blocking paved avenues that people use to get places
They're on the east Pentacrest. Nobody actually goes there for anything meaningful; Macbride is a museum and Schaeffer is LAS administration.
The only thing people do on the Pentacrest is sit around looking at smartphones pretending they aren't just completely dead inside.
Every single one of these brainlets will be across the street lined up at the Cookies & More in an hour without masks on talking about how awesome they are and how terrible Kim Reynolds is.
Yes, I DID grow up going to Old Capitol Mall.
Dust is dead, Valkyrie is dead. The graphics card thing was "walking in stations", which they were going to adapt to make the World of Darkness MMO, but that too is dead and White Wolf has been sold back off.
EVE right now is worse and better than ever.
The game meta is essentially bifurcated. At the small group level, the game has never been better. Between abyssal deadspace, pochven, and various changes to lowsec and wormholes, if you can get a few doods together to do a thing, you'll have a great time.
But nullwar is in a bad spot. Beeitnam illustrated the problems, that once again it's a defender's game and that the N+1 problem is still very much alive.
But to answer your specific question about why I'm not harder on CCP...
It's mere existence is a tacit admission that business in western democracies is over-regulated, for otherwise these people would be out there 1099'ing real bux instead of space bux.
Why shouldn't designer digital jeans cost as much as real ones?
They're learning tho. If they ever need more dough all they need to do is release Hazard Control skins for Caldari and Goons will splurge another hundred million.
I've walked away from far better games than anything Square has made.
There's only one company I have some loyalty to, and that's CCP Games.
Why? Because frankly this is a company that has failed bigger and harder than any other games developer ever, to the point where their mistakes are hilarious as long as you remember to keep your client stopped for a few days after any major update, just in case.
EVE once rolled out an update that deleted boot.ini, and another update was so poorly optimized it was putting graphics cards into thermal shutdown.
It gets weird after the books of the north.
Consider the entire series as a bowel movement. The first three books (the books of the north) were solid and well formed. The subsequent installments (the books of the south) were chunky explosive diarrhea. And then once they started traveling the plain between worlds it found some substance again, but it's now rainbow colored and the blood pressure of constant exertion has made your brain see stars and you can hear the refrain of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds playing in the distance.
The first three books (available as one book) of the Black Company series by Glen Cook. It follows a band of mercenaries serving BBEG told from the perspective of Croaker, the company's sawbones.
It's an interesting series because the power level is so disparate. This is a setting where resurrection, daemonic possession, and displays of fire wizardry on par with WW2 bombing are normal, yet the best the company can manage is chopping up their undead immortal enemies and burying the body parts far enough apart that it'll take a few years to be a threat again.
All ten books (don't worry, individually they're not very big books) were recently translated to english.
It's basically Napoleonic warfare in space as a backdrop for the author's discourse about the relative merits of republican democracy vs dictatorship.
If it was that important to you, you should have been forthright with Churchill about your real intentions in attacking Poland.