Equinox expansion

Equinox Plex costs

I have been thinking about the Plex price problem too.


I think CCP is okay with the rise.


Right now, there is isk income disparity on a massive level.


you have the tiny .1% player population in pochven printing isk  like 500-900mil per hour.

you have the tiny .4% burner mission boys.  300-500 mil an hour. (was told 250 in empire, but just saw someone do 300 in empire)

You have the sub 1% incursion grinders, 200-350 mil an hour.

You have the 5% wormholers, 100-500 mil an hour.

You have the 1% smart bomb/skynet/edencom ratters, 250 mil an hour.

You have the sub 1% beacon grinders, 300 mil an hour.

You have the 10% high end ratters, 60-100 mil an hour.


then you have everyone else.

the 25% low end ratters, sub 60 mil.

the 25% mission runners, sub 40 mil.

the 2% abyssal runners, negligible raw isk 

then the remaining 30% who bring in no raw isk at all, including miners, faction warfare, pvpers, traders, industry people, etc etc.


note  these are all raw isk, you ignore parts for this discussion.


so you have massive amounts of isk being injected directly, the null sec ratting being one of the biggest sources because it is the largest population.  but you have a much smaller amount of people bringing in nearly as much, wormholes, because the income disparity. then an even smaller amount bringing in the same amount as the large population, the pochven boys.


CCP could clamp down on all these. they did.  Other than incursions and  burners, they have nerfed all these incomes in the past few years.


But it makes the price of everything higher.  making the low end of 80% or players having to struggle to earn.  it also makes prices uncertain, so the miners and explorers are dependent on uncertain prices  making them in the struggle category.


so the high end buys Plex.   the mid range does too but struggles to do it.  and everyone else below is reliant on them buying that Plex because they eventually give up and buy Plex to buy the things they want.

more people buying Plex used to be just game time, but now it's a lot of little things.  so it used to be more people playing your game.  but it's just pressing out more money out of a tiny population.


and a lot of people don't like to talk about the raw money injection into the game because they have expensive tastes or mistakes.  do it's sort of hidden

it's sad to me.  because they need to broaden eve, make it easier for new players, but this just gets harder if you are doing raw isk generation, like ratting, but maybe about the same if you are dependent on other people's pricing, like gas mining or exploration.  it's why exploration is so strong, because inflation helps you. 🙂

This is kind of how I see the world.  I have a proposal on my site, https://www.wckg.net/home/feature-suggestions and it would make eve easier for new players.


but in end, just end things that are too broken.  I don't mind the pochven boys, they are doing king of the hill.  but high sec incursions are easy to fix, just drop instant spawn.  burners, adjust the speed missions.


Feature suggestions 

This is just my list of things that I think will help the game.

Over all goal - Make new players less overwhelmed, make some of the more obscure and pointless mechanics less annoying, and make it easier for people to get into the game, getting shooting people, and at

null sec ratting, drop bounties back to where they were, sadly.

inflation at a certain level helps ccp

until it impacts the bottom 80%

and as soon as the bottom 80% starts to think this is a pay to win game they are wrong.


eve is not p2w.  its p2l.


it's pay to lose because it will just cause those same people to say " well I can do that".  but they can't.  and they won't know until they lose something expensive.

it's one of the biggest reasons we see people quit too.

honestly, the "I was killed by players" thing  that's fine.  people adapt, they are like "oh yeah, that was dumb".  eve is really good about telling you when you are fucking up.


but if you are a small time players  trying to grind sub 50 per hour, null sec ratting, trying to earn 3.15 bil isk https://janice.e-351.com/a/ojpX2S  that is 63 hours of their life.

Appraisal ojpX2S @ Jita 4-4 split: 3,066,500,000.00 ISK | Janice

PLEX - 500


escalations pay for some part of that, so yes, maybe less, but that incursion is 5% of finished ones.

and some of these players are making far less.

I don't have easy answers 


but I want more players.  I want them being stupid in pvp too.  I want them to have a reason to be in space.


