No, the title is not some sort of clickbait, I ended my Eve Online adventure.

I created my first character in 2007, but I was playing alone in hisec and It was such a boring game that I wasted 2 of the 3 months subscription I bought.

Then came the fantastic “This is Eve” trailer (I still think it’s one of the best trailers in the history of videogames) and I decided to try it again, this time immediately entering a corp and really playing as the game should be played, in team.

I created my main character in December 2014 and I quit in May 2025.

Why? Because I had no more objectives, I did everything I was interested in the game.

I could blame CCP for all the wrong choices they made (to be honest I have at least three huge posts in draft since years about this) but in reality I quit Eve because I lost interest in the game.

I never been a PVP player and I never liked it, during the last year of playing I kept doing PVE in NPC Null even If I was in a huge alliance (INIT) with plenty of space and opportunities.

I was in a fantastic corp but ignored all the content opportunities from the amazing guys inside it, I reached all the objectives that I was interested in:

• max out my pvp main for fleets
• max out a pve alt (three toons to be honest)
• max out a mining alt (two to be honest)
• max out two haulers for jumpfreighters
• max out an industrial toon
• max out a Jita trader
• create a huge collection of blueprints to build whatever I wanted or needed
• max out ratting, mining, combat missions, mining missions, DED complexes
• max out a dread toon, two carrier toons, two fax toons, two Rorqual toons, two JF toons

I participated in all the big was happened in the  game in those 10 years, I saw the game evolve, fall and rise again, I was one of those involved in some of the most epic battles and objectives ever made in the game (a couple of which were World Guinness Record events).

The game made me possible to get in contact with so many amazing people, I made friends, young people, old people (some of them also passed in those 10 years), people from all over the world.

I can’t describe how many amazing experiences I had thanks to Eve, but now they’re all memories of the past.

Those who know the game may think there’s plenty of other things to do, like building and playing a supercarrier or a titan, in reality I don’t give a damn about those things so they’re not an option or an interesting objective.

The reality is that the last year was a slow and tedious approach to this decision, I was only too lazy and too nostalgic to take it.

These 10 years have been a blast, and no matter its problems I still think Eve Online is the most complex and interesting multiplayer game ever existed and still existing today, so I really suggest everyone to try it.

I will gladly pay if there’s a way to reset my memory and forget everything about the game, to be able to start from the beginning today, but sadly it’s not possible, so my only option is to “win Eve” and stop playing it.

o7

It looks like a century has passed since I wrote something about this game… in fact it was 2022 and I was writing about the problems affecting the game.

Well none of that has been solved, and probably more problems have been added… but that’s the last important of the bad news.

The main problem the game is facing is that something terrible we saw coming for years is happening, the game is basically split into two big factions fighting each other, or better not fighting each other and living in some sort of “cold war stalemate”.

On one side we have the Imperium and allies, basically the Goonswarm and friends.

It’s a huge community with a great organization, good fleet commanders and with any opportunity for any player to do whatever they want, no matter they are experienced bitter veterans or fresh newbies.

In its recent history Imperium removed any kind of system renting (basically small entities pays a fee to use a system for farming and their own things, just like a victim of some sort of mafia boss, if they don’t pay they have to leave or get crushed), made its space free for all its members and call a war against botting (the use of illegal bots to farm).

On the other side we have a larger organization called Pandafam, made by the chinese alliance Fraternity, Pandemic Legion, Pandemic Horde and North Coalition.

This huge collection of alliances have almost anything inside:

• chinese alliances that costantly violates the game rules and licenses promoting bots and RMT (Real Money Trading, selling or buying game goods with real money, which is strictly prohibited but the game owner CCP) and living on renting.
• veteran alliances like Pandemic Legion and Northern Coalition made by a bunch of people but ruling like mafia bosses thanks to space renting
• a melting pot of everything (newbies, spies, whoever else dislike Imperim for no reasons) called Pandemic Horde.

