http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=2351

Lessons learned

- Shooting at stationary structures is boring
-See: Starbase warfare, Dominion sov warfare. Even the good fights that do happen around such objectives could be improved by having better objectives.
- Shooting at things with hitpoints scales very efficiently with fleet size, which encourages lag-producing behavior

-Having to spend significant amounts of effort defeating an enemy which isn't even fighting back is really boring
- See: Starbase warfare, Dominion sov warfare. See in particular how long it took to clear IT Alliance's ownership out of Delve, as a recent example

- Waking up every morning and having to clean up the mess made while you were asleep is boring
- See: station ping-pong pre-sov, repairing station services. Having to do something tedious every day before you can actually play the game is not cool

- Doing something just "because it would be cool/neat/awesome" is always a bad idea and will come back to bite you later
- See: Jump bridges, cyno jammers, Sov 4, AoE doomsdays, titans in general, supercarrier boost... Note that we should still obviously strive to make everything cool/neat/awesome, but when we start off with an awesome idea rather than an actual problem we want to fix or a feature that has a clear, functional and necessary goal, it generally requires painful fixes further down the road

- Cost is a useful variable to tune but an unwise thing to rely on to enforce scarcity or balance - players will always be richer than you think
- See: outposts, titans, supercarriers

- Making something tedious will not stop players doing it if it's very clearly the best option. They'll do it, and they'll hate it
- See: everything involving starbases. As a counterpoint though, things like the one-per-corp-per-system-per-day starbase rule demonstrate that if something doesn't make a big difference but is sufficiently awkward to do, then any theoretical "exploit" scenarios tend to fall out of favor quickly as they're just not worth the effort.

- People like to do one-stop shopping, and will "go to Jita" for everything unless doing so is comparatively very inconvenient
- See: moon mineral distribution, high-strength booster resource distribution, neither of which achieved much in the way of the nullsec-to-nullsec trade that they hoped to encourage