Equinox has not been good to most of the players of EVE. What was hyped and praised as a ‘rejuvenation’ of nullsec, has been met with a lot of drama all around. Player numbers over the past few months have lowered – which is expected in summer months, but not quite to the extent that we have seen. The steam reviews have also recently been bombarded by negative ratings, in an effort to make CCP pay attention. I’ve been reading reddit stories of skyhook robberies, nerfs to ratting anomalies, systems that can no longer support any sort of isk generating content (ie: not enough workers, or power), nerfs to mining anomalies and an overall reluctance to convert the systems to the shiny new (you’re not forced to at the moment, they will auto swap sometime in November, is the speculation). Once you swap you are unable to revert the change. Even if you don’t personally live in nullsec, a huge portion of the active population of EVE does, and these changes will trickle down and affect everyone over time, no matter where you live. There’s arguments about Pochven and WH faucets, and an overall feeling of frustration.
Personally, I’ve always been a ‘let’s wait and see’ player, and I like to think that game developers (given enough time) are smart enough to be able to turn things around, but I’ve also never really experienced an expansion in EVE before, and I’m not sure about this one since so much of it doesn’t relate to anything I personally do, directly. I’m concerned about the trickle down effect, more expensive ships, less players around, those items do affect me.
I’m also not naive enough to think that CCP can please everyone, especially in this sort of a game. I do think they (CCP) need to remember that it’s supposed to be fun, and if you remove all of that fun, you need to replace it or people will leave.
I guess we’ll see what happens in November.