This mix of everything is founded (and funded) mostly on renting and illegal operations (bots and RMT) and usually deny any content (which means pvp fight) they are not 100% sure to win, they use timezone tanking (putting their structure’s vulnerability timers in chinese timezone in a way that it’s almost impossible to contest them), and recently they started to reinforce their own structures to put next timers also in chinese timezone (preventing enemies to set those timers in US or EU timezone, denying pvp content).

In short words they are killing the game.

You may think I’m clearly on Impierium side and against Pandafam, take a loot yourself on how vast is Pandafam space compared to Imperium and its allies.

In general Imperium+allies and Pandafam have similar player numbers, but look how huge is Pandafam space compared to Imperium one.

Why? The answer is simple: renting.

All those regions highlighted in purple are almost entirely dedicated to renting, the less attractive systems (systems with low resources) are empty resulting in a huge waste of systems, all the others are rented to very small corporations for farming 24/7 (in a lot of case using bots) with astronomical profits of trillions of isks each month.

No attackers, no fleets, no pvp, all that purple area is a totally dead region made to earn money by renting and botting, turning a fun game into renting/botting farm… if this makes you remember The Matrix you’re not far from the truth…

On the other side Imperium and allies showed a completely opposite scenario:

• any alliance, no matter its size, can live in a single region if it’s well organized
• no renting, no mafia bosses, no extortion
• the essence of the game, which makes it alive is pvp so everything should be focused on it, everything that prevents pvp should be modified or removed
• if you want to conquer a system, a constellation or an entire region you’re free to try it, get organized, get people and fight for conquer it
• if you want to stay in a system, a constellation or a region you have to fight, to get people and get resources to defend yourself
• less passive income, if you want to get resources you must have players and be active
• each region should be accessible for invasion and conquer
• small groups should be able to conquer space to get bigger and fight each other for survival, a bipolar universe is not healthy for the game.

I don’t know what you think but the last manifesto is way better and promising for the future of the game.

Recently I read this really interesting post by Dunk Dinkle, the leader of one of the biggest alliances in Eve Online, and a great guy, check his awesome speech during the latest Eve Fanfest 2022.

Essentially Dunk made some observations about Eve and suggested a couple of radical solutions, or at least suggestions on how to make the game more interesting, in this post I would like to give my point of view on his observations.

The game is too hard for newbies.

Well, let me say it loud and clear, Eve always been hard for newbies for anyone who didn’t started to play from the early beginning.

I started in 2007, left the game after a month, then I gave it another opportunity in 2014, I fell in love and I continued to play since then.
What Dunk perfectly described (the struggle for the newbie to keep the pace with other older players) is exactly what I felt for at least 2 years, and just like me it was what everyone experienced in Eve until CCP introduced the damn skill injectors (which are the root of all problems in Eve imho, more on that later).

Did it was fun? Not exactly, or better, not directly, because this continue run to reach the level of the other players around me triggered a lot of other small objectives and mid-term goals, and all of these were the real fun part of Eve, not sitting in a damn gatecamp in a blingy T3C or BS.

Obviously in the meantime you can’t just sit in a station spinning a corvette while waiting to finish your skills, you can always join fleets and make experience, and this is where corps and alliances can help.
When I started Eve almost every alliance (well maybe except NC. and PL and other “elite pvp” groups :\ ) have fittings for newbies with T1 cheap ships which every player could fly easily; now most of them removed this opportunity among their doctrines (maybe not Brave, but a lot of alliances made this choice) because “you can buy PLEX and inject”, and that’s wrong imho.

From my perspective alliances should encourage new players to grow slowly and gradually without skipping the steps that every Eve player experienced before the introduction of the damn injectors.
It’s a learning process that make you feel capable to fly an expensive ship BEFORE you will be able to get you butt into that ship, it worked perfectly for years and years since 2016, I don’t understand why now it should be different.

A 3rd solution

Honestly I highly appreciate a leader of a big group that dares to suggest unpopular solutions to fix the game problems.

Regarding the solutions Dunk gave I have some doubts, starting the game from scratch can lead to the very same result and so many people invested so much of their time and money in the game that I doubt many will follow this route.

Reducing the game area can be interesting, but maybe you can achieve a similar result removing the factors that limit the players ability to move around and attack each other, for example rollback the cyno changes, make remote regions easier to attack (think about drone regions), putting NPC systems with stations in every single region at capital jump range from lowsec (or other NPC systems).