I want those players to be able to afford a battleship.  it's what every starting player wants too.


I want the high end content to require a big ship, like pochven honestly.  but I want people to have to defend that big ship fairly.

we are part of the problem with inflation.  but so are the other people

but hey  it's great for us, right.

The reality is that nullsec is far less attractive now than it was before the patch.

Those of us in #nullsec on the https://www.eveonline.com/discord have been working on a shared google spreadsheet for the past month.  We have a few of us on the PH server interested in this content, such as Gobbins (PH) and Kenneth Feld (PL).  They have been switching systems and testing the new ones.   I've been working with those outside our alliance, hdubb (Sigma), Baschti (CONDI).  They have been super helpful as I've been relaying information to the public discord server, and vice versa.  We have a few other players as well, but it's been mostly anonymous in gathering this data.  We have started updating public resources as well, as I have spent a large amount of time updating https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Asteroids_and_ore and I don't even mine. :D

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DCJhZQjam39R81f389b43xfEM92uqfVcJNQMX7Xvq6U/edit?gid=0#gid=0 has a collection of data on this latest patch.  so let's interpret this.

Note, I'm ignoring the other impacts to null sec and me.

That's what CCP wants, that's fine, most of that doesn't touch newbies in space that much.  

Ratting

Ratting changes initially seemed good because instant respawn brought back smartbombing/edencomm mass ratting back.  However, now that there is a 20 minute respawn time between instances, it's far less content available.  When every system could support nearly 40 anomalies to choose from before, the new system will be a max of 17 anomalies.  The values inside these anomalies varies on the true sec of the system.  You can easily see this yourself by going to the TCU filter on dotlan and flying around there.

Pre-Equinox ratting sites:

Military 5 - 36-42 sites make up depends, but usually 4 of the highest ones, but a lot of mid range ones.

Military 4 - 31-34 sites - usually 1-3 of the highest ones, lots of mid range ones.

Military 3 - 22-30 sites - usually 1 of the highest ones, lots of mid ranges

Rest don't matter that much, but they were higher.  The new content is fewer anomalies of the smaller amounts, yes, but it's less over opportunities.

The new sites depend on true sec.   However, the make up these anomalies don't vary as much.  In fact, some anomalies, like Ports, go away entirely. And sure, a few systems can afford to fit the new anomalies, but it's far far reduced.  But even the top end systems cannot support as many pilots because there are just fewer amounts.  They top out at around 17 anomalies minus the regen, so just a lot less content to be had.

Old system could handle 3-4 newbies all farming the same types of sites.  New system looks like people will have to switch between different types of ratting sites as they go.  

Please see the spreadsheet for the exact details of the new sites.  But one or two bulk ratters can clear out a system easy.   And the new escalations are silly easy but don't pay very well.  I did not capture these yet because I thought they might be tuned upwards, but I'm doubting it now.

Rough estimates under the new system?  I honestly don't know, but I feel that half of the anoms are gone, maybe half the space is good enough to support the same number of people, so I think guessing half the ratting is fair again.

Mining

This is worse in a couple ways.

First is the rock sizes.  Rock sizes are MUCH much smaller.   I have a sample on the spreadsheet as well.  It's less mining, harder on crystals, and a lot more 'The Asteroid is depleted'. 

Second is the respawn time.  The respawn times are longer.   You end up with fewer belts in systems, so if you are mining, hunters will have more success going after smaller miners, while the big groups will have protection and will just do moon mining more often.  This also leads to far fewer anomalies to mine from, specifically going from the average of 2-7 anomalies in most locations down to a flat 3-4, and 2 might be garbage.

Third is the types of ore.  This is a mixed bag, as people can pick and chose now, but not all systems can support them.  So it's great to get some isogen belts. but....

