winter patch: Dominion

[Pezzle]

New blog with lots of extra words.

http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=703

I guess it is nice from a certain standpoint that they are changing T2 materials required.  Since they are not lowering the moon goo production rates I see the market eventually ending up in the same situation.  Can alchemy compensate for that?  Who knows.

The comments on solar system upgrades are nice.  Unfortunately they are also meaningless without some numbers from the rest of the new sov system.  We also need more details on those upgrades.  Will you get something better or just a saturation of the same?  How much with the modules cost?  Where will these modules be deployed?  And so on.  We do not have numbers on costs of sov modules or the rate of increase per system held.  We do know that max fuel savings is 10% as opposed to 30.  I am guessing fuel costs for alliances stay about the same, so, thanks for nothing?  Even if there is a savings it will be negated by the sov tax.  The new system will be more expensive by far.   

Oh, the concept of a single system supporting 50-100 players in terms of material resources when fully upgraded only bewilders me. 

[Sir T]

What they are doing is vastly increasing the need for the low end moon minerals. Which should mean the big guyswill  run ariound blowing up and claiming  towers owned by small operators that previously they would not bother, with and use teh blob to defend the towers they were previously using to claim space. Welcome to Pos Warfare II - The Low End Wars.

And people were talking last night that the docking module that would allow Supercaps to dock was utterly pointless. The module will cost 80 billion, and since it can take 2 days to claim a station, which will destroy the module, there was no pooint in it. In short the implication is that nobody will bother upgrading stations at all after a while.

To be honest all I can see after this is the big boy clustering around empire and whoring every moon in the back areas, which will be pretty much empty. Why bother going out there? Dosent seem very much fun to me.

[Endie]

I am so weary of typical MMO players giving the same old tired "I hate change change sucks evrything is stupid" responses we've all heard since Ultima Online.  It's the same in SGBS right now: apparently the sky is falling, Eve sucks, and the old system was just fine thanks all of a sudden.

Just as one example, how will these putative "big boy alliances" stop other alliances, big or small, destroying the hugely increased number of moons they need to hold when you include all those R16 and R32 moons, when they won't hold sov there because it's 20 jumps away and nobody from their alliance uses the space?  Five CTAs for capitals every day, with no cyno-jammers ever to mitigate the hot-drops that result?

[Fordel]

Will any of this make T2 ships cheaper?

[Sir T]

You are right of course Endie. Thats why I've been holding off commenting on the changes up until now.

Will any of this make T2 ships cheaper?

Its hard to say to be honest. There is the twin changes of alchamy and the increase in use of low end moon minerals. I would say t would probably on balance make them cheaper, yes.

[Reg]

I expect there's going to be a transition period where T2 prices will rise a ton because we'll suddenly need 10 times as much low end crap and it won't be available yet and the high end prices won't have fallen.

I think I'll probably just stop making T2 modules for a couple of weeks while things settle down. Whenever I've tried to predict these things I end up burning myself. 

[Pezzle]

Very hard to say if prices will change much.  I would expect them to rise for awhile.  Will they drop to a lower than existing level after?  Math is hard.

[Endie]

See that's interesting, and affects everyone from 0.0 to emprire producers. Eve had reached equilibrium, and that's terrible in an MMO. Now there will (hopefully) be chaos. That's potentially fun.

[Reg]

One thing I know for sure is that I'm only going to be making shield emitters as I need them.  It'd be annoying to be caught with a 3 month supply and have the prices on them plummet.

[MahrinSkel]

I always loved when they'd pull a major shuffle on the economic side.  That's when *real* fortunes get made, I quadrupled my net worth (from 10 figures to 11) in two weeks when Salvage came out, then doubled it again in the following month, for a while I handled about 50% of *all* melted capacitor consoles (I encouraged some guys to start salvaging and put out buy orders for *everything* salvage in Querious, then worked the intra-regional spreads on the stuff that turned out to be valuable).

Eve actually has a lot less "We Fear Change" conservatism than most games.  Some will bitch, most of those will turn out to have been wrong about the consequences they feared, most of the ones who are better at out-guessing how this will affect things will just quietly set up to take advantage.

--Dave

[IainC]

This is the price history for the last five days for Sylramic Fibres in Sinq Laison. Sylramic Fibres are the only moon material used in the manufacturing of every racial armour plate type.

Edit to add: What's even funnier (and I didn't notice initially because I went straight to the graph before the market had loaded) is that all the Sylramic Fibres in the entire region have either been bought or taken off the market, there is precisely one open sell order at the moment for about 77k units at an out of the way system many jumps from anywhere useful. Normally there are dozens of orders at Dodixie alone.

