As another former EVE player, I've always been of the opinion that the only way an MMO works is if you can properly compete with other players per the mechanics of the game. Theme park MMOs never appealed to me because you're not playing a multiplayer game for 99% of it, you're just playing a single player RPG in the general vicinity of other people's avatars and/or having your experience ruined because the devs decided you all needed to kill the same mob that they've made respawn once per half hour and there's only ever 5 of them in total.
That said, the downfall of a game like EVE has little to do with the devs and more to do with the tendency of players in that environment to reinvent society from first principles. The death of EVE and why I stopped playing is that it became safer to live in 0.0 space (which should be the lawless frontier where anything goes) than it did in high-sec space (where you can kill other players, but you will guaranteed be killed by NPC cops in response) because every group consolidated into two giant blobs of alliances where you could AFK in space and know you had a 99% chance of still being alive and well when you came back an hour later because the nearest enemy faction is an hour's travel time away. When you're unironically calculating how much you owe in taxes based on your mining activity, the idea of being an ancap god kinda loses its appeal.
Even in a hardcore full PvP vibeo gane, we can't overcome our nature of generally liking safety, so people will gather in safe places. If there are no safe places, we will band together to create them and will collectively act against outsiders trying to make them unsafe.
Gamers who fantasize about "hardcore full loot PvP" imagine a game where it's just a bunch of individual characters ganking each other, and the most skilled gamer with the most epic gear will reign supreme, but that's not what happens because, as it turns out, "apes together strong." People form groups, alliances, clans, whatever, and then they'll create rules because that's literally what we have done since the dawn of our species.
It's an understandable thing to be mad about, but everything you're mentioning happened in like 2006/2007 and CCP did a pretty good job of preventing it again.
Furthermore that era of history was one of the healthiest when it came to organic, continuous content. It was only when the nullsec blocs started going ham on rental empires that the issues started really popping up, as it was suddenly very incentivized to protect every inch of space so you could print infinite ISK so you could buy more supercapitals so you could expand to more space to print more ISK, etc. Call it an inherent contradiction of game mechanics if we want to be Marxist about it, but it was doomed to result in static crabbing, which it did.
As another former EVE player, I've always been of the opinion that the only way an MMO works is if you can properly compete with other players per the mechanics of the game. Theme park MMOs never appealed to me because you're not playing a multiplayer game for 99% of it, you're just playing a single player RPG in the general vicinity of other people's avatars and/or having your experience ruined because the devs decided you all needed to kill the same mob that they've made respawn once per half hour and there's only ever 5 of them in total.
That said, the downfall of a game like EVE has little to do with the devs and more to do with the tendency of players in that environment to reinvent society from first principles. The death of EVE and why I stopped playing is that it became safer to live in 0.0 space (which should be the lawless frontier where anything goes) than it did in high-sec space (where you can kill other players, but you will guaranteed be killed by NPC cops in response) because every group consolidated into two giant blobs of alliances where you could AFK in space and know you had a 99% chance of still being alive and well when you came back an hour later because the nearest enemy faction is an hour's travel time away. When you're unironically calculating how much you owe in taxes based on your mining activity, the idea of being an ancap god kinda loses its appeal.
This exactly.
Even in a hardcore full PvP vibeo gane, we can't overcome our nature of generally liking safety, so people will gather in safe places. If there are no safe places, we will band together to create them and will collectively act against outsiders trying to make them unsafe.
Gamers who fantasize about "hardcore full loot PvP" imagine a game where it's just a bunch of individual characters ganking each other, and the most skilled gamer with the most epic gear will reign supreme, but that's not what happens because, as it turns out, "apes together strong." People form groups, alliances, clans, whatever, and then they'll create rules because that's literally what we have done since the dawn of our species.
Another major L for individualism :big-cool:
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It's an understandable thing to be mad about, but everything you're mentioning happened in like 2006/2007 and CCP did a pretty good job of preventing it again.
Furthermore that era of history was one of the healthiest when it came to organic, continuous content. It was only when the nullsec blocs started going ham on rental empires that the issues started really popping up, as it was suddenly very incentivized to protect every inch of space so you could print infinite ISK so you could buy more supercapitals so you could expand to more space to print more ISK, etc. Call it an inherent contradiction of game mechanics if we want to be Marxist about it, but it was doomed to result in static crabbing, which it did.