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[Silas Vitalia]

--Incoming Bittervet, all hands to battle stations--

Is anyone else....EVE burnt out these days?

I feel like the amounts of RP butthurt and genuine caustic attitudes from many players, combined with the last few years of not-expansions and lack of content have been slowly but surely draining my interest, to the point I'm using my account more like an instant messenger chat program with occasional pvp than the all-immersive experience it once was for me.

What I'm having difficulty determining in an objective way, is whether my memories of things 'how they used to be' years ago were actually better than they are now, or if bittervet syndrome has taken hold in a scary and profound way. 


I realize my particular interests put me in an extremely small minority of eve players (RP, lore, etc).  I just feel like the current administration and direction of the game development just isn't interested in the things I'm interested in.  I remember strings of expansions where my and other players reactions were 'holy crap that looks cool! Look at all that new shit! Neat!'  and the last few years has been more 'hey look at all the new balance iterations, x thing is less broken now'

I'm trying really hard not to be jaded but I'm not doing a very good job of succeeding lately.  Playing this game for what is probably on average daily for the last 7 or 8 years I'm feeling incredibly 'meh' right now about justifying further investment of RL time and resources.

Am I right about shit actually being better and more interesting and more dynamic years past? 

Or do I need to up my dosage of HTFU and do other things in game? 

Moderator note I will happily accept HTFU or YDIW responses.

[Vincent Pryce]

[Arista Shahni]

The chocolate icing of every MMO comes off eventually, and eventually, people get fucking tired of cake.

Usually best to play other things in between and  not focus so heavily on one game.

Communities also change, or in some ways, 'refuse to change' to the point that sometimes things get annoying.

"HTFU"ing is what leads to bittervets.  See, that's the thing.  They're bitter, caustic, miserable, take pleasure in being total dicks to everyone they run into, but still pay to play EVE.  This makes them positive contributors.

You're better off, if you're feeling Meh, deciding who do you play a game for?  Do you play it for the people around you be be exposed to you, or do you play it for your own enjoyment?

This has all gotta be bits of similar speeches you've heard before.  No game is any different in that respect.

[Morwen Lagann]

I might be logged into EVE whenever I'm awake and/or at my computer, but I'm rarely actually sitting there playing EVE the whole time. Everyone needs breaks sometimes. I've been playing a lot of STO with Ava, Ana, Karm, Vince and a few others for a couple months now, which is the primary source of my being AFK, though sometimes I'm playing other stuff. Or watching movies.

I'm also a little burned out and sort of in self-imposed limbo, myself - I've got a bunch of stuff to write before I can really get back into RPing, and I have the problem of easily being able to visualize exactly what I want to do in my head but getting those images (and there are some seriously pretty moving images in there at times, lemme tell you) into words on paper or notepad or w/e is extremely difficult for me and always has been something I struggle with. Hence Morwen having been extremely silent for the last two weeks beyond the obvious reasons.

I think the next couple expansions are more geared toward my gameplay priorities than any of the other ones have been in the past, save Apocrypha and the current Odyssey, so I'm not feeling too pessimistic about the direction CCP is going.

Not going to disagree with the sentiment that lowsec is the redheaded stepchild that's always being beaten to a pulp by its siblings, though.

[Makkal]

For me, it's a cycle of interest and lack of interest. I don't know if RP was better years past because I wasn't around.

I'll actually say that the lore/setting got a great deal of love this year with the fall of Heth and the rise of Federation - Republic tensions. Things have slowed down and those of us in the larger Amarr bloc weren't really given something to play with this year, though I appreciated the event actor showing up for the PIE ball.

And yes, lowsec is a red-headed stepchild.

[Lyn Farel]

You know, I have pretty much stopped finding an interesting in the actual game for 3-4 years now, after I left FW. Which means I still enjoyed it maybe 4 years or so, which is already something. On my first MMO, which was SWG, I got fed up of the (nonsensical) gameplay past a few months. I still stayed ingame for 3-4 years after just because of RP and what we were able to do with the little community I was into. And we did awesome things.

And like all the things, we had a golden age, and then decline.

