I think you're seriously overestimating the impact of COD on most people's perceptions on what an FPS should be. There's a reason COD is a successful franchise; not necessarily because it's innovative but because it's consistent. I know that me, like many other FPS player look for consistency when playing FPS games. This has nothing to do with COD, just the fact that it is a desirable trait that many of us look for. The stupidest thing people do here is think that they're better because they're not some 'COD casual' and that everyone who doesn't want some convoluted mess of numbers and contingencies is looking to dumb down the game and make it like COD. All the FPS crowd ever wanted was some sort of consistently enjoyable gameplay. That combined with the lauded EVE metagame would make for an extremely fun and innovative FPS experience. The reason I blame the EVE players is from the previous builds where they wanted everything to be modeled after EVE, but in the form of an FPS. The convoluted skill trees, SP progression, grinding, etc. Even with a consistent and fun FPS experience, these kinds of things turn away new players and force them to forever be behind people who started before them, which is not at all in the spirit of an FPS game. The greater problem arose when the game could not deliver a consistent and fun FPS experience and new players wouldn't even want to jump through all the hopes to enter into a competent stage in the game. From my point of view, the metagame will develop on its own, but it's completely up to the game developer to create a fun and meaningful environment for that metagame to be carried out. In the end I guess most of the blame falls to CCP for being dogshit fps developers.