Fourth is cherry picking.  The new system encourages cherry picking.  So what's the respawn on these cherry picked content? take a guess :D

As a summary, here is the old system on the eve uni wiki, which I have updated and standardized on the Asteroid and Ore site

And here is the new content:

The new anomalies are smaller than then the enormous, with more rocks with a smaller overall size of those rocks, meaning it's more clicking pressure to click all these rocks.

It is important to note that the 'picking' which ore people mine will majorly shift this balance as well.  You will see a massive influx of isogen, for instance, but I don't know if it will be enough to stem the required amounts by battleships.

We were promised escalations as well. Well guess what, it's mostly trit.  3.1 m m^3 of the 4.4 m m^3 is veldspar. And tiny tiny rocks.

In the spreadsheet, we summarize how much 24 hours of mining can make you.  Also have a sample constellation under the old system with the make up of what mining options are there, note this isn't fully scientific but it's the best I could do. :D  There is some detail in the bottom right of the mining anomalies tab. ("Mining anomolies" actually)  These details say how many hours under the new system it would take for a 'good' mining crew of 15 to mine an erebus. Hint, it's worse.

All in all, this is less overall mining because there are more rocks that are quickly exhausted.  There is also a 'more clicking' shortfall as well.

Impacts? Again, I don't know, nobody does.  But considering most of the 24 hour values are 'half' again, I'm fine with guessing half the mining.

The MER

The MER (Monthly Economic Report) for May 2024 lists some key indicators on the health of the different regions.  https://www.eveonline.com/news/view/monthly-economic-report-may-2024 is the May one, and we should have June, but it's not out yet, so here we are, I got tired of waiting. edit: https://www.eveonline.com/news/view/monthly-economic-report-june-2024 has come out.  drop in null sec ratting shown. 

We can use the data in the MER to estimate the impact a bit.

Null sec Ratting income is actually easy to figure out, thanks to the ESS payout.  22.5T was paid out from ESS.  Realize this also covers the very lucrative 'reserve bank', so on the VERY high end, this is 22.5/40% for 56T in bounties.  Note that this change doesn't affect CRAB Beacon runners or Escalation 10/10 runners, so maybe 80% is the anomalies.  Note that the other 9 T in bounty payouts not accounted for is most likely in NPC null sec or in missions.  This is the largest single isk flow into the game.  This is versus 22.4T in just blue loot in wormholes to support a tiny subsection of players compared to the number of people in nullsec.  There is another 27.9T in incursion, overseer effects, and other npc buy orders that isn't accounted for.  Total of 173.8 T in faucets.  So maybe 56T out of 174T to a 34T out of 152T.  edit: new MER shows similar numbers, 24.1T ESS, so 60T ratting. Most likely due to the chaining solution we had for a bit. 

Mining is tougher because CCP doesn't break it down.  I just eyeballed instead of downloading the data. Moon mining peaks at 1.0 B m^3 high sec moons, 1.6 B m^3 in null sec moons.  I can only guess they mean asteroid ore to cover anomalies as well.  Asteroid ore is 0.7 B in high sec belt ore, 0.9 B in null sec belt ore, rounding errors on the rest.   So of the totals of ore mined (4.5B a month?), this is only affecting around 0.9 B in ore.  So maybe .9 B out of 4.5 B ore is now .5 B out of 4 B ore.

Summary

This could be 13% of the ISK income remove from the game.  This could be 13% of all ore removed from the game.  In Null, this is representing a possible drop off of 40% of ratting income, and a possible drop off 50% of mining income.  This isk drop and mining volume drop might offset each other a bit, as deflation, but who knows.  These are guesses from me, based on data.  And CCP can confirm whatever.

You know it's bad when people I have blocked on the eve online discord agree with me for the first time ever.

NWABroseidon: It’s not scarcity 2.0 cuz scarcity implies it will ever be good again. It’s just the state of the game

As such, I'll be updating my pretty popular 'All changes in the last 8 years' page to reflect the state of the game. https://www.wckg.net/Vet has that data.  I have archived this thread as well.  Let me know if you think I'm wrong.