Tbh they would need to introduce a lot of changes in the game for me to care again about it. But I don't play for that anyway. It would be nice to have something else to do again, but RP is enough by me. The only issue I have is when I don't have any RP solutions and when it's mostly dead. This is when I seriously consider quitting.

So I don't really think i'm in your position regardless. If people are caustic, i'm not sure it's because of that tbh. People are caustic because there are plenty of unsolved issues that stand between them. Issues that people do not want to speak about or hear about because they can't accept them. Most people prefer to sit on their privileges when they have acquired them, and when it stomps on other people fun or life in the community, they will do whatever they can to beat them to death out of selfishness.

I have seen that on other MMOs, but usually they tend to explode pretty fast and communities eventually collapse. Here it is not the case thanks to a strong core of people sharing good RP values, an overall more mature group, and a good environment with similar ideals. But one can't suppress feuds between people that will inevitably appear, and when people do not want to face them out of fear to see something shattering, or just out of fear of losing their privileges, things start to get insidious and stay for ages rotting again and again until the bitterness starts to really smell.

[Vic Van Meter]

I get that completely.  I've played WoW pretty much consistently since launch, and that's a game with a LOT more variety than EVE.  I think it's kind of amazing EVE has stayed as alive as it has.

That said, it's a game that plays up the PVP in nearly every aspect of the endgame and promotes corporate politics as its claim to fame.  Which to us who aren't in love with it is a bit like taking a bunch of the worst parts of cliquishness we hated in high school and then making sure those cliques have every opportunity to screw with each other.  It breeds a sort of hostility and caustic bile that seeps into nearly everything in the game.  I've definitely noticed that everything turns into a fight, even in the RP community, but that's just because of the sort of atmosphere the game puts together.

I'd say you need another game for a while.  Take a break from the fighting.  Play a completely different game, maybe even not an MMO if you want to sort of relax IRL a bit.  If you do take up a different MMO, take up something that doesn't play up the PVP so much.  Give yourself an opportunity to chill and not have to fight over every little thing so much.

Then again, sometimes I just stop playing the game and take some time to RP.  That's not so bad.  It's probably harder in EVE since it's not like you can disembark and just soak up some random RP at a backwater station the way you can in other games that give half a damn about RP.  There's nothing wrong with just RPing, though, for a while.

[Esna Pitoojee]

Confirming another partially-burnt-out spaceships-chatbox-user.

I've been bouncing around between a few different games, and still I have trouble pushing myself to undock in EVE anymore. At least some of it has to do with a certain someone deciding to make CCP throw a wet blanket over everything RP a few weeks back, but it's even more than that: I can simply no longer find a group in EVE that fully matches my interests; no such groups look to be appearing in the near future, and my own experiences with leadership have shown me that I am shit at motivating a corp to do stuff so starting something isn't likely either.

We all know EVE - like most other MMOs - is about the community. The RP community is about all I've got left in EVE, and that doesn't drive me to undock and make fights - only to make :words:.


Regarding expansions, in some ways I am enormously glad to see CCP going back and fixing up some old stuff. A lot of these little things needed to be fixed, and the game is much better with them as such. However, I agree, 'expansions' should not solely be fixes.

At first I thought it was because EVE had somehow evolved itself into its final stage - reached its own endgame. But lately I've been realizing that I was partly wrong - it is not the game, but the community meta that has evolved into an endgame state (especially with respect to communication). How that will shift, I'm not exactly sure.

[Gaven Lok ri]

I have been there with EVE before.

I will say that its actually better than it was three or four years ago. Having not played in the intervening years makes that a bit easier to see.

TonyG being gone is a huge benefit. The storyline is moving, even if its not perfect.

The t1 hull changes are phenomenal. PvP is incredibly varied compared to what it used to be.

There is a relatively large amount of content to play. I am loving FW and don't plan on leaving it, but you have wormholes, incursions, general low sec, 0.0, FW, high sec stuff and so on. That is a huge amount of types of content to pick from.

The community seems to be in a somewhat odd place. RP communities have balkanized quite a bit, which is both good and bad. This is in part because of the amount of added content to the game. All RP effort used to go to a very small number of activities, that isn't really true anymore. Still, the RP channels are far far more active than I remember from three years ago. And the amount of RP-light people is much higher than it was a few years back.

