EVE Online: The End

First off, a big ol' fuck you to both CCP and most of the linux users who play EVE Online.

I was really starting to get into this game. Enough that I was about ready to plunk down my $15 a month to become a full-fledged player, even before my trial ran out (I want a bigger class of ship, you see).

But, there's no point. I can't play the game. As I mentioned in my last post, CCP is dropping support for their linux client. They're doing this because, apparently, most of their linux users were ignoring the linux client and using the Windows client in wine/cedega/crossover. Since CCP wasn't seeing a significant spike in subscribers logging in on their linux client, they concluded that it wasn't economically viable to continue to officially support three operating systems. Of course, they're keeping the OSX client, which has basically the same damn programmatic requirements as linux, so I don't really understand how it's more than a little extra work to ensure that it plays on both.

Now, I have no idea why the linux users weren't using the linux client. My only guess is that the linux client doesn't support the "premium" high-res textures or windowed mode. I looked at the high-res textures in Crossover, and they're not really that much better. Certainly not better enough to deal with the difficulty and annoyance of getting EVE to run in wine. Even with the basic graphics, and with a few hours' tinkering, the Windows client is crashing every forty-five minutes in Crossover Games.

So, instead of putting more time into this and getting nothing out of it, I'm going to call a halt to my review.

My final analysis of EVE Online is that it's the only MMORPG to ever catch my attention. It's the only MMORPG nuanced and sophisticated to ever make me want to pony up $15 a month to waste endless hours of my time.

If there's any MMORPG you should play, it's EVE Online. Unless you're on linux, in which case you should be used to developers ignoring you.