Correct, I probably should have worded that better. You can interact with other player's spaceships (preferably through violence :D), but your virtual flesh and blood Avatar is currently only accessible in said single player environment (or a portrait).

Well, there hasn't been an expansion worthy of praise since Apocrypha in 2009...

Incursions wasn't completely horrible because it added High Sec PVE that doesn't make me want to stab my brain out to escape the boredom, but even that was poorly (read: not at all) followed up (risk/reward is seriously skewed in high sec and easily farmed in the lower tier sites for relatively ridiculous/easy ISK per hour) and most likely done with extremely few development resources as most of the individual bits were already in the game in one form or another while the nose candy enthusiasts in Team :AWESOME: pissed away money on the for now indefinitely postponed full Incarna (Establishments etc.).

Oh, and I forgot one other point that was pointed out in another comment:

I'm already bloody paying a premium subscription price for EVE (well, not any more at the moment) and double dipping (or rather attempting to do so) into a customer's wallet like that also offended quite a lot of players in conjunction with the idiotic price points. A couple of EUR/USD for a full set of high tier clothes might have been acceptable to some in that context, but the way it was rolled out, not a chance.

Microtransactions have a place in gaming. That place is Free To Play games or to justify further development time on an already aging one time purchase title (like Team Fortress 2 before it became completely F2P and MT based).

The EVE MT experiment did not just fail because of that, it failed because of a multitude of reasons, most of which a sane person would have seen coming from miles away.

First of all, the NEX Store (the name of this abomination, yes I'm biased against it, deal with it) was released in a vacuum of a completely single player environment. The only place your purchase will be seen in all its glory is in the confines of your own game client in a shabby little hole called the Captain's Quarter (or dismissively, the Captain's Closet). Multiplayer Avatar interaction was indefinitely postponed for now (they finally admitted/realized that they had nothing fun in terms of gameplay value on the drawing board for it, go figure), so the only way your purchase is visible to other players is through the Tiny Avatar portrait (which is one of the reasons why the Monocle was the only item seeing significant sales, the other being trolls buying them to enrage the more easily excited opponents of microtransactions in EVE).

Second, the concept of a market-less (if you ignore the resale), infinite supply item is diametrically opposed to the core concept of EVE's player run economy and sandbox nature. Everything in EVE has a price defined by supply and demand. The price of the Vanity Items is based solely on the current ISK equivalent value of a month's worth of game time.
For a more sane approach on that and how it would be at least somewhat acceptable, I made a thread about that on a community forum in the wake of the ingame riots.

Third, even the low-price tier is still retardedly expensive. Even the cheapest items still cost 1000 AUR which amounts to 1/3 of a PLEX (the Gametime Code token which converts to 3000 AUR, clocking in at around 17 USD from a cheap supplier) and a full set of clothes (boots, pants, shirt/jacket, etc) would set you back over 20 bucks worth of PLEX/Gametime.

The reason given in TFA, while certainly not wrong as it really was bloody stupid to launch with almost exclusively high-tier items, compounds with all this and resulted in a huge backlash against CCP over it (and other poor decisions and a backlog of frustration over the last two years of neglect towards the core gameplay) but was definitely not the only or even the main reason for it.

I should probably also point out that the prices of the items in general are also hugely immersion breaking. The ISK equivalent price of a monocle (the highest priced item) is roughly that of a dreadnought. Which is a capital ship. The second largest and expensive tier of ships (after supercapitals).
And even the cheapest boots cost as much as a battleship.
Admittedly, you apparently buy a lifetime subscription to your clothes as they don't get destroyed upon player death like implants (another decidedly un-EVE feature of the Vanity Items) but that still seems somewhat extreme...

I expected Heroin/Crack dispensers reading the headline.

Left disappointed.

That's not surprising. It happened before and it will happen again.
EVE has a very rich history of large scale scams, reaching from investment scams like this one to long-planned infiltrations of alliances like the infamous heist by GHSC (who incidentally ripped assets to the tune of 200ish billion ISK off one of the major alliances again just recently).

The only "surprising" and novel bit about this story is that he apparently/supposedly didn't do it for the e-fame or e-gain, but for RMTing the scammed ISK because of real life troubles, which was the reason for his subsequent banning.

Am I the only one that had to think about Somalian pirates peacefully mining in High Sec after reading this post? :)

Nope. Second Life does that, AFAIK.

I have to disagree on that one. EVE is what you make out of it. You can do tedious and boring stuff like run an industrial enterprise (aka Spreadsheets Online), mine asteroids (mindnumbingly boring), do PVE (which is admittedly terrible in EVE) combat or you can go the PVP route (be it as a pirate, mercenary, grunt in one of the major power blocks or declaring war on carebear corps for "protection money") and blow up other people's pixels leading to tasty bitter tears for your drinking pleasure (complete loss of whatever you're flying when you get blown up can lead to amusing smack talk).

Or you could do something completely different and do the social engineering and scamming (completely accepted by the TOS as long as you stay within game mechanics) that keeps EVE in the mainstream news.

It's a sandbox, there should be something in it for you to have fun with as long as you can befriend the general gameplay, setting and the UI (which is constantly improving) surrounding it.

Nobody. I just felt like pointing it out.

Because for EVE veterans a scam hardly qualifies as "news". ;)