[lac]

T2 ships should become cheaper to fly, even if you don't consider the more modest material requirements, because they will insure for a bit more (al least they do on SiSi now).

I don't think lowering T2 prices was CCP's main priority, although they've acknowledged the reason of the price hike was the fixed influx of high end moon products vs the ever increasing number of people capable of flying and using T2 goodies.
What they are doing is balance the total moon income over different kinds of moons. Since these moons are spread around and quite numerous and alliances will no longer control vast patches of space, some of that income will go to the new alliances who try to fill the void between the contracting empires, giving them a chance to acquire some wealth and by doing so strengthen their foothold in 0.0.

A system like what they are proposing will give them the tools to tune how much of 0.0 a single alliance uses and, considering a revamped alchemy, allows for adjustments to whatever becomes the next bottleneck manufacturing good.

It should provide for both a more dynamical alliance landscape and better scaling economy once all the pre-patch excitement has died out.

[MahrinSkel]

Given the volume spikes, somebody is going long, making a big bet that those fibers are going to increase in value to the tune of a billion isk in that region alone.

--Dave

[IainC]

Just did a bit of comparison shopping in other regions. The story is the same across most of Empire, minimum sell orders are now running at about 300 per unit and the numbers of sell orders is down in the low single digits per region. I wish I had the capital to do marketeering on that kind of scale.

[Simond]

I am so weary of typical MMO players giving the same old tired "I hate change change sucks evrything is stupid" responses we've all heard since Ultima Online.  It's the same in SGBS right now: apparently the sky is falling, Eve sucks, and the old system was just fine thanks all of a sudden.

Well, bearing in mind there's no actual details yet, just arty-farty "you'll need to rat/mine/etc to make money, more people ratting = better than, also we're nerfing how all 0.0 alliances make money because focal points = bad" without actually telling people how the new systems is going to work.

Or how it's supposed to work, rather.

[Endie]

I really don't mind even if they've radically cocked it up. I'm interested in watching the ants get stirred up, both from up close (as a player) and from a distance (like reading this thread).

[Goumindong]

I am so weary of typical MMO players giving the same old tired "I hate change change sucks evrything is stupid" responses we've all heard since Ultima Online.  It's the same in SGBS right now: apparently the sky is falling, Eve sucks, and the old system was just fine thanks all of a sudden.

Bad changes are bad changes. Just because the system currently has problems does not mean that the new system must have less. It instead could have more.

Given the parameters laid out by CCP that is what looks to be happening. Not that there are not good things[for instance, more dense 0.0 solar systems in terms of isk production], but there are also bad things [the removal of moons and space quality as a focal point to stir conflict] and it looks like the bad will outweigh the good.

With regards to "omg typical mmo players giving the same old tired" crap, its not that, its just that most people are stupid and unable to do critical analysis. The developers are not outside of this sphere.

[eldaec]

Will any of this make T2 ships cheaper?

I doubt you'll see much difference in end user prices, maybe the recent (overhyped) increase will be reversed.

You'll just get a warm fuzzy feeling telling you that the profit has been distributed differently among a dozen or so people you've never met, who unknowingly colluded to build you a Vagabond.

[Reg]

Ferrogel prices have been dropping steadily in Sinq Laison for the last month. People must be liquidating their stocks in advance.

[Comstar]

I had a big rant about this, but I want numbers, I want how a constellation that can barely support 6 people at a time is going to support 600 *without* adding agent missions.

I suppose it can work, if everyone gets super poor and has to fly tech 1 ships and BS only get used as often as Dreads do now.

[Simond]

I had a big rant about this, but I want numbers, I want how a constellation that can barely support 6 people at a time is going to support 600 *without* adding agent missions.

I suppose it can work, if everyone gets super poor and has to fly tech 1 ships and BS only get used as often as Dreads do now.

Nah, CCP can't make 0.0 much worst than it is now without people going "You know what? Fuck this shit" and either a) running missions in Empire or b) going to play an actual PvE game.

[MahrinSkel]

I had a big rant about this, but I want numbers, I want how a constellation that can barely support 6 people at a time is going to support 600 *without* adding agent missions.

I suppose it can work, if everyone gets super poor and has to fly tech 1 ships and BS only get used as often as Dreads do now.

I've seen a single constellation support 40-60 simultaneously, with only Exploration and static belts, so it's not that much of a stretch.  A system's carrying capacity is not a fixed thing, there's no reason a single system, fully "upgraded", couldn't have 100+ belts and the equivalent of 30 complexes.

