Why EVE died?

I wanted to wait till mid-Autumn because daydreaming people still claim that losing 1/3 of the activity in 4 months is "just Summer dip", despite Augusts were always better than Julys. There is no need to wait, as CCP made the last "Hail Mary" move of MMOs before pulling the plug: going free-to-play. So EVE is now officially in terminal state and its demise will be accelerated by the armies of throwaway gank/ECM/lagmaking alpha accounts. Reddit was fast to respond with megathread, another and great graphics (check the sail of the lifeboat, it's the work of a master troll):
No, I'm not going to take credit, my "Don't play EVE Online!" page is a mere messenger of the facts, I probably saved a couple hundred players from figuring them out the the hard way, but they would get the same conclusion after a few months of suffering anyway.

First thing first: EVE was stable last year, even shown growth in 2015 second half. If you asked me or anyone last year this time about the fate of EVE, we'd say "stable, maybe slow decline" and "not unprecedented drop and CCP dropping the towel, going F2P". We can safely say that if the last year status quo lived, the game would be at the same state or only a bit lower. But the status quo changed a lot in the last 12 months. The "undefeatable" Imperium was destroyed and their remnants were evicted and chased away. The new king of the hill on the other hand is not a new coalition full of players, but the I Want ISK site.

Let's see the four clear differences between IWI and all previous kings of the hill:

• You can't engage IWI: PL supers were awoxed. PL lost lots of supers in BR. Goon ratters were hunted, their supers were trapped occasionally. If you didn't like the king of the hill, you could do something about it, and cut them. Your cut didn't kill them, but hey, you're one man, if everyone make a cut, they die. There is absolutely no way to be even a thorn in the side of IWI. They have no in-game assets to attack.
• You can't join IWI: The CFC was always recruiting. PL made PH. So if you had no special terms, you could easily be one of the "Kings of the Hill". Sure, only as a line member, but then you could work your way up by becoming an FC. IWI has no in-game alliance you could join. You can at best be a banker but that's a real life job with no in-game affiliation.
• You can't outperform IWI: you could at least theoretically farm more money or kills than the actual king of the hill. Not many did that, but the way was there to recruit newbies to outgrow Goons. BRAVE did pretty well. You could get a killboard better than PL members had. But there is absolutely no way to play better than IWI as they don't play the game at all. They are an out-of-game site (let's not get into what kind), so you can at best outwork them, but coding a site and paying out "winnings" is not playing.
• IWI is the only king of the hill CCP openly protects: every single game rebalance was aimed of limiting dominating gameplay. Sure, the kings could water it down or outright violate the rules and not get banned, but jump ranges, entosis and the rest of the changes at least promised that something will be done against the dominating gameplay. Now not only there isn't a promise, but Citadels expansion - first time since moon mining - directly and clearly introduced an enormous top-down income source, benefiting to the incumbent king of the hill. Also, IWI quickly reached Mittani level immunity to bans.

Let me summarize these points: you are defeated, everything you do in EVE is irrelevant, there is absolutely nothing you can do about it and it's not going to change in the foreseeable future. No wonder people don't want to play. The critical problem is that not only actual damage was done, but good faith was lost. Even if CCP would ban all "casino" sites and all "bankers" and undo the broker fee changes and negwallet everyone who made a few trillions on the Jita citadels (besides casino bankers who are already banned), many departed people wouldn't return. I sure wouldn't. I wouldn't believe "they saw the error in their ways and improved", I'd say "they got caught, now they cry and beg and promise the Moon but as soon as we're not looking, they'll be back at betraying players for their whales/friends/bribe-givers". They got a second chance after Incarna. With Citadels they did something much worse. No more chances for CCP, not from me, not from the legion of players who stopped playing in the last months. They are going down.

At this point the only way to save EVE if CCP outsources operation, like they did in China. If CCP would just develop the code but the day-to-day operation would be at the control of a reliable partner (not some project company founded in 2016) then maybe. EVE, I mean the software implementation and the official ruleset is still the best on the MMO scene. With stewards who enforce the rules instead being champions of breaking them, EVE at least has a chance of flourishing again. In the hands of the totally corrupted community team, it's game over.


PS: and now I lose myself in imagining CCP Falcon trying to find a new job with the "No1 reason his last workplace bankrupted" mark on his forehead. I'm only doing it for 5 seconds yet and my smile is already wilder than when the Goon Kickstarter failed.