But I have a 3rd solution, an unpopular, painful but healthy solution:

1. remove skill injectors and extractors from the market and limit their usage
2. turn back injected SP into skill injectors (there should be some log about it in the CCP infrastructure) and give each character one free SP complete remap for not injected SP trained after the introduction of injectors
3. rollback ore changes and rorqual changes back to the golden rorqual age
4. remove keepstars and get back to the old titan and supers dedicated characters

Injectors

Let’s begin with the starter dish: remove skill injectors and extractor from the market (online and CCP store) and limit their usage.

Usually when I suggest to remove injectors people reply “it will be bad for new players”, well no.

First of all the vast majority of the people which took advantage from injectors were not new players but experienced players, who had huge wallets and no way to spend the ton of isks they made during years and years of gameplay.
Except for few rich guys the vast majority of new players can’t afford to constantly buy injectors with real money, but the main point is that this kind of behavior is totally pointless.

There are so many skills and skill levels in Eve that you can’t simply say “ok let’s inject this skill and then I’m ok”, no it doesn’t work like that and every Eve player perfectly knows this.
After you trained a skill there’s another fundamental skill, and then another one and another one and so on, the list of important skills is endless and using injectors is not a solution.
Besides of that from a isk/sp ratio injectors are really bad, it’s way better to train normally with +5 implants, so it’s better to invest into PLEX or MCT certificates than injectors.

There will be injectors flowing through the game still (see next point), so I will suggest a strong limitation on their usage to help new characters, for example limit their usage to characters with less than 5M SP.

Injectors rollback

Now the first course.

I know, this will be painful, it will cause a lot of people to complain, some of them will leave Eve but if the game will survive it will be stronger and will be able to live for another 10 years at least.
This will solve a lot of the “proliferation” problems in Eve, caps, supers, titans, rorquals, bots (this is another historical Eve problem, injectors rollback is not a solution but it will help to make the bot users life harder); it will cause a temporary but huge drop in capital and supercapital ships price, but this will push people to use them.

Rorqual and ore rollback

A nice juicy main course :)

Let’s be honest the golden age of rorquals mining in nullsec was one of the best moments in Eve history from every perspective.

It gave a huge push to mining, to industry, to trading, but also to pve (more capitals means more ratters) which consequently resulted in a huge push to pvp (more ratters means more gankers, but also more people willing to commit their dread and carriers and faxes into war, or even solo pvp with them).

Ok back in those days there were a lot of “defence fleets” to save rorquals, but let’s look to the bigger picture, it was all content, on one side we had defence fleets, ot the other we had the “bomber and kiki booshing nightmare” which was one of the best content creator factors since ages!

From a mining and industry perspective active rorquals have never been a problem, the problem was their proliferation, which was caused by injectors, not by rorquals themself.
One of the historical problems in Eve is that mining is worthless unless you have a large amount of accounts, we have this huge and fun and fundamental part of the game almost completely ignored by the vast majority of players because it’s worthless if you have one of two accounts, and this means that also all the other activities related to this (industry, ships and equipment trading and hauling, BPO research, invention etc etc…) are ignored by a lot of players.

Rorqual active mining opened all these pillars of the game to everyone, before that a player with one or two accounts will barely be able to build a cruiser or a battleship, after that almost everyone potentially could build a capital, or a super (with more patience) or a titan (with a HUGE amount of patience), these things literally opened all these career paths to a lot of new people.
As I said the only problem with rorqual mining was proliferation, but that’s an issue regarding skill injectors.

Keepstars

And finally the dessert.

Keepstars are gorgeous, keepstars are powerful… but keepstars (with injectors) lead to supercapital proliferation.

In theory a huge amount of supercaps is great for content, they gave Eve those epic superbattles (which I found so boring btw… but that’s my personal opinion) that made the game famous among the entire videogame industry, but they’re also the key component of what we call “supercap umbrella” that in some case killed the content.