Really though, EVE has never really worked if you want CCP to give you content. It has always rewarded setting your own goals and direction and finding a community to accomplish those goals with. This is both the best thing about EVE and the worst. Most of the time I see people (including myself) burning out on EVE it is because they either set goals that they could not achieve or they accomplished their goals and failed to set new ones to replace them.

[Louella Dougans]

I, personally, have been in the ingame news several times, and had a direct and pivotal role in the development of a major expansion. (no really, I did)

Some things are better, some things are worse.


There is however, a tendency to accumulate disappointments, which saps enjoyment.

The more you play, the more people you encounter, that will have different views about all sorts of things. And eventually, it becomes "Oh, it's this again". Familiarity breeds contempt, and all that.

[Ollie]

Beyond what everyone else has offered Silas, it might be worthwhile pointing out an obvious but sometimes overlooked fact: as you get older your priorities change.

Maybe gaming, either EVE specific or in general, doesn't have the same shine to it as it once did because other things in your life have become more important.

[Pieter Tuulinen]

Right now I still enjoy logging in with my Pyre bros and having a roam. I'm not sure I can do eight hour roams and, I must admit, RP seems harder and harder these days - although I sink a lot of time into it.

I just don't RP with the same variety of people that I used to, and I don't know why...

[Utsukushi Shi]

I started playing EVE the week before Incarna came out. Right as I was starting, wide-eyed in this amazing game people were quitting over the whole "Greed" debacle or railing against the introduction of Avatars and CQ's. For me it was irrelevant, a whole new universe had opened up to me replete with it's own history of both NPC and PC interaction to delve into. It took me awhile to really get into the RP side of things beyond reading about it but from day one I was fascinated by the old stories and the fact that some number of the players from days of yore were still here and active. It has been a source of constant sadness how few of them are truly interacting with the game today and how RP in general has so little effect on the day to day of most of the game.

I think that the older players like yourself are an immeasurably valuable thing for us younger players. Not only do you contain the knowledge of what actually happened in the past you contain within your character histories the gravitas necessary to be our leaders and advisors. You Silas should be the head of a Blooder Alliance reaving through the stars not a two man corp pegged onto some silly named pvp alliance that could give a shit about "lolRP". Esna, you should be part of Mithra's Society or PIE or CVA or find some upstart young Amarr roleplayer with the time you do not have and teach him how to grow and be successful. We should be taking this game back from the mechanistic boring players, not just reacting to them as if they own EVE and it's future. When I think about RP in this game what sticks with me is that quote from the "Good RP Logs" thread where Graelyn recounts his "name". That is fucking awesome. Every once in awhile I go back and read it and think about how someday I too will be able to list my accomplishments.

I get that it is hard sometimes to have the time and put in the effort, like Merdanath was posting the other day. I tried to run my own alliance and create my own little slice but hit the brick wall of RL issues vs Executor/CEO. When it failed I had a choice, join some non-RPers and go farm C5's, make my own little 1-man corp and be sad and lonely or find a Corp that was close enough to what I liked and wanted to do and help them. I went with option number three and other than my steadfast desire to never wear aviator shades it has been a blast. Still don't have a ton of time to play but when I do I get the interaction I desire and contribute how I can to Corp goals. Someday I will have more time and will put any of the dozen of schemes I craft weekly into play.

Don't be discouraged. You are an awesome part of New Eden. I want to read of your exploits for years to come.

[Vikarion]

I'm not tired of Eve. I've gotten irritated enough to threaten quitting once (monocle gate) and unsub, but I'm not tired of it. When I get tired of one facet, I try something new, or try doing it harder, like missioning in hostile null. If I get tired of rp chat and the boards, I shut up about it for a while. But there are so many things to do, I can rotate between them.

[Saede Riordan]

Or do I need to up my dosage of HTFU and do other things in game? 

This really. I was pretty much ready to quite before I came out to wormhole space. I'd done the facwar thing, I'd been a lowsec pirate, I'd been part of nullblobs, I'd done highsec wardecs, heists, scams, there's very little I haven't tried. I came out to wormhole space and I feel like it completely reinvigorated my enjoyment of the game, and I'm definitely having more fun now then I was ever having in the past. So if you're not having fun, try something different.