TL;DR
- A number of mining changes are going out to alleviate a number of problems in Nullsec.
- We don’t anticipate these will be a one-and-done fix.
- I’ll check in with the community every two weeks and we’ll make additional adjustments around every four weeks until we get the ecosystem to a healthy place.
Hey folks, I’m CCP Okami, the Game Design Director on EVE Online.
I started on the EVE Online team while we were shipping Equinox and I’ve been here ever since. As a lot of you know, Equinox was a super challenging expansion, especially from a design perspective, and I feel like I’ve been through a trial by fire, both learning EVE, understanding the community, and trying to support the design team in iterating to a place where we can all feel content.
We’re not quite there yet and like most things in EVE, this will take time.
Today I want to talk about mining because it has been the current hot topic in the community for a reason. There are some clear issues, which are evident in the more recent Monthly Economic Reports (MER), where you can see the Mineral Price Index (MPI) spike.
I’m going to break down what some of the challenges with getting this right are, and try to walk you through some of the logic and thinking around why certain changes were made (for better or worse), and talk us through some of the vision of where we hope to see mining go in the next little while.
EVE Online - Simulation or Game?
The first thing I want to touch on is a bit philosophical and ask whether EVE is a simulation or game (or simulation-game)? I know a huge amount of EVE’s player base enjoys EVE because of its simulated economy and sandbox nature. This places a lot of value on the “simulation” aspect of EVE, sometimes even more than the “game” element of EVE (ie. micro-gameplay loops, game feel and feedback, etc…).
Ultimately, in the market we trust, and so do you. The marketplace in EVE is perpetually the “great balancing engine” of EVE Online and in theory, whenever we change any of the universe’s inputs or outputs, we can trust the marketplace to do its job and hand the keys of that engine over to you - the players - to figure out, solve or push on in interesting ways.
When things become less abundant and prices go up? That means certain things will become less available in the universe. That, in and of itself, is not a problem. The game is balancing itself, and access to everything is still there. It just means that there is a shift in the universe and folks should adjust to it accordingly. It’s fair and everyone has access to the same content and changes, so the universe should stabilize at a new equilibrium.
In theory…
In practice, New Eden has begun to feel less fun for many of you. Access to many of the toys you had previously seem reduced and we have effectively introduced a new efficiency puzzle that yields less favorable results than the previous one which naturally feels bad.
In design, we always need to be careful whether we are preserving the core simulation engine of EVE, or influencing that engine and removing challenges and gameplay that could be solved in the universe, and sometimes it also takes time to see how the economy and engine of EVE actually sort themselves out.
But also, sometimes we need to rebalance things to make them more fun, and we recognize that. The process isn’t always simple or straightforward and it can sometimes put the delicate balance of preserving the simulation and heart of EVE at risk if we do it too quickly or too frequently.
What Happened with Mining in Equinox?
Being super straightforward, Equinox was a fundamental redo of some of the biggest systems in EVE. Huge systemic redos like this are always full of pitfalls, risks, and challenges, and they usually take time to iterate to get to the right place.
I think we made some missteps in how we communicated our design intentions around Equinox which has led to a lot of confusion and pain for the community. With big changes like these, designers have to make assumptions and sometimes you never really know how they play out until they land.
The changes we made were:
- We introduced Tier 1 and Tier 2 mining Upgrades that allowed Sovereignty system owners to choose which ore types spawned in their owned space.
- We made more ores available in Nullsec, with greater amounts of flexibility and choice via. Sov Hub Upgrades.
- We introduced new ores in these sites that were curated for Equinox’s flexibility.
- The sites had more asteroids with lower amounts and low to medium volume.
One of the main goals with Equinox was flexibility. The ability to choose which ores your organization wanted to spawn and prioritize in your Sov space. This flexibility could, in theory, lead to groups in Nullsec becoming fully self-sufficient.
However, when designing something like this, there have to be counterbalances for every benefit. If Nullsec can provide all of its ores for itself, we have to consider how to ensure that it also just doesn’t become completely dominant in the mining ecosystem and give breathing room to other parts of space.
We also needed to consider the impact of individuals mining vs. groups mining vs. multi-account miners and try to account for a fair system that gives space for all types of participants.
Finally, while we don’t technically have “level design” in EVE, we do design and craft our sites with both form and function in mind, trying to create spaces that feel like an enjoyable and realistic science fiction setting. However, the impact of some of the aesthetic decisions can also affect how our systems work. The radius of our sites in Equinox was bigger than the average site, and there were more rocks that were more spread out, along with set decorations (that I know folks have feedback on). We wanted them to feel more like real, genuine, chonky, and aspirational asteroid fields.
