EVE Online players have been up in arms this week over sweeping nerfs that are about to hit to high-end farming gameplay styles in the player-owned nullsec territories. It started when CCP Games announced that the Excavator drones used by Rorqual capital industrial ships would be getting a sizeable mining yield reduction and that a respawn delay would be added to ore sites in nullsec. As players were still reeling from that unexpected news, developers then announced a surprise general nerf to fighter damage with the goal of making carriers and supercarriers less effective in PvE and PvP. This significant balance change was just announced on Friday 9th June and goes live on Tuesday 13th, prompting outcry from the community over the lack of feedback-gathering on such a significant change to capital ship balance.
These nerfs both seem to be reactions to the latest few Monthly Economic Reports, which showed that the total money supply in the game economy is over a quadrillion ISK and rising rapidly. The detailed breakdowns of economic activity in the reports tell a more complex story, with ISK supply from bounty prizes roughly doubling over the past year and mining in the Delve region shooting off the scale in the past few months. It seems that a large number of nullsec players are spending more time farming and building up resources, and it’s the scale and efficiency of the top-tier farming setups that has CCP worried.
In this edition of EVE Evolved, I discuss the upcoming Rorqual and fighter nerfs, look at the economics of farming, and explain why this trend could be a more serious indicator than CCP realises.
Analysing the Rorqual nerf
The mining nerfs announced last week are a direct hit on the highest tier of mining gameplay, starting with direct reductions to the mining yield and movement speed of the expensive Excavator drones that can only be used by the Rorqual capital industrial ship. That’s a two billion ISK ship with extremely rare drones that still cost almost a billion ISK a piece, but of course price has never been an effective balancing tool in EVE.
The biggest part of the mining nerf is that the Ore Prospecting Array nullsec system upgrade will now have a cooldown between depleting one site and the new one spawning, so players will no longer be able to mine continuously in one star system with an unlimited number of ships. It’s clear that this is a response to the rapid rise of Rorqual fleets and the trillions of ISK worth of ore being mined of Goonswarm’s home in Delve each month recently, but the actual impact won’t be all that terrible. People with large mining fleets will just have to scale back the number of miners per system or cycle between multiple star systems, so the ultimate effect is to reduce the maximum carrying capacity of a given area of nullsec space for mining operations.
While some are calling this nerf a knee-jerk reaction, I’ve always had a problem with infinitely-scaling resource streams in EVE and a cooldown on the respawn is a pretty reasonable change. I’d be interested to see some follow-up on the problem down the line, though, such as proposals for replacing infinite resource streams with timed events in the same style as the new moon mining gameplay.
The economics of supercarrier farming
While people were obviously angry at the mining nerfs, they weren’t ‘71 page forum thread in two days‘ angry or ‘plaster the whole EVE subreddit with vitriol‘ angry. That honour was reserved for CCP Larrikin’s surprise announcement of a nerf to carrier and supercarrier damage, which was deemed necessary primarily due to the recent rise in NPC bounty payouts. CCP Quant later clarified on Reddit that these changes are intended to hit a relatively small group of players who were able to generate upward of 500 million ISK per hour on each character by endlessly farming nullsec anomalies in supercarriers.
The latest economic reports do show a massive increase in ISK pouring into the game from NPC bounties, roughly doubling over the past year to reach almost 70 trillion ISK last month, and over 90% of it is coming from nullsec. Supercarriers were never intended to be PvE powerhouses and the number of them in the game has shot up rapidly over the past few years. Though there are practical limits to the number of pilots who can efficiently farm nullsec anomalies in one star system, this type of farming obviously scales up too easily and produces far too much ISK for supercapital pilots. Given that alliances are now capable of mining trillions of ISK worth of ore per month, building up a huge supercapital fleet isn’t a serious barrier to them and this ISK faucet was only going to get bigger.
I’m not sure that general fighter nerfs are the way to tackle PvE supercarriers as they also hit regular carriers that can only reach about 50 million ISK per hour, but the economic problems did need to be addressed before they spiralled out of control. This is partly because of the additional complicating factor of the role that skill injectors play on both sides of the farming equation. Not only do they give a straight-forward new pit for the super-rich to pour their wealth into, but they also allow new farming characters to be created in a matter of hours or minutes. Once players find a highly profitable and scalable farming setup, they can now replicate it dozens of times and the new characters will quickly pay for themselves like a good investment.
