From out here on the user-end of the Eve experience, I can see the ground littered with the broken spears and swords of fresh battles: internal debates and technical difficulties. The most obvious casualty, of course, is the smoking feature hole where once, a jukebox stood proud. This module brought functionality into Eve Online that is rarely seen in an MMO, and now that functionality is lost, likely gone forever.

As someone who has sometimes engaged in such battles myself, I think I can see how the battle went: There's a big push to modernize the dustiest corners of the game experience, and as part of that, someone sold the idea of a cool new set of dynamic background noise. That's a great idea; it helps set the ambient mood in a unique and interesting way. There were technical hurdles to overcome, and the most obvious one was the current sound implementation. The Klang team found that they couldn't comfortably integrate the new features into the old system, and so the decision was made to scrap the old system.

There are two problems with that decision: First, while the new feature is cool, it's not -that- cool. When I play Eve, I'm not listening to the elevator music in the background, I'm listening to my fleet on Teamspeak. This is important: I'm totally ignoring your new feature because it literally doesn't add anything to my game experience (but to give credit where it's due, I don't think it actually detracts from my experience at all; it doesn't hinder me hearing people on TS either). I can see how it's cool, and it could add something to someone's experience, but for me, I have other things I'm looking at. An entire team spent a lot of time and resources on something I just don't care about (sorry!).

To add insult to injury, if I'm doing something that doesn't absolutely require me to hear the FC's voice, I've probably got Pandora running -- and I've actually got it running -on top- of your new dynamic bg noise; I didn't turn it off because I didn't even notice it was there! So now all your new feature is doing is subtly mangling the music I wanted to listen to. On top of that, I can no longer control my playlist from Eve if I have a hard-drive based playlist; I've lost a feature I was accustomed to using, and, importantly, my playlists and preferences were likely lost when the player was. So the work I, as a player, did of importing and tinkering with my playlist was also lost.

So, to summarize, the new feature is really cool. Unfortunately, it's not THAT cool; when you ripped out the old player to put it in, existing functionality was lost, and when you did that, user data, in the form of my playlist order and song choices, was also lost. That's why you have so many players unhappy at this decision, and I hope you choose to reverse it.