So in summary:
- We wanted to give Nullsec more flexibility and choice.
- We needed to make sure that more flexibility was balanced against the rest of the universe.
- We needed to account for different play styles.
- We wanted to make beautiful, science fiction space rocks for you to enjoy.
When making our Upgrades and considering what ores went inside them, another criticism we had of how Nullsec mining worked previously was that there tended to be high value ores, and low value ores. Miners would cherry-pick the good ores and leave the low value ones for “clean up”. This didn’t feel like a good situation and we wanted to account for that in how we designed these new sites and ores. When it came to designing our sites, we had seven sets of sites to respectively cover each of the seven basic minerals. We needed to ensure that there was an ore that was a “bread and butter” ore for each site. Our conditions for creating these ores were:
- They needed to get the majority of their value from a single mineral type, as their site was meant to be a specific Upgrade choice an organization made for their system. This could mean being 100% made up of that one mineral or being mostly made up of that mineral with a few traces of some others.
- They needed an appropriate ISK/m3 value to be placed in large quantities in sites that would spawn in large numbers (ie. they needed to be a fairly standard ore, not a super special jackpot ore)
For two of the seven mineral types (Tritanium and Pyerite) we had pre-existing ores that met those conditions already (Veldspar and Mordunium). For Mexallon and Nocxium, we didn’t have any ores in the game that met the first condition, so we created Kylixium and Nocxite. For Isogen, Zydrine, and Megacyte, we had ore that met the first condition, but they were too high up the value curve (ie. jackpot ores) so we made new ores to meet the second condition - Grimeer, Hezorime, and Ueganite. They were intentionally low to medium density to account for their ISK/m3 value. Now that we have a clear breakdown of some of our goals, intentions, and approach, I’m going to touch on where some things went wrong and what some of the challenges are.
The first is that we couldn’t fully anticipate the correct distribution and choices of Upgrades and sites across the universe and what total percentage of maximum ore volume generated by the sites per day would be mined. That had a significant impact on how the overall value of these sites was being calculated and has led to a clear impact in how minerals are being mined. Next, many of these sites were actually balanced to be more valuable than previous sites. However, due to how the rocks were distributed and placed in the sites it meant that there was also an increase in micromanagement, effort and labor which leads to both a tangible felt decrease in value and a shift in paradigm that’s been regarded as a confusing change. This was done to both try and support a broader variety of playstyles and also for some aesthetic factors.
The analogy I’ll borrow from one of our designers is that sites used to contain $100 in them, broken up into $20 bills. When you went out mining, you would only need to spend time nabbing 5 of those bills. In Equinox, we put $200 in our sites but scattered around a bunch of $5 and $1 bills. This meant that there was more potential value, but the amount of labor to nab it all went up significantly too. Other sites meant to provide Tritanium to the ecosystem were purposefully lower value, as they weren’t previously available in Nullsec. These were introduced for the freedom of flexibility but made intentionally lower value to offset the fact that they could be produced locally vs. being imported from other areas of space to try and balance the ecosystem of Nullsec vs. the rest of the universe.
Another unintended challenge that arose is that effectively when it comes to choosing an activity in Nullsec, the ISK/hour and relative effort of ratting makes it an obvious choice in comparison to mining which has higher labor and, in some cases, offers lower ISK/hour. This has driven more people away from mining and into ratting, which means that our estimates on mining value are off even more, since we weren’t accounting for this shift in work.
Finally, we’re able to start measuring the real impact of the Metenox in the game ecosystem more thoroughly, which highlights some unintended side effects and challenges. The high ROI of Metenox's in lower and mid-tier moons, combined with its inability to extract regular ores, has contributed to the current increase in the Pyerite price, as moon mining is no longer able to supply the market with that ore.
I also want to touch on our messaging. I want to acknowledge that we didn’t do a great job of conveying the vision of Equinox to you all and leaned in on things like “rejuvenating” or “more wealth”, which is confusing when things don’t feel like they’re lining up that way for the average person playing out there. Our goals were more around flexibility and self-sustainability, as well as creating long-term systemic levers that we could develop onto for years to come. We definitely learned a lesson here, and we’ll work on better rolling out and being transparent with our feature visions in the future.
Hindsight is 20/20 and we can totally see where we made our missteps. While the intention was sound, our hypotheses and estimates didn’t work out and lead us to our high MPI that we have today. I personally have a lot of learning around how to better work with you folks around messaging our intentions around big, systemic reworks and I’m going to be way more in touch with you all as we roll out changes and updates like this.