Is EVE in a cold war state?
Over the past 13 years I’ve been playing EVE, I’ve seen the game go through countless major changes that have produced these distinct gameplay eras lasting anywhere from a few months to years. The early years saw a game-wide race to get into battleships, the era of mining in cruisers before mining barges were added, the slow march of nullsec infrastructure deployment that accompanied tech 2 production, and the following era of dreadnought proliferation as players trained the skills to fly capital ships.
EVE has naturally been through a number of these periods that could be characterised as cold wars, periods in which alliances retreat to their territories to build fortresses and farm resources for the next coming war. I think we’re in one of those periods right now, but it may not be by choice. The fact that that people are choosing to farm more instead of fighting should perhaps be a warning sign to developers that something is wrong with nullsec warfare. We’ve heard increasing numbers of complaints over the past few months from players who just don’t enjoy citadel warfare, and some pretty damning condemnation of the sovereignty and structure warfare mechanics.
I touched on this topic in a recent article asking if EVE had become too safe, and the situation is progressing as Upwell structures continue to proliferate throughout the game. The universe is now littered with medium Astrahus citadels and Raitaru engineering complexes that are still standing only because they aren’t worth the effort of destroying them. The reinforcement and vulnerability mechanics that may make sense for the largest scale of Upwell structures that are worth defending have proven to be more irritating than engaging on the smallest scales.
Backlash from the community is to be expected following any nerf announcement, but there are some genuine concerns and rational arguments out there in the sea of flailing limbs and people who are totally going to cancel their 15 accounts. Dirk MacGirk discussed the ore anomaly nerf with a very level head a few days ago and pointed out just how natural and useful resource depletion is as a game mechanic. Kaidokpi on the EVE forums actually ran the numbers on the mining changes and worked out that it’s a pretty nominal change for even the largest alliances.
Player xiaodown on reddit also made a pretty convincing argument that people are farming a lot more recently because there are actually fewer meaningful targets for everyday PvP, a possibility that should perhaps worry CCP. At the same time, the effect of skill injectors on the scalability of high-end gameplay is becoming readily apparent as people rapidly train into capital ships that there may not enough compelling gameplay for. The negative side-effects of unbalanced farming opportunities or new flavour-of-the-month ships used to take months to settle in as players had to train for the new meta, but that’s no longer the case and developers will have to keep that in mind in all future game design and balance discussions.
EVE Online expert Brendan ‘Nyphur’ Drain has been playing EVE for over a decade and writing the regular EVE Evolved column since 2008. The column covers everything from in-depth EVE guides and news breakdowns to game design discussions and opinion pieces. If there’s a topic you’d love to see covered, drop him a comment or send mail to brendan@massivelyop.com!
Guys,I came across this guide EVE ISK Farming Guide and was wondering ,if you got any more detailed stuff about ratting? like which ship to use, where to go etc. I love pve combat, but have no clue about the game, barely started last week.
A few years ago i was hopefull for Eve Online to withstand the forces that are comming.
Games like ED, SC, Dual universe etc etc all show great promise for the space genre.
Not all are equal but good alternatives for people who are spacejunkies like us.
I had faith in CCP Seagul of chaning sov mechenics and capital improvements.
But all hit the wrong marks…
Fozzy Sov is a disaster….
Citadels are a disaster….
Capital rebalance are still ok, but stil need work.
Battleships still suck except the Mach / Nightmare / Rattlesnake wich 90% of the smaller alliances cant SRP.
Try to invade Imperium today and you are met with hundreds and hundreds of citadels wich is insane, and people complained about POS bashing while citadels are 10 times more powerfull.
Instead of making it worth invading other people’s space its now a joke and such a massive undertaking that none is going to bother with it anymore.
WWB i hear ? nah that was a one time happening funded by a trillionaire and all of Eve needed to combine their power to take down a carebear alliance to get them on their knee’s and they are back and stronger then ever….
They implemented Rorq changes that was already well known to be way to OP..
Then they nerf it and nerf it and nerf it and nerf it…
Now its time to nerf ratting ticks done with carriers and supers wich have a direct impact on grinding those same citadels wich takes endless amount of time…
So what did we get what we had 2 years back ? nothing.
All progress that was made is being undone and its just getting worse.
Sorry for my whine here but i hoped so much that CCP Seagul made the game better and last weeks i just realised how badly everything got when looking a few years back.
