I've played Eve off and on for years now, mostly trying to 'get' what it is people see in the game. Unfortunately I rarely last more than a couple of months before I get bored and move on and I confess that I still don't 'get' it. For all it's supposed complexity and difficulty it's really an exceedingly simple game mostly mired by one of the worst UIs ever designed. Much of the supposed difficulty is more a matter of the game being unbelievably poor at showing the player what they need to know and instead dumping every possible bit of data on the screen in a format that is as difficult to sort through as they can make it. Add in game mechanics that make little coherent sense, presumably a relic of CCP's haphazard game development (they have a tendency to add half baked, at absolute best, features, then forget about them for years), and/or seem purposefully obtuse and an unbelievable number of guides out there that are grossly out of date, and it's a serious mess for new players.
Then there's the little issue of the two Eve rules -- "Never fly what you can't afford to lose", and "Trust no one. Ever.". As for the first, I have a half dozen or more limited edition ships, given out by CCP for various events and such over the years, that if I ever undocked with them it'd be like wearing a huge "Kick me!" sign. Just kinda sad that they'll never leave dock. As for the latter, the biggest issue with Eve is that it really is pretty boring to play solo, at least once you've got the basics down and enough SP to fit and fly decent ships for various roles, and yet you really can't trust anyone you meet in game and if someone seems to trust you then you can be almost certain it's because they are either trying to scam you, nuke you to atoms, or, most likely, both. If you're the adventurous type you can join a corp, though that is often a more trying process than applying for security clearance and nearly as invasive, but even then there's a good chance you'll end up either used, abused, scammed, or all of the above. Hell, even the 'good' corps, like Eve Uni, have their issues. I don't think I've ever played when EveU wasn't perma-wardeced, usually with a couple of jerks in tricked out destroyers sitting outside their home station hoping for newbies to undock.
CCP has gotten themselves into a pickle. Eve has been in decline for a while now, they're so beholden to the functional sociopath component of Eve's playerbase that there's very little they can do to improve things without having their existing playerbase decide to crash Jita in protest. Their other games have died on the vine or fizzled out soon after release, Eve is all they really have and they need fresh blood to keep it going.
Honestly, though, even without all the issues, Eve's fundamental design is problematic. There's no reset point. With, say, WoW, every expac is a new beginning. A new player joining WoW right now won't have the gold, heirlooms, and such, but little of that really matters, they're close enough to being on an even footing with someone who's been playing for 12 years that it doesn't much matter. Even later in an expac's lifespan Blizz tends to build in "catch-up" mechanisms so newbies can get up to speed and can, with a bit of work, even exceed a long time vet.
Most MMOs have similar mechanisms, natural reset points and catch-up mechanisms. Eve has no such system. SP is a matter of time played, period. Someone who's played longer will always have more SP, and for all that a lot of Eve players love to claim SP doesn't matter, they're full of crap. SP isn't everything, but then neither is gear in WoW, but it does play a huge role in what you can do in the game and how much chance you have of surviving any given encounter. You can buy a character with a lot of SP or, now, even buy SP itself, but for the average person just starting out, unless you are willing to dump a ocean of money into the game (and, granted, some are) you will never, ever come even close to catching up to longtime vets, and that can be rather disheartening.
I strongly suspect the combination of no reset points, poor new player experience, and a playerbase that is, well, often unkind to newbies in a way that makes most MMOs look welcoming, leads to the well known and discussed issue of poor player retention. A F2P option really does nothing to address any of that. All I can figure is CCP is hoping it brings in some sheep to feed the eternally hungry wolves, though I suspect it'll fail at doing even that unless they plan on randomly dumping them in Lowsec or something. They have to know this will be abused by vets in ways they and I can't even imagine (and I can think of half a dozen ways without trying), I'm not really sure this won't hurt them more in the end than help.
Guess we'll see.
Preferably from a multi-light year distance.
