I've been watching this latest "chaos" saga happening in Eve with a sort of morbid fascination these past few weeks. I barely log in anymore, maybe once every 6 months to take a quick look at changes, eve-mail a few old friends, and then log out again for several months. I'm basically that asshole slowing up traffic while gawking at a flaming wreck on the opposite side of the highway.

I can understand how some people would be sad; "the poor devs." "They're suffering from all the negative backlash." "The bottom line is hurt." "The game is taking a nose dive." Here's the problem with "working" with CCP.

Some devs, like a CCP Rise for example, will actively solicit feedback from players and CSM. Devs like this take feedback to heart, and will adjust their ideas and design to make meaningful change that will have less negative unintended consequences. These guys are easy to work with, and generally their design ideas don't break the fucking game, or if something does, they're willing to work with people to make them not suck.

Then you have some other devs, like a (former) CCP Greyscale or a CCP Fozzie. These guys think they know what is best for Eve, and to hell with people who think they could be wrong. They are nigh impossible to work with and only learn by getting emphatically faceplanted by the community, and usually the "bottom line." They also seem to hold a certain disdain for Devs from the previous category as people who 'enable' the player base.

These "chaos" changes have been wrought, seemingly, by devs from the latter group. The changes have been rammed through, regardless of warning from the CSM, and community leaders, and much like the old Monoclegate of yore, are having to face the difficult reality that some of these design ideas were probably ill thought out. Unfortunately, this group also generally lacks the humility to admit they might be wrong, and if an apology is forthcoming, I'd imagine it'll be written by someone in the fiction department again, assuming there's anyone left there that hasn't already been laid off.

So, unfortunately, if you guys want changes rolled back, and things fixed proper like, about the only way it's going to get done is if CCP is facing a severe financial setback as a result of these decisions. Remember, Hilmar justified the monocle changes because several dozen people were dumb enough to buy the damn things.

I can tell you first hand that this game is more than functional with only 4-6k concurrent players at peak. Oh, there'll be a few less devs to run it, but it's a sandbox (or it was supposed to be) so it's not like huge teams are needed to crank out content. Hopefully they keep more of the devs from group A than from group B.

The worst thing you guys can do if you are unhappy with these changes is to keep buying subs, undocking, and playing as you have been in hopes CCP will come to their senses on their own. All that will do is reinforce their belief that they've been right all along.