Yes there were good thing like Free to Play and the Fax machines i realy love !
But overal it was 2 steps forward 3 steps back :(
I rather have dominion sov then the fuckfest we have today sorry people :(
I’d like to believe that the core of what has been done over the past few years is solid and the main problems are all more easily solved than they were previously. Dominion sov had hit a dead end and wasn’t going anywhere, and starbase warfare couldn’t really evolve as the starbase code was from 2004 and largely undocumented. I agree that fozzie sov is a nightmare and citadel warfare is untenable, but CCP is hopefully in a much better position now to act on feedback from players.
I’d like to see more dev discussion on big systemic changes to both systems as they clearly need it. Right now, we seem to be getting a lot of small band-aid fixes to the symptoms rather than the cause. For example, they’re talking about increasing the build cost of faction battleships because they’re too cheap when what actually happened was that we now have BPCs out the wazoo because of escalations from infinite streams of nullsec anomalies that can be farmed non-stop.
Entosis was intended to make it so the defender has to actually show up to defend space and space that isn’t actively used is easy to capture, and it did that but it had some nasty side-effects. It’s led to players grinding ore and NPCs to get their ADMs up and flinging dozens of cheap entosis ships at a constellation. They made it so you could attack sov without a fleet, and that has led to fewer actual fights. Citadel warfare is a whole other set of issues, from damage caps that don’t make sense and overpowered void bombs to having three reinforcement periods on a cheap 2 billion ISK structure and perfect asset safety. I’d like to see these issues ironed out on a systemic review level, not by applying a load of band-aid fixes to the symptoms.
But that at the end of the day, isn’t it about an iteration of artificial constraints?
I.e., if we designed a virtual world, then in a realistic world it would be winner-take-all or at least a cold war of a “couple” of blocs – e.g. Goon, Russian, not-Goon/PL. Not a lot of fun being a foot soldier in that and not a welcoming place for new unskilled pilots/people.
So there must be some sort of sov mechanics so that it is not “might makes right” and the horde sweeps over everything. There must be some artificial constraint to prevent sov being “king of the hill” and they have not found an unfun way to do that.
In a struggle between CCP and Goons and their CSM reps, I would bet on the Goons understanding – or at least exploiting – the system better than CCP.
What players want is occupancy-based sovereignty where the alliance that lives in space gets to plant its flag there, alliances can’t easily hold onto space they don’t use, and small groups can become entrenched and defend against a larger force. The first attempt to do that was by charging a lot of ISK for territory, which backfired because the largest alliances have more than enough ISK and smaller groups couldn’t afford it. Making the fee exponentially increase based on territory size also doesn’t work as people can break up and still form unofficial coalitions, plus it wouldn’t address either of the required conditions above.
Fozzie sov attempted to solve these issues with ADMs that increase based on the amount of mining and ratting in a star system so that the people using the space will have an easier time holding sov. That seemed like an elegant system, but EVE players will always game the system, so people began grinding NPCs and ore to raise ADMs and that became a chore. People even did offensive ratting ops where they’d raise their ADMs in enemy territory to create more fortified positions, which is totally backward. It was supposed to be a defense bonus for those who actively live in a star system, but ended up becoming another weapon in the alliance arsenal.
I’ve always felt that even having artificial sovereignty structures and contests was a mistake, and that instead we should allow people to fight over the things that matter to them like stations, assets, and resources. Now we have this weird entosis link mechanic that allows a lone frigate to contest an alliance’s sovereignty and a gamesy constellation-wide sov contest with capturing spawned complexes. It all feels so fake and detached from the reality of owning space, when all we needed was a barebones system. Over-engineered systems like this are always prone to being gamed and filled with edge cases and side-effects that need band-aid fixes. I don’t pretend to know what the ideal system looks like in its entirety, but I’d hope CCP is open to reinventing sov again because band-aids won’t work forever.
Finally an outlet picked up this story; especially glad as it’s you examining the situation, Brendan.
This nerf is a bandaid fix. It’s the end result of many broken systems: jump range/timer nerf for cyno so (you’re much safer ratting in your carrier/super in the middle of alliance space), making null safer than highsec (with fozziesov and citadels), the introduction of SP injectors (because now you can instantly enter the most efficient isk generating meta instead of it being a 6-month train), the loss of the game’s largest isk ink with the introduction of citadels (tax is no longer leaving the game in the same %).
