This is well-written, candid and interesting, but I feel like I'm missing out on a lot because I've never played EVE. Can someone who is familiar with the issues (for example, what is "ship spinning"?) give an overview of what led to this?
Generally in the Eve universe you are never safe, except when "docked" in a space station. In previous versions, you were presented with a view of your ship floating in the space hangar, and due to the "camera" mechanics of the UI, you could spin around your ship at like 300+ RPM.
An utterly pointless exercise in which millions of man-hours have been spent while simultaneously chatting on TeamSpeak or Jabber or doing market research, or whatever. But all players seem to share a tongue-in-cheek fondness for this feature.
Dragging the camera (with a mouse down, move and release) would cause it to rotate around the player's ship until some artificial 'drag' decided the spin should slow to a stop. It was one of those innocent and functionally useless UI features, that is surprisingly satisfying to preform.
...I'm not the only one? Oh thank god
As far as the item shop, it turned out that a monocle cost around $80 after converting isk (in game currency) into real money via the purchase of plex (Eve supported gold buying). The items were grossly over priced which made CCP seem like a desperate broke evil corporation with which the player base has lost most of it's trust with.
As far as the direction of the game, with the introduction of a long awaited feature, Captains Quarters, that was not even completed upon release, it made it seem that CCP was not willing to listen to the wants of the player base in which direction they should devote their programming hours. Plenty of activities in Eve have not been updated nor has the game play had an injecting of new and invigorating play style in a few years. With CCP's latest move, it has made me and other players think twice about investing more time in a game that the developers seem to no longer care about.