I am cancelling my subscription due to my belief that the chronic problems that I have witnessed will never be addressed. They cover two main categories, Quality Control and Resource Usage.


Quality control

Constant patching. Patches are not an acceptable form of Quality Control. Yes, I know that current business management practices say that the business will make more money if they let the users be beta testers (lots of game companies are doing this). Try calculating how much money is being made from me when I cancel my subscription over issues caused by being a beta tester. Respect me and give me a quality product for my money. Seriously.

Downtimes after major upgrades have never once been managed successfully. There is always a Gǣlast minute rushGǥ to get things working which always extends downtimes by significant amounts. A serious company would take steps to ensure that such transitions would go smoothly. If they had succeeded even once, I might believe they are actually taking stepsGǪ but the results speak for themselves.

There are at least three different methods of patching that I am aware of. There is the in-game version where the patch downloads from within Eve itself. There is the newest version, aka the Eve Launcher. And finally, the most annoying one of all, is the 5mb downloader that must be downloaded in order to get an 8mb patch. I will discuss the last one more in the Resource Usage section.

Recurring bugs are a huge problem. Sound. Need I say more? No, but I will. I recall a little over two years ago when the sound system was absolutely broken. For a year. Yes, an entire year. I had to turn off the in-game sound on all of my computers (2 desktop and 1 laptop) for an entire year so I could play the game. Even now, after certain patches, I get weird static sounds periodically or sounds that do not play at the proper level orGǪ meh. I suspect the sound system needs to be reprogrammed from scratch by someone who actually has experience writing such code. I do not mean to hurt the feelings of the coder who wrote the sound system but seriously, give it up. Let someone who is competent do it.

Sideways warp effects. I did not experience this bug at all when I first started playing. It is now a regular feature that keeps resurfacing. Not once or twice but constantly. I am unsure but it could be every third patch unless the moon is eclipsing a planet or there is a supernova in M61 that also coincides with the day of the week being a Tuesday. You can assure me that this is permanently fixed but the track record says clearly otherwise.


Resource usage

Network resources are abused in a grossly incompetent manner. The constant patching is a problem but read the part above about the 5mb downloader for an 8mb patch. When that method was in the heaviest use, I was on GÇ£broadbandGÇ¥ that was roughly equivalent to a 56k modem. Yeah, I was not a happy camper. The other item in network resource usage is the inventory. A few (6?) months ago, I would dock and it would take 10 seconds or more for my ships to show up. It is generally reduced to 5 seconds or less now, but why is it not immediate (like it used to be!)? It seems that every time I dock, the client is downloading all of the inventory. If this is the case, it is grossly incompetent. Once the initial data is downloaded, the client should only get fresh data when there are changes, and that data should only be a delta. A periodic refresh, possibly time based (every hour?), could be implemented without serious problems.

The only computer based resources that frustrate me to death are the graphics. Okay, being pretty is important. I can understand and deal with that even if I do not respect it. Something is seriously wrong when a Macbook Pro made in 2010 overheats on a silly space-sim game while being able to play halflife 2 or more modern games without any real issues. I am sure that the graphics are more cutting edge now-a-days but the half life 2 (Source) engine could be swapped out from whatever graphics engine is currently being used and almost nobody would notice a difference in graphics quality. Yes, I travel around the world a LOT and I can not bring my desktop computer or home network connection with me. Resource usage is a massive problem for me.

Hm. Why not? LetGÇÖs throw in something recent so the message is clear: The recent inventory management screen. People complained. People made suggestions. People showed how it could be implemented without causing major issues for people. All of it was soundly ignored. The new inventory management was sent out despite some minor bugs and it was made NON-OPTIONAL. Arrogance at its finest. For myself, I actually mostly like it despite the minor bugs but there is one major issue that I have with it. My shipGÇÖs cargo bay. I am unsure why my brain works this way, but I need to have a shipGÇÿs cargo bay. Perhaps it is a mental separation that I need because, in my mind, the game is ship-centric. I do not know. Tweaking an inventory management screen is NOT a ship's cargo bay.


I have tens billions of ISK worth of resources, ships, etc. in my hangars (no, I am not giving it away, it will rot). I have been playing this game for a fairly long time. I have made lots of friends. At some point in an abusive relationship, the person being abused needs to say enough. Well, I am saying it now. Enough!

To all of the capsuleers I have interacted with (positively and negatively), I will have fond memories of you. To CCP, well, let's just say that seeing your name on ANYTHING will assure me that I should stay far far away. Good bye and good luck to all.