I won't add anything to the general vitriol other than to say that I think some of us could think of one or two people we'd rather have seen take up the role that Tony Gonzales took on. There were several people with great ideas, talent, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of Eve derived from many hours of gameplay, reading and debating with their peers: prerequisites for producing something pretty memorable I think. Maybe they couldn't have delivered anything better. We'll never know.
There was always a sense that TonyG blithely networked his way into a position while others were wasting their time writing good stuff and, well, getting Eve. Perhaps I am being unfair, but that's my perception of how things went down. The community of actively creative people playing Eve was pretty small. The reaction to the news that some guy writing an Eve novel was mostly: "Who?" It was a decision from left field.
Sure, I feel pretty resentful on a personal level. I loved Eve, and its background and writing bits and pieces of fiction set in that background maintained my interest long after I'd tired of the actual gameplay. Someone waltzing in and bollocksing stuff up was a deciding factor in me not bothering with it any more. It's purely the double whammy of nostalgia and the lack of any credible alternative to Eve that makes me pop back occasionally to see what is happening.
