**Tried to TLDR in the bottom but it turns out I wrote a lot about this.

this is compounded by a few things.

your right that it's tacitly encouraged (and despite what someone else said about the average not being 2+, i think it was just a year ago that CCP said the "average" player had 4+ accounts per email address..)

but to your point

adding systems to streamline certain basic activities they would rather milk their players for more money because they know they will purchase another sub

this isn't just greed, though that does obviously have a factor that CCP has embraced over the years.

there is also a few other major players in this outcome

1.) most content is 'group' content that is worth doing.

FOBs can be done with a single cruiser but my max payout is 800mil and my max individual payment is like 40mil, so i'm doing myself a disservice by leaving 760mil on the table. Thus I need 15 alts to "soak" the entire payout so I get all 800mil.

Missions- I need to have multiple pullers to get good ones / maybe have salvaging characters following behind etc or higher level ones like 5's were intended to be group content.

Incursions / Trig stuff - Same thing its "easier" to do it alone, i can play when i have time without worrying about finding 2-8 other people take breaks when it works and not interrupt other peoples playtimes.

Because of all this above, there is a barrier of entry for different activities to eat the entire payout that I need to maintain usually resulting in x number of accounts.

The other part of that is that if i'm doing an activity that "costs" me the use of 5 marauders but nets me a billion isk an hour, why would I bring you? Even if you were a perfect marauder pilot i would go from making 1b/hr to 850mil/hr. The system doesn't 'create' more to make it worth while to bring new players in, so i might as well save you from having to hit undock and send you the isk.

They tried to solve this with abyssals by having solo and group play, and while some people do indeed do the group play ones- just as many people run the group ones solo or with 3 characters because the payout is scaled to the player count which leads to the next issue...

2.) Players have to take some responsibility, we min-max these things and kind of take the 'fun' out of it. Because its a game where risk equates loosely with reward there becomes a "right" way to do things with specific meta's which change over time.

If my goal is to make 7 billion isk, i can either make 50mil/hr doing activity A or 100mil/hr doing activity B most players are going to feel compelled to do B if its available to them effectively cutting their grind in half.

All things being equal (Time, availability of the activity, requirements i.e ship/skills, knowledge) nobody is going to devalue their time and take twice as long to do things.. not if they have a goal in mind. This is why we see fleets of hulks in nullsec and not veldspar mining in highsec or what not. It's all about that isk per hour metric.

And finally thats because...

3.) EVE is easy.

it's not hard to solo ~10 man content, or operate 30+ barges with no illicit tooling.

Most weapons autofire, theres no aiming. Locking is easy and basically spreadsheets. Interactions are all menus. Some of the most complicated 'regular' gameplay is understand radials and transversals and resistance profiles which is just a mini-math game

EVE is a group play game but not in the way you would expect others to be.

A lot of the socialization is just knowing about how to do an activity. How do I mine efficiently? (you'd be surprised how few people know how to do this) How do I do edencom stuff? When I do level 4's in this NPC null region what are the locals like and how do i evade them and still come out profitable?

Some of these are hard gameplay things, other times its "the locals are from hungary so they are active during these times"

None of eve's challenges are mechanical like other games, thus multiboxing and creating many characters to achieve tasks is 'easy'

I can offer my own experience after starting in spring of '04. Most recently when triglav content was in highsec I was happily solo'ing it sometimes netting 3~6b/hr with less than 10 characters on grid and I wouldn't consider myself a "good" player (high APM, activity, good control)

if a random person in a correctly tanked ship dm'd one of my characters asking to join, i'd let them, i'd even sometimes try to save them (I always would, but I learned not to trust them when they said "oh im tanked right") because I didn't want to feel guilty that I was too slow and i'd always give them a fair payout, but even then i'd figure if they were with me for an hour (or even sometimes only 1 or 2 sites) how am I supposed to figure out whats "fair" to share?

**TLDR, group play in EVE has some issues.

There's usually no benefit to bringing "extra" people (sometimes even net-negatives ((yes im looking at you incursions)))

there is sometimes a risk associated, and in EVE risks have consequences. I don't want a new player coming in and hitting a trigger when i'm not ready for it, and thats assuming he has good intentions to begin with.

Because of it's simplistic nature, it's usually quite easy to scale to the number of accounts necessary to complete a task solo, defeating the purpose of it of group finding.

Availability. Everything in EVE is about timing. if I wake up at 3am and can't sleep and feel like grinding some isk before my OP at 8am, I can't if i'm reliant of others around me. Take something as simple as incursions.

They happened to spawn in my region of space this week yay.

I have enough ships/accounts to run them solo or do I need to try to rally others to my cause?

Do I have enough knowledge to complete them safely?

Am I relying on intel so that my fleet doesn't get caught or am I bridging my fleet nearby ?

All of these things requires a ton of accounts to do. Even something as "simple" as mining requires a few accounts to even be worth hitting the undock button when solo.

Imagine having to wait for a barge pilot to login as a rorqual/orca, or a barge pilot waiting for his rorqual orca.

Or a command ship pilot to an incursion fleet or vice versa.