And to be super clear, our intention was not to have the MPI as high as it currently is, and we will absolutely be taking some steps to course correct here that I will be outlining below. But first…
Why Balancing EVE is Hard
The first part of balancing that is a challenge is to ask the question is this actually a problem, or is it just annoying? In this case, there is a lot of anxiety about speculated impacts such as the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and ship/module prices. While some things are impacted, the game is still completely in a playable state and some folks have simply seen a shift from mining to ratting. That said, we do very much care about the health of mining, as it is part of the lifeblood of EVE. This is not an easy question to answer, and sometimes it takes time to see and measure what happens. Tuning too quickly and thrashing puts strain on EVE’s core principle of being a simulated economy as well. It can usually take about 3 months to see what the real impact of a change on EVE’s economic engine is and sometimes upwards of 6 to see how the simulation begins to stabilize and come to an equilibrium.
The next part of tuning an issue like this that is challenging is that we have to consider stockpiles. A lot of folks are holding onto ores in storage. Unfortunately, there isn’t a technically clean way to separate ore and minerals pre and post a balance change. That means that even a small change in something like mineral refinement rates, can have a HUGE opposite impact on the problem we are trying to solve (ie. suddenly injecting a massive surplus into the economy). Sometimes we might be too cautious about this, but it is a real factor that we have to consider carefully when making changes to things like density or refinement rates.
I’ve also seen people ask why we are afraid of returning to the Rorqual era. While we really want to see Rorqual use, that was also quite a divisive time. I wasn’t here for it, but I’ve heard stories. It fundamentally shifted the way EVE was played and the overall economy and market. For some folks, that was a lot of fun; for others, it removed aspiration and challenge. To us at CCP, it was an unbalanced and unintentional change to the game that we’re still feeling the echoes of today. So absolutely, we’d love to see Rorquals in space, but we need to take a more measured and safe approach to how we get there. This one can be a razor’s edge to dance on, and it’s better to move with caution.
What We’re Doing Next
So with all of that out of the way, we are making some changes, now and in the future. I’m going to lay some of these out for you here. On March 12th we will be releasing a Revenant Major Update to EVE Online, with a number of significant game and meta balance changes. We really hope you like them! Many of them have been informed by super rigorous conversations with our current CSM19 (thanks!) as well as us monitoring the discussions among players taking place on various community platforms. Below are the changes we will be making to mining in particular:
- Ore anomalies generated by both T1 and T2 Prospecting Array Upgrades in Nullsec have been rebalanced to contain a higher quantity of ore distributed across fewer but larger asteroids.
- This is to help address the fact that many of these sites have been expressed to be too small and inefficient, as well as having increased micromanagement due to rock sizes.
- We’ll be adding T3 mining upgrades for Sov Hubs that will introduce much larger rocks and have roughly 3.5x-3.6x the ore of a T2 site.
- This is to help create larger, more chonky sites that may also entice some more Capital mining.
- Mercoxit sites spawned from T2 and T3 Upgrades will be more plentiful and will distribute more evenly across systems that have the Upgrades installed instead of clustering.
- This is to alleviate some of the inefficiency around acquiring Morphite that is impacted by how our sites are currently being distributed.
- Mordunium will have a ~5% increased refinement rate - Stockpiles rejoice (I know you’ll be holding onto yours once you read this, naughty naughty).
- This is to help alleviate the Pyerite availability issue that is largely being caused as a knock-on effect of Metenox Moon Drills.
- New ORE Deep Core Strip mining module that will reduce waste on Mercoxit mining
- This is another lever to help with the Morphite faucet issues currently.
- Increased Magmatic Gas cost of Metenox Moon Drills by ~35%
- We felt that Metenox were unilaterally too cheap to run and anticipate that this will have an impact on the overall number of Metenox and on the moongoo and associated mineral market.
Notably we are not touching ore density of our newer Nullsec ores at this time. While we are aware of the feedback and understand the complaints with it, it’s a more complex lever to pull that touches both on reworking many of the sites from a content perspective and also puts some risk on stockpiles as well. Will this fix everything all at once? Being totally honest? Probably not. There’s no silver bullet here. And I can’t promise that this is going to be the magic change that gets it all right. However, since there are a large number of changes going out the door all at once, I want to see how these land and what their impact on our simulated universe is. I promise to be looking at data and check in with you guys every 2 weeks on the official EVE Discord. We’ll examine what levers and things we may need to keep adjusting on a monthly basis. Tending to this is an iterative thing and I think we can keep moving towards a healthier equilibrium.
