axemanjim

I played Eve for nearly 2 years, before quitting 6 months ago. I think your correspondent is in for a nasty shock.

I agree that the learning curve for new players is harsh, but the mid-game, from about 6-12 months of play is an absolute joy, as the myriad of options and things to do opens up for you.

After that, though, at around 12-15 months, things go downhill. At that point, you can take your character into one of the big alliances and play the "real" game in lawless space, fighting massive battles with the best ships in the game, and make a fortune from mining the best minerals and killing the best mobs in the game. Fantastic, yes?

No.

Battles in 0.0 (the "lawless space") are not determined by ships, tactics, pilots or skill. They are determined by lag. Game-wrecking, fun-destroying lag that gets worse with every patch. You warp off to the scene of a fight in your intricately set-up, tactically brilliant ship that cost you zillions of ISK to get just right, and, two minutes later, when your screen finally unfreezes, you're sitting in a station and your ship and pod are space dust somewhere. About 1/4 of the ships in every major battle die without their pilots even seeing the enemy. The art of fleet combat is now lag-management and metagaming. It's got to the extent that the big alliances will deliberately crash server nodes (by having hundreds of pilots jump in/out of a system within seconds of each other) to avoid losing key battles. Sorry, but that just isn't any fun.

And that's before you get to the corrupt relationship between the developers and some of the big alliances. I ended up fairly high-up in an alliance (albeit a smaller one) and it was really noticeable how some alliances got bugfixes and others were told to do time-consuming workarounds or just ignored. Not fun. The worst part of the imfamous T20 incident was not that the eponymous dev was corruptly giving free stuff to his friends but that the only action CCP took was to ban the whistleblower for "causing extra work for CCP!". I felt very uneasy about handing my money over to a company that could behave that way, and in the end I stopped.