--Dave

[Phildo]

As it stands, if I'm in a 10-belt system and there is one other person ratting with me then the belts are full.  Any more than that and you have to start sitting and waiting for respawns, and even with two people I've had to do that.  Belt ratting is not the way to pack people into a system.  I think they're relying on a lot of people mining when they come up with their figures.

[Pezzle]

I can run a dozen belts or more myself.  Two people means you start going hungry.

[MahrinSkel]

5 belts per person, 100 belts per system, 8 systems per constellation.  That's 160 people simultaneously right there, more than are likely to be ratting at peak in any alliance other than the Goons.

Pick any standard you like for what is "enough" to carry a given number of people, it doesn't matter.  The amount of content per system is an arbitrary number, set originally to work around the limitations of the hardware and software Eve started with.  They've added a lot more hamsters since then.

The real point is that they are *deliberately* switching away from point-source concentrated pulse models to diffused regeneration ones.  Somebody has been studying their A-Life theory.

--Dave

[Teleku]

5 belts per person

WAT

Not unless they set re spawn timers in all belts to 5 minutes.  I can easily keep a system free of rats, nothing to shoot, in a 20 belt system.  I have to hit multiple systems usually.  If any other person is ratting in any other system I'm in, I go somewhere else.

[Nerf]

Increasing the respawn rates via upgrades could increase how many people can rat in a system easily though.  If upgraded enough the respawns are almost instant, so its just wave after wave of rats, you could support a lot more people.

Of course, CCP will probably completely forget that the only way to make decent ISK is chaining and tie the max-upgraded respawn to the belt being clear if they do it that way, so you'll still need at least a dozen belts to be able to chain effectively and make any ISK.

[lac]

Increasing the respawn rates via upgrades could increase how many people can rat in a system easily though.  If upgraded enough the respawns are almost instant, so its just wave after wave of rats, you could support a lot more people.

I imagine that's how their 'rat-attractor' upgrade will  work. It would make sense that they try to minimise the belts needed for effective ratting if they try to cram as much people in a system as possible.

[Phildo]

Yeah, but what about those people who mine by themselves?  Are there going to be designated rat-free belts for them, or are they going to have to ask a corpmate to sit around for them all the time?

[lac]

Since you can get both ratting and mining upgrades I'd assume you upgrade some systems for one and some for the other.

[Endie]

Yeah, but what about those people who mine by themselves?  Are there going to be designated rat-free belts for them, or are they going to have to ask a corpmate to sit around for them all the time?

:420: faction fit your hulk every day.

Since you can get both ratting and mining upgrades I'd assume you upgrade some systems for one and some for the other.

That seems to be the thrust of what the fanfest discussion entailed: as with stations, you will have a limited number of upgrade paths available to you, so choose wisely.  If you install a mining upgrade and a ratting upgrade as your first two, presumably you limit how good either can eventually be.

I like the idea of adding upgrading space to the things you can shape and improve in the universe.  Vio Geraci, who posted at length about these exact ideas back in 2007 or so, and whose ideas were taken to the devs by Darius and Bane, and then further pushed by Zastrow, must be feeling pretty right now.  The fact that this has been something influenced so heavily by goonswarm makes it mildly ironic that the usual doomsayers are complaining quite so volubly in SGBS.

[Endie]

A very insightful blog from Mittens on how the sovereignty claim system will probably be less important than the system for locking people out of stations: http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/75206

Fair point: I've helped kill plenty of alliances where they had huge amounts of sovereign systems left at the point where they collapsed, and it was the loss of station systems, together with the flight of assets to empire that that provokes, which tended to prompt that failure cascade.

Also, this summary of fanfest's key announcements for those that didn't waste their Sunday afternoon watching the streaming: http://www.massively.com/2009/10/05/eve-fanfest-2009-highlights/#continued

[Amarr HM]

The sheer drama these changes will create will make it all worthwhile.

[Pennilenko]

There will be tears for the goblets of all.

[MahrinSkel]

I like the idea of adding upgrading space to the things you can shape and improve in the universe.  Vio Geraci, who posted at length about these exact ideas back in 2007 or so, and whose ideas were taken to the devs by Darius and Bane, and then further pushed by Zastrow, must be feeling pretty right now.  The fact that this has been something influenced so heavily by goonswarm makes it mildly ironic that the usual doomsayers are complaining quite so volubly in SGBS.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

--Dave