Your feedback along the way will be critical, and I’ll be as transparent about the impact of the changes as I can. I’m also going to “leak” an upcoming expansion feature as I think it will help some of you folks out with your organization and planning since some of these changes, notably the T3 mining upgrades, are going to put some tension on how you plan your Sov space. We are developing a better way of managing your Sov Upgrades and making it so that you don’t have to destroy Upgrades that you want to or currently feel like you need to remove. Effectively you’ll be able to install as many Upgrades as you’d like, shuffle them, and online/offline them easier. This is to give you all better control and flexibility over your Sov space (as per our goal with Sov). I want to arm you with this information as it may help with the decisions you make around how you plan your Sov space once these new upgrades are released and alleviate potential anxiety about you needing to destroy Upgrades to make space for T3 mining ones. You’ll still have to do that until this feature is released, but that’s a decision you can make and plan around.
A final point I’ll make here is that it is my experience in game development - especially in MMOs like EVE - that the best way to resolve issues is around gradual and consistent tuning. I hope you’ve seen a bit of that influence in more balance updates and patches recently, but I also want to apply that to this mining issue. I know some of you might have hoped for other more specific changes (and those aren’t off the table), but I think the way we get there is through assessing this regularly, communicating with you and continuing to nudge things in the direction they need to go rather than taking a big change and leaving it until we get a chance to do another major update. I’ve been having great conversations with you all about mining in Discord, and I’m taking notes on all the feedback I’m getting. I think there are some great opportunities to bring more focus to this super important profession and role in EVE in future updates and expansions.
The Future of Mining
Now, I want to share with you some of the future vision of mining. I’m going to give you a heavy caveat here that some of these things are very real and in our near future, and some of these things are just discussions that we’re having internally. I want to share both because I’d love to hear what is interesting to you folks and spur some conversations as well. We’ll set up an official post on the EVE forums to hear out your ideas and feedback as well.
Capital Mining. This is one we’re totally committed to. We want to get Rorquals back in space. Not only do they provide a very cool role, they’re great ships that a lot of folks have invested a lot of time into obtaining and are eager to get back into. We need to do this one in a measured way that doesn’t lead us back to the divisive “Rorqual era”, but this is a very real thing that we’re actively talking about.
Mining in Other Regions. Look, I love you Nullseccers but I really want to get to some other areas of space as well. Once we have mining sorted out for you folks I’d really like to make sure we’re tending to our other areas of space and making sure that they have a fulfilling piece of the mining pie. As we get closer to understanding the vision of how all our areas of space work together for mining, I will absolutely share this vision with you. Many folks have asked about how mining will be impacted in their space, and all I can say is that I care and want to make sure we make some space to think about you soon as well.
Jackpots and Surprises. One of my personal wishes for EVE is for it to be a more dynamic universe with surprises and wonders. I think that mining is a great place for us to explore this dynamism. Could you imagine stumbling across some mega rare and valuable ores in places you didn’t expect them? This one is a very real thing we’re looking into at the moment but the actual direction is still pretty fuzzy, so I’ll share once there are more details.
Metenox and Auto-Moon Miners. We actually really love the role these are playing in the game right now. However, we are seeing some unintended side effects (RIP Pyerite) and think there is room for us to continue to expand on these, both in terms of their systems and gameplay as we monitor what the medium to long term impact of them in New Eden. Are there ways to create more content around Metenox’s for players? Could there be new types of Metenox’s that provide different types of benefits and trade offs? I’ve seen a bunch of feedback around these both from the CSM and folks in Discord. I’d love to hear more!
Waste Mechanic. Let’s be real, who likes waste right now? This is only a half-mechanic at the moment and we’re missing any form of interesting way to deal with it or mitigate it. We totally have some ideas brewing and want to make sure we close the loop on this system. On the radar and being worked on!
Core Mining Gameplay. While EVE has mining at its core, the ways players have engage with mining over the years do not need to be restricted to our regular known and loved mining ships. So some of our internal conversations have been around trying to imagine what other fantasies and gameplay can we add to EVE that can also interact with mining and fulfill some of its promises. We have a version of salvaging, but we don't think it delivers on that fantasy strongly. What are ways we can make scrapping and salvaging more interesting and engaging? Or maybe even explore whole new fantasies and gameplay loops to add to our mineral and market demands. The sky is the limit!
Whew! That was a lot! Thanks for taking the time to read through all of that with me. As always, we love our community and appreciate you all coming along for this ride with us. If you want to chat about any of this stuff, you can find me in the EVE Online Discord.
See you in space
o7
CCP Okami
Game Design Director
EVE Online Official Discord