There’s been an overall push towards making PVE safe, so it’s no surprise that more isk is being generated now more than ever. Not only that, but the nerf to carriers is claimed to be required to balance pve, but it has an enormous detrimental effect on pvp; did no one consider that even once in CCPs offices?
Not only this, but CCP Quant talked about 260m tics (it was 540m iirc, but he edited it), then, in the very same sentence, says that 260m is the largest observed possible tic and that it’s closer to 140-170m. This, if we’re being honest, is actually closer to the hourly rate of isk, rather than what’s earned every 20 minutes.
Players are justifiably upset. CCP hasn’t actually finished anything they’ve started in the last couple of years. We’re still all waiting on module tiericide to be completed.
Unrelated, and this may have sneaked in quietly, but have you seen the announcement for pirate battleships and the increase in material cost? It’s another bandaid fix. CCP make minerals super cheap with what they did with rorquals, then they’re unhappy with how things become cheaper to fly so nerf both rorquals and the pirate battleship construction so they’ll now be ridiculously expensive to fly.
At this point, I’m starting to think CCP just doesn’t like fun.
Great article as always. Here’s my two cents as an active resident in sovnull (CO2 pilot living in Impass). This won’t be in any order.
First, EVE started the downward spiral with the introduction of PLEX and the hill steepened sharply with skill injectors. Any method of pouring money into a game without actually playing the game is guaranteed to screw the economy.
Next, while the fighter nerf is crummy, and the announcement of such a massive change was probably the worst handled I’ve ever seen, carriers and supers will still be able to out dps any other drone ship in either pvp or pve. Along with that I have a bit of a correction for Nyphur: carriers can make way more than 50m an hour. Hell, I do better than 50m in my Golem.
Next, I really don’t understand why people got so flabberghasted by the Delve mining numbers. The Goons are by far the largest alliance in EVE, something like 4 times the size of the next largest, so of course they’re going to mine the most. The Rorqual changes will probably be good, if only to force Rorqs into more systems and provide more targets for conflict driving.
I really want to hammer my first point more, because it just seems so obvious to me, and no one else is railing on about it. PLEX and skill injectors are money printing presses. Allowing people to create a hundred alpha accounts and mine them for sp forever is the dumbest idea CCP or any other game company has ever come up with. People went nuts over Monaclegate, but nobody said boo about injectors. At least monacles didn’t allow for the massive proliferation of nearly perfectly skilled pilots practically overnight.
Ok, I’m done, except for one last thing. I’m not unsubbing. I still love EVE. Besides, there’s no game that even comes close to EVE as far as scope and depth.
Yeah. IMO, skill injectors have been huge – both in terms of use, profitability, and game-changer. Not just on the upper end; when a new player is told about a skill plan that is 60 days or injector(s), I think a message is being sent.
Cheers! I actually disagree about PLEX as we were trading game time codes for money ISK long before PLEX became an official thing and there really was no way for CCP to regulate or stop that. I think the PLEX system was an inevitability and did a lot more good than harm over the years in terms of curtailing RMT and allowing players to contribute to disaster relief through PLEX 4 Good. It allowed CCP to stay afloat as a subscription game during the free to play revolution, and a ton of other subscription MMOs have followed suit with their own PLEX-like items over the years.
Skill injectors are a problem, but only if CCP doesn’t shift its thinking about the impact of game balance and the speed of iteration required for new features. They allow people with access to large amount of ISK to rapidly create new characters with any set of skills required, so any unbalanced farming mechanics that are discovered will now be rapidly rolled out on hundreds of characters. It’ll be even more important with new gameplay that has new skills to train, as injected skill points allow people to get a head-start on players who don’t use them. Going forward, CCP must tackle this with more rigorous balance testing of new gameplay and of how changes affect existing gameplay, and a way to respond to emerging problems like that more quickly. If a seemingly innocuous change is exploitable somehow, you know EVE players will find it in days and will now be rolling it out to hundreds of characters.
BTW, allowing people to mine alpha accounts for skill injectors was definitely not intentional. Ghost training has not officially been classified as an exploit, but it has been confirmed that it’s a bug. Your skill queue is supposed to pause when your account reverts back to an alpha.
So CCP is finally tired of the botters.
If that was the case, they’d actually ban a few.