in a farflung part of the Universe. The ambience was dark and cruddy, with a sense of hopelessness, like Bladerunner or Warhammer 40k. It was sink or swim and "adapt or die" was the motto. "Harden The Fuck Up". There was a feeling that something was going on, but nobody could divine what it was. There were pleasure hubs, hedonism, religious fanaticism, drugs, slavery, and corporatism. Human life had little value. Everything was a struggle; wealth was hard to accumulate and easy to lose or have stolen from you. There were scams and heists. Stories of betrayal and revenge. Spies could actually do real damage via AWOXing and theft. Trust was a commodity. Friendship mattered. Reputation mattered. You needed help from others. And everyone was a shady psychopath and everyone was paranoid.
Over the years, EVE Online has morphed. It started around 2012-2013, around the time this "action" trailer was released (compare it to the original version). The playerbase was already starting to age, and it seemed like CCP was trying to appeal to a younger generation of gamers. There were lots of quality of life updates. Yes, many of these were good and sorely needed. A lot of clicking got removed, which was good. Certain things that used to be a headache and took hours to accomplish became more streamlined, which allowed players to spend less time doing "chores" and more time going out there doing other things. But in a lot of ways the game just got too easy. It got too easy to make ISK and PvE became safer. The trailers changed; there was less focus on ships and story and narrative and more focus on people, action, and flashy explosions. The ambience began to brighten up. Pleasure hubs were removed, slavery doesn't get talked about as much, and drugs are now referred to simply as "boosters" (and they aren't even illegal anymore...).
Everything had it's dark side. Even the Sisters of EVE had a dark side, and their own morally vague, insidious and hinted-at agenda. Even the good guys were bad guys. What the fuck ever happened to the development of the Vitoc antidote? What happened to the rogue drone storylines? What's with Isogen 5? Terran superweapons? Who is "The Other" and where did "The Other" go? Why did the Drifters kill Jamyl? COME ON ALREADY IT'S BEEN YEARS. YEARS!
Somewhere along the way, what made EVE EVE, and what made EVE players EVE players, got lost. Due to decisions made by CCP (cap rebalances, monetization, thematic changes in trailers, increased advertising, and the introduction of skill injectors and Rorqual blobs), the player culture itself changed. The old guard is gone; those villainous, psychopathic, shady capsuleers of legend... are gone. There is no more "long game". It's all instant-gratification. It's all ease and convenience. Fucking cat ears. The playerbase wants fucking cat ears. We used to want WiS so we could cut each other's throats. Now we want fucking cat ears so our space barbies can look cute while we ECM each other from 200km away.
So in conclusion: EVE Online isn't dying. It died years ago. Nobody from the old days would recognize this mess we have now. So now that EVE Online, the EVE Online I fell in love with and grew up playing, is dead... what now? Can a phoenix rise from the ashes - better, more interesting, more meaningful, more engaging, more sensible, more enduring? Or is... is this it? Just a slow decline until the servers no longer pay for themselves, and EVE Online dies and exists only as a shitty mobile game in Southeast Asia?
Stay tuned for Part 2; The Solutions, if I ever find the motivation to write it. This could possibly be my last blog entry.
Take care, space nerds. This is Xuixien, space cat extraordinaire, signing off for now. o/
