Vale, US TZ

I have taken the decision to close Sudden Buggery's US Timezone. I have tried, repeatedly, to reinvigorate it and been unsuccessful, yet again.

i am not sure what it is. I'm basically unemployed, so i have a lot of time to play in the US timezone. Every so often I manage to get something to do during the day time - maintenance on my 4WD, some accounting, tax time, cleaning the house, etc - and my daytime hours drop. I guess this might be the problem - somehow every American I recruit needs someone with an ability to get out of POS and tell them what to do, otherwise they instantly go AFK and unsub. It's uncanny.

This has seen literally 100 guys come through the door and clag out in boredom and idleness in the last 12 months. There's only so many interviews, API checks, information and orientation sessions, so many training sessions and so on that you can do before you think "You know what? Fuck it. Fuck this for a joke."

So, yeah, it is a joke, and sadly the joke is on me.

But clearly the game itself isn't holding people's imaginations like it used to. Numbers are down to the lowest point they've been in ten years. CCP is probably not in as much of a panic as they ought to be, clearly making up lost revenues with SKINs.

But it is getting to the point where there's so little going on that even addicted MMO nerds are sitting around thinking "why the fuck should I bother rolling a hole over the course of 30 minutes, just to find nothing to do?"

This raises the question of whether there is anything coming, especially for the AU TZ, in the future of EVE. One of the great things about EVE is that you get to interact daily with people from other timezones - the great benefit of the Single Shard. You get great rivalries between US TZ ad EU; between RUS TZ and AU TZ, and so on. You have had assymmetric timezone warfare sewn into the very fabric of EVE itself via 40 hour POS timers and the like; just assymmetric enough that they force odd-houred fights on people.

That's all coming to an end. The first transition has been Fozziesov, where nowadays there is literally nothing to be done in the AU TZ except make ISK in nullsec. Or uselessly cripple some station services to troll fights from people who just stay docked and out-boredom you. Fozziesov has literally cut the knees out of AU TZ content completely.

The next stage will be Citadels. When POSs are deleted from space, you will arguably have almost nothing to Entosis anywhere in EVE when an Australian or Asian. The smaller the TZ window for Citadel vulnerability, the more they become livable. The consequence of that is that they become inaccessible content to Aussies and become, by default, totally invulnerable to Aussies. This is equally so to some extent for any other time zone to any other timezone.

So, it really does beg the question, what game will there be left to play for me, in 12 months? The roll-a-hole forever, finding nothing and no one game? The stay up to 1 a.m. to Entosis a Russian Citadel because I'm Western Australia game?

No thanks.

So, at the end of this post, I want to leave you with an idea, and that idea is that we can, honestly and truthfully, lay the malaise of EVE as it stands and as it goes forward into the future, at the feet of CCP Fozzie.