Honestly this is probably gonna be a bit rambly and dorky but it's the game I've played for by far the longest period of time compared to literally anything else. As much as things have changed over the years, from new content to buffs and nerfs along with people leaving and new people joining the game, there's a big thing that hasn't changed that's always drawn me back: It's a game where you try and build up something for yourself and others can work to tear that down. Where you have your own little sandbox and some people might try and kick it over but you can do the same to them.
There's other games where that sort of thing is true (I guess like... Rust, PvP Minecraft) but usually they aren't such a long term thing and they aren't on quite the same scale (thousands of people vs maybe a dozen?). EVE has such a massive amount of space, and such a massive amount of things to do. I can step from one 'gameplay loop' to another if what I'm doing gets a bit boring to me. They also a lot of the time feel way more demanding of your time, which is kind of saying something compared to EVE? If I log out of one of those types of games for the night all my stuff might be gone by the morning.
I guess I kinda like the idea of what I mentioned about a sandbox. About building something for myself and for my friends, about having such a wide variety of things to do. I definitely get a bit burnt out sometimes and there's been times where I've felt like the game is in some unrecoverable death spiral, but that was usually when the devs seemed to just... stop developing the game? And they finally seem to have realized that the cycle of like... the tiniest of (usually incredibly nerf-heavy) balance passes where peoples playstyles are destroyed is Bad(tm). I don't really know where to end this post so I'm just gonna end it here, also if you ever wanna talk about bad video games or playing this specific bad video game well... hi :3