Honestly I’m not sure if this is good for the game, imho remove keepstars and rollback the game to the previous mechanic (each titan char should be permanently in space inside the ship) will reduce the number of titan/super pilots to a more sustainable level, not all the players would be willing to pay a subscription to leave the chars abandoned in space inside a huge (and barely usable) ship, just like before the introduction of keepstars.

Conclusion

That’s all, I’m not a pro player, I’m not one of the oldest Eve veterans, I’m just a regular nullsec grunt with a couple of accounts and half a billion of skill points in his characters (not a single one injected), I love Eve and it’s the game that I played the most in my entire videogame career since C64.

This is only My2Cents on some of the key problems the game has today, maybe I missed something, maybe there are better solutions, but that’s how I feel about it after playing for so long and after trying almost everything the game has to offer.

I hope you enjoy the meal :)

Well, time has passed since the last update on this blog, it’s time to do a quick recap on some of my new year’s goals.

First of all I archived one of the most important and desired goals: swimming!
During these first 3 and a half months I went swimming almost two times a week, sometimes three, starting with 20 pools at low pace and raising up to the actual 40 pools in 40-45′; as I expected each time I go swimming I feel better and better, actually it’s the only thing makes me feel really good and the only weapon I have against my terrible working stress…

Talking about work I can’t deny we have huge emergencies during the last month, as I predicted (I repeat the same thing for years…) we had great problems on our biggest customer with some stupid custom applications deployed on a huge WebSphere Portal cluster.
Remember the KISS model? My company did the exact opposite, this application produced huge out of memory problems on the Portal jvm, I sent logs and begged developers to fix the huge amount of exceptions we collected but nothing changed  since the problem went really crytical; at the end they fixed the exceptions and made changes to the code and all returned to work normally.

Remember: if you are working on some big enterprise software meatball like WebSphere Portal DO NOT deploy custom applications on that product unless you are ABSOLUTELY sure of their quality!
Use some easy Tomcat or Jboss instance, hundreds of them if you need to scale out for a big workload, you will live better, spent an infinitesimal part of money and will get a better result.

And what about Eve?
Well I finally get a second account, I used the buddy program and made a brand new cyno/scout alt and I’m skilling for the biggest and most ambitious project since I started play: two jumpfreighter pilots!
Yes, it’s not a typo, I need two JF pilots for take my future Rhea in null space and also in hi-sec, so I need a second JF pilot in npc corp to fly safe and now lose this huge ship in some stupid war brawl…
Look at that beauty, isn’t it gorgeous?

Eve ha molte differenze rispetto altri mmo o mmorpg, ma una cosa che ha certamente in comune è la comunità italiana.

Non chiedetemi perchè ma in ogni gioco noi italiani riusciamo a mandare in vacca ogni iniziativa positiva o degna di nota, nella migliore delle ipotesi passiamo il tempo a litigare tra noi senza alcun ritegno.
Se ci integriamo in gruppi internazionali sappiamo essere eccezionali, fantasiosi, affidabili, disposti a grandi sacrifici, competenti ed estremamente abili, ma una volta in gruppo con altri connazionali finiamo sempre con il litigare l’un l’altro oppure a flammare da mattina a sera su forum e chat varie.
In particolare siamo maestri nell’arte jedi del “si stava meglio quando si stava peggio” oppure nell’evocare presunte superiorità di un gruppo rispetto ad un altro, spesso proclamando il proprio come l’unico vero e inimitabile depositario del puro spirito italiano.
Purtroppo ho vissuto questa brutta tendenza su Lotro, e dal fallimento dell’ottimo progetto di alleanza totalmente italiana ho visto succedere lo stesso anche su Eve Online.

