[mcantor]

This is well-written, candid and interesting, but I feel like I'm missing out on a lot because I've never played EVE. Can someone who is familiar with the issues (for example, what is "ship spinning"?) give an overview of what led to this?

[RickHull]

Ship spinning is an incredibly trivial feature that corresponds to an utter lack of motivation to actually do things in Eve. Veteran players have a somewhat love/hate relationship with the game, warning new players that "Eve is a terrible game".

Generally in the Eve universe you are never safe, except when "docked" in a space station. In previous versions, you were presented with a view of your ship floating in the space hangar, and due to the "camera" mechanics of the UI, you could spin around your ship at like 300+ RPM.

An utterly pointless exercise in which millions of man-hours have been spent while simultaneously chatting on TeamSpeak or Jabber or doing market research, or whatever. But all players seem to share a tongue-in-cheek fondness for this feature.

[norova]

So, it seems like "ship spinning" is the equivalent of wandering around World of Warcraft capital cities only by way of spamming jump? Thank you for the details.

[jswinghammer]

It's worse than that since you do it out of reflex and it is less engaging than what you're describing (though I never played WoW).

[bmac]

In some ways 'ship spinning' in eve was the iphone equivalent of dragging a screen past its boundary and watching it snap back in place.

Dragging the camera (with a mouse down, move and release) would cause it to rotate around the player's ship until some artificial 'drag' decided the spin should slow to a stop. It was one of those innocent and functionally useless UI features, that is surprisingly satisfying to preform.

[Sundog]

|In some ways 'ship spinning' in eve was the iphone equivalent of dragging a screen past its boundary and watching it snap back in place.|

...I'm not the only one? Oh thank god

[evilneanderthal]

I can't believe how many hours of my life have been spent jumping around Ironforge aimlessly.

[TGJ]

It's not that ship spinning is some preferred activity in Eve, it's simply a preferred activity vs. Captains Quarters (CQ). The problem with CQ is that it did not run very good on most machines and the movement of the characters was very stiff. Also the load times to get to CQ were longer than that of ship spinning.

As far as the item shop, it turned out that a monocle cost around $80 after converting isk (in game currency) into real money via the purchase of plex (Eve supported gold buying). The items were grossly over priced which made CCP seem like a desperate broke evil corporation with which the player base has lost most of it's trust with.

As far as the direction of the game, with the introduction of a long awaited feature, Captains Quarters, that was not even completed upon release, it made it seem that CCP was not willing to listen to the wants of the player base in which direction they should devote their programming hours. Plenty of activities in Eve have not been updated nor has the game play had an injecting of new and invigorating play style in a few years. With CCP's latest move, it has made me and other players think twice about investing more time in a game that the developers seem to no longer care about.

[lflux]

'Ship spinning' also covers an easier way to access certain well-used menus for managing your ship, without having to open the 'Ships' window. The 'spinning' part is a minor loss, not being able to easily access cargo/fuel/hangars is a major UI drawback.