Like most people with an interest in MMOs - as well as a great many who would deny having any such hobby - I played World of Warcraft for a time. Recently, three workmates started playing and I was invited to join them but, despite getting as far as downloading the client, I was unable to make myself resubscribe. This is not due to having played WoW for years - in fact I only played for a few months - nor to having reached the level cap or otherwise "beaten the game". The failure of the game really to captivate me stemmed from a lack of innovation from Blizzard combined with over-analysis on my part (as a programmer - especially one who has created his own (cack-handed, awful) multiplayer world - I spoil the fun for myself by constantly looking behind the curtain).
I never got higher than level 45 or so, although I did that several times, and Blizzard's servers are positively clogged up with the dozens of characters of level 17 or 22 or so that I would roll up and abandon. Some were to try out different classes or races, while others were to indulge my real enjoyment: frontier worlds in MMOs. I've always been a sucker for the under-populated server, whether that be in WoW, Star Wars Galaxies (Lowca represent!) or Ultima Online shards. Thus, many times that a new server opened up I would start up yet another character with whom I could watch the nascent power-groups coalesce, develop and bump up aganist each other. But eventually the world would become static but for the odd bit of internal drama splitting up raiding guilds and, like Dr Stockmann, I would leave the crowd behind and move on.
Given this butterfly's attention spane, it is perhaps a little strange that I have played Eve Online for over two years now. It certainly suggests that the single-server model CCP has adopted (excepting China), where every player shares the same virtual universe as every other, has succeeded in generating sufficiently involving storylines as to provoke a greater commitment to my character than in any other game so far.
Does my love of the fresh server-state and the new character contain within itself the reasons why I always move on from both the character and, ultimately, the game? By forcing me not to play my game, have CCP kept me playing theirs?
Perhaps. But I still long for the fresh Eve server. With two 30-million skill point characters I am far better off than most current players (remember that in Eve, skills are trained pretty much constantly, regardless of whether one is online or even, up to a point, subscribed). I am not greatly constrained in my choices as to what I can do with my characters by their skill levels. And Eve itself is designed well enough that a new character really can be useful. But the current Eve universe, with the exception of the Drone Regions added a couple of years ago, is basically the same as the one occupied by a few thousand players at launch.
There is no frontier to be found any more. Roaming PvP requires either large gangs or ridiculous, game-breaking "nano" ships which can travel at stupid speeds to avoid unwelcome combats, because the high population densities of most 0.0 space mean that a small group or soloist in a slower ship will be dealt with within a few jumps of entering hostile space: and I speak as a member of Goonfleet, with the largest amount of empty space available to me of any alliance, courtesy of places like Detorid (and yes, I can fly vagabonds and other nano ships!) Key systems like Jita or Motsu have become clogged, while fleet battles have become ridiculous 1000+ person lagfests that are beyond CCP's Python architecture to deal with.
Eve has become late-15th Century Spain or Dark Age Norway, with large numbers of aggressive individuals packed into a space they have outgrown. But, while the younger son could, in those times and places, have simply jumped on a ship and gone to carve out a space for himself to the west, that option is not available to the younger player in Eve. As well as Goonfleet, I sometimes hang out with the guys from the F13 messageboards in Eve. There are 60 or 70 of us playing regularly, mainly oriented towards PvP, but there is no way at all that we could carve out our own space in 0.0. The domination by existing power structures is too entrenched. Take a look at the latest automated Eve influence map to see how massive power-blocs of thousands of players dominate the game. Or for a tabular view, consider this table at Eve Maps, which shows that only one in six alliances holds any space of their own, and only two alliances of less than 100 members. That chart doesn't show the hundreds of systems deep enough in major alliance space to not be held for sovereignty purposes: the real picture is that the top ten dominate the vast majority of the game's space, and that most of the smaller holders exist only as pets or renters of those big powers. There is nowhere far enough away from the superpowers for smaller alliances to carve out their own space.
Two things need to change. CCP needs to "free up" more space for settlement: not an increase on the order of the 250% or so needed to return population densities to where they were when I started playing (some population pressures are good for provoking war and drama), but a very substantial amount, much of it low quality (a la Providence). Low quality space would at least have some chance of avoiding the attention of the big players. It should be hard to get to from the existing, high-quality space: perhaps reachable through lowsec but not directly linked to current 0.0 space.
The second change that is required concerns sovereignty mechanisms. The need for a fleet of 200 remote-repping battleships engendered by current game mechanics (specifically by pimped-out faction cyno-jammer towers) in order to take space has to go. The marginal utility of blobbing with extra players has to be curbed in order to provoke the creation of greater numbers of moderate-sized powerblocs. At the moment that utility is limited by lag, and the side to git thar fust with the most men always wins that fight.