C’è un ulteriore aspetto che però fomenta i flame su Eve, ovvero l’appartenenza alle varie fazioni e l’annessa sindrome del “player elite pvp”.
Dovete sapere infatti che molti giocatori di Eve smaniano all’idea di essere i migliori pvp players del gioco, in particolare del pvp in solitaria, gonfiando il petto ad ogni kill guadagnata in solitario oppure con un piccolo gruppo di compari.
Va da se che costoro vedano il pvp fatto in gruppi corposi (corp o alleanze che siano, non parliamo poi di operazioni colossali organizzate da intere coalizioni di alleanze) come il male assoluto, una pratica riprovevole e utile soltanto ai newbie o senza esperienza pvp, insomma ai giocatori inferiori.
Persino le pratiche tipiche delle grosse flotte, come il fatto di seguire un comandante (detto “anchor”) in combattimento è sintomo di pochezza, di immaturità, di scarsa capacità o di gioco stupido (forse il detto “nessuno nasce imparato” non è più di moda); da notare poi che in molti casi chi afferma questo sono persone che hanno giocato in queste condizioni da molto tempo, e magari solo dopo anni e anni di esperienza hanno maturato le capacità e una visione tattica tali da permettergli di valutare autonomamente le condizioni di gioco e agire di conseguenza.

In questi giorni abbiamo tenuto una importante riunione di corp, la prima dopo tanto tempo e soprattutto dopo la nostra adesione a una grossa alleanza (la quale fa parte della più grande e potente federazione del gioco), durante questo incontro sono emerse diverse critiche al modello di gioco dell’alleanza, vista da alcuni (pochi a dire il vero) come un carrozzone dove vivere tranquilli e in pace, annoiandosi rattando e farmando come cinesi impazziti, insomma lamentandosi dei pochi stimoli forniti dall’alleanza.
Non è la prima volta che sento criticare il gruppo in cui siamo entrati (Circle of Two), li ho sentiti etichettare in tutti i modi di cui nessuno positivo, insomma l’ultima ruota del carro della federazione, spesso portando come dimostrazione la killboard delle operazioni condotte dalla stessa oppure il bilancio delle risorse perse.

L’altra sera però è successo qualcosa che avrebbe dovuto far riflettere tutti, siamo partiti in 250 per una flotta e alla fine della serata avevamo portato a casa un bilancio in isk piuttosto negativo ma avevamo ingaggiato non una, ma ben cinque diverse flotte di cinque diverse alleanze, creando scontri, gatecamp, rappresaglie coinvolgendo alla fine circa 1000 giocatori, il tutto condotto in modo più che buono e facendo venire la tachicardia ad ogni membro della flotta.
Insomma una serata FANTASTICA, divertimento assicurato per tutti, scontri epici (ne più ne meno come quelli dei bellissimi trailer della CCP), grande direzione e una quantità impressionante di content generato in game, insomma fatti e non pugnette.
Forse altri gruppi avrebbero potuto limitare le perdite o mietere più vittime, molti probabilmente non sarebbero nemmeno scesi in campo viste le condizioni non totalmente favorevoli, altri avrebbero optato per una ritirata strategica all’inizio del fight; quello che però importa imho è che l’alleanza abbia creato qualcosa di emozionante, coinvolgente e divertente, delle navi o dei soldi persi francamente me ne importa ben poco (senza contare che le navi sono state tutte rimborsate dall’alleanza stessa, altro vantaggio di un gruppo organizzato).

Se mai qualche nuovo giocatore di Eve dovesse leggere questo post il mio consiglio è quello di non lasciarsi abbindolare da guru pvp o presunti tali, chiedete informazioni e imparate il più possibile da chiunque ne sappia più di voi, ma valutate sempre la visione del gioco in modo molto critico.
Cercate di capire cosa vi piace fare e non lasciatevi influenzare dalle preferenze altrui (sacrosante e rispettabilissime, per carità), ignorate i pettegolezzi malevoli e prima di valutare un gruppo focalizzatevi su cosa può offrirvi e se questo va nella direzione del vostro divertimento.

Se invece siete giocatori esperti permettetemi di dare un consiglio anche a voi, aiutate le nuove leve ma ricordate sempre che la vostra esperienza e il vostro vissuto in game sono totalmente ignoti a loro; provate a riflettere sulle motivazione per cui un determinato modo di giocare vi annoia, forse avete giocato troppo tempo nello stesso modo, quello che però a voi può sembrare scontato e stantio potrebbe essere del tutto nuovo e stimolante per un novellino.

PS: ancora 3 giorni e finalmente potrò portare delle navi logistiche tech 2! Sempre più pro! :D