Eve Online - Occupy New Eden

Eve Online is mainly known for the ridiculous learning curve, record-breaking scams, metagaming and extraordinarily boring mining.

I've played this damnable game since March of 2009, making me a 3 year "bitter vet" in just 3 months.

But if I'm to be completely honest a lot of the bitterness has left me since the most recent expansion: "Crucible"

I joined at a point of excellence in the history of Eve Online; the Apocrypha expansion introduced Tech 3 ships (extraordinarily customizable advanced Cruisers), improvements to exploration including thousands of Wormhole systems (unexplored parts of space populated by murderous robots), changes to the "New Player experience" and Epic Arc missions.

This was considered one of the best expansions in the history of the game. It polished, refined and added features that not only filled existing niches but also created new ones.

How did the developers make it happen?

CCP, the creators of Eve Online, have a number of teams responsible for different aspects of the game development, ranging from artists to codemonkeys. Back when Apocrypha was in development they decided to cannibalise staff from all their different teams, put them in a dimly-lit basement and sic them on bugs, nagging issues and annoying crap. This led to their greatest expansion yet.

CCP repeated this experiment with Crucible, leading to an improved UI, improved graphics and aesthetics, new and rebalanced ships, new equipment and a large smattering of love all over the face of New Eden.

Why did this happen?

A few months ago there was a flood of badly received changes from CCP announcing that they would not touch the space aspect of the game for 18 months, micro (macro?)transactions being introduced, the removal of "ship spinning", numerous bugs and a CEO who basically threw a shitfit when the angry masses of gamers told him where to stuff his fancy pants.

The forums were a mess with complaints, large gangs of furious spaceship nerds were piling up in key trade systems and shooting indestructible statues to lag the server and send a message to the owners that shit needed to change.

It took a while for CCP to recognise their mistakes and longer to fix them, but if every expansion was as smooth and polished as this one I would keep playing this game until the UI got plugged into the back of my cybernetically enhanced brain.

*Edit* For more information about Eve Online and the rather spectacular Crucible expansion try going just about here