Quitting EVE Online – For real this time (question mark?)

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while now. It’s been a fair few months since I canceled my main account’s subscription, although I admittedly hadn’t made any final decisions at that point yet. In a way CCP made that decision for me a bit later on, when they decided to raise their subscription price by a third back in May.

I know, I know, writing “I quit”-posts is lame and all that, but this is kind of a big deal for me. I created my main account and -character on December 22nd, 2005. Fricking two thousand and five! Yes, there were breaks in between, but I’ve played this game for a hell of a long time. I’ve seen – and been, at times, part of – empires rise and fall. I’ve been a manufacturer, trader, policeman, mercenary, pirate and lowly fleet grunt. Features came and went. Things changed, and we all adapted. This is truly a game like no other.

However, for me personally many of the changes CCP have made during the past couple of years resulted in a game that’s become less and less enjoyable to play, and along the way my willingness to adapt has all but vanished. EVE has always been a game you had to put work into in order to get to the enjoyable bits, and each and every time I took a break it was because the tedium had started to outweigh the fun. Well, by now the tedium has reached a point where I just don’t want to deal with it anymore at all, and the game’s become more expensive to boot. So, yeah.

Now, of course I could just leave it at that, but since this is my own personal platform I’m also gonna use it to tell anyone who’s willing to listen (well, read) which changes in specific made the game so much worse for me. Keep in mind though that I’m not saying reverting these changes would make the game better per se, I’m just saying it would make the game better for me.

• • The big Cyno change

Almost three years ago CCP drastically reduced the selection of ships a Cynosural Field Generator could be fitted on. Before that you could fit this device, used to provide a jumpdrive-destination for capital ships, to almost any vessel, which meant that even as a solo player you could move your capitals around with almost no financial risk (provided you didn’t make any mistakes, and making mistakes is very easy in EVE). Since the change you have to use at least a Force Recon Cruiser, which means that you’re forced to put upwards of 300 million ISK at risk – per jump.

Not even taking into account the fact that you also need to have your cyno alts trained up to the point where they can even fly these things, this change alone put a hard stop to any activity that would have required to move a capital ship on my own.

So no carrier ratting for me anymore – which I’d only just begun to do, goddammit – but even more importantly, no more moving all my shit without the safety of a whole fleet. Ever since then life in null sec has become a huge bother for Lakisa and myself, because we know that we absolutely can’t risk missing any move ops else we might get stuck. We also can’t get stuff into or out of null without using the services of a shipping company, and I’ve always liked to do these things myself (and it was cheaper that way too of course).

I know that this change has brought its upsides when looked at on a bigger scale, but for me as an individual it sucks big time.

• • The economic starvation plan

Not very long after the cyno change CCP began their assault on too much wealth and stuff and everything being too easily obtainable in the game (their opinion, not mine). In their usual way of sledgehammering every perceived problem into an unrecognizable pulp they heavily nerfed mining outputs, ratting payouts, the efficiency of the once strongest mining ship and probably some more stuff I can’t recall right now. The value of minerals soared to all-time highs, and naturally prices of ships and, well, most player-manufactured goods (which is almost everything) followed suit.

Now, it is true that out in nullsec it could feel, at times, like pretty much everybody had their army of Rorqual-alts as well as their own Supercarrier and/or Titan. However, I can assure you that such was not the case. I certainly didn’t have any of that, and a substantial percentage of any fleet’s regular grunts didn’t either.

Still, I’m not saying that they shouldn’t have done anything. Some kind of change probably was needed. The way I see it a better way would have been to somehow incentivize more usage of caps and supers, so more of that stuff would have gotten blown up. Their solution led to much less caps being fielded instead, because most people were too afraid to loose them all of a sudden.

Worse for me personally – and for many more I’m sure – is that the “little man”, as usual, got affected just as bad as the trillionaires, if not more. The fact that the nerfs were primarily aimed at capital ships, which are all Tech I hulls, meant that other Tech I ships got a lot more expensive too – only that those are actually supposed to be the “cheap stuff”. Suddenly flying battleships instead of Tech II cruisers wasn’t the much more affordable alternative it once was anymore. Aspiring to own one of the big toys some day, a daunting task even before all those changes, has become entirely unachievable for the average player.

As for income, since the cyno nerf effectively took carrier ratting away from me my modus operandi for ISK-making was pretty much back to “run level-4 missions in highsec”, and let me tell you, when that’s your only viable income stream you really don’t want to buy, let alone lose, anything of value. Yes, there are other things I could have done to earn some more ISK, but I didn’t want to do those things, simple as that. The game felt like a job at times even without any additional busywork.

CCP can argue that doing this was necessary all they want, it has made the game less fun, end of story. I don’t know about you, but in my opinion any change developers make to their game should make the game more fun, not less.

• • More focus on (and power to) the cash shop

You know what I dislike even more than seeing a beloved game getting worse and worse? Seeing that and also being bombarded with cash shop advertisements, every new “opportunity” being more pay to win than the last.

I don’t give a damn whether it’s Pearl Abyss pulling the strings in this regard or not (because what difference does it make?), fact is that the cash shop is being shoved right in our face at every opportunity nowadays, and you can pretty much buy everything your heart desires. Yes, even skill points. Not that it matters much ever since the introduction of skill extractors, because PLEX is a thing and you could always sell that for ISK and then buy injectors with those.

As you know I generally don’t consider cash shops to be the spawn of the devil per se. But the bottom line is this: to me EVE Online in 2022 is a game that’s as unfun to play as it ever was since I started, has a higher subscription price than any other MMORPG on the market (as far as I know) and seemingly cares more about selling me shit I don’t need than entertaining, let alone humoring me as a player…nuff said I guess.

Of course the timing couldn’t be worse, what with Goons getting a new leadership just recently and declaring the time of stalemates to be over. There might be interesting times ahead.

Oh well, I guess from now on I’ll just be one of those guys who keep saying that watching the goings-on in EVE from the sidelines is a lot more fun than actually playing the game.

I’ve said that before though, so we’ll see.

Blaugust 2022 post count: 2