In June we are starting to address the supply of pirate battleship BPCs, with moderate changes to the chance of escalations spawning from the most popular high-end anomalies and larger changes to the drop rates of the BPCs themselves from quite a few NPCs.

This should have been done by silently dropping the rates every month for about 3-6 months instead of making this announcement that nuked the market in an hour.

The problem isn't cost, it's supply... People already fit 2 bill fits + HG Slaves to their Machs. Making it a bill more expensive won't do anything. Nerf the drop rate so if a Mach fleet dies it can't be instantly repurchased.

Also RIP the Barghest, under the bus it goes.

This would also impact the availability of deadspace modules.

Is this intended (or, at least, considered to be acceptable collateral damage)? Or will drop rates for the mods be adjusted to compensate?

yup
is that a problem
and tbh its not the one part of the game thats out of alignment
the whole economy is out of alignment because of players taking advantage of mineral cost increases
and thats what is going to happen here too

This should have been done by silently dropping the rates every month for about 3-6 months instead of making this announcement that nuked the market in an hour.

Its called Free Market Economics.

Its called Free Market Economics.

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of AT pilots suddenly cried out...

Mate, do you even know how AT works? The limiting factor is their high point cost. Not their isk value.

Something about this rubs me the wrong way.

I haven't played a lot recently, but why is this proliferation of pirate battleships considered a problem?

Is it a Pirate BS....that's your answer.

Something about this rubs me the wrong way.

I haven't played a lot recently, but why is this proliferation of pirate battleships considered a problem? Maybe someone can clarify for me? Are there too many gangs of pirate battleships roaming around? Did someone find this to be an problem and consider it to be unbalanced?

Well, for me, I've always kind of thought of Eve combat as a complex game of trade-offs, like rock-paper-scissors. Let give me a simple analogy using this game. Lets says we had a game where for some reason rock was winning more often than paper or scissors. Let's say we had two ways we could try to balance this game. We would either 1) Reduce the number of times people get to use rock by basically forcing people to use it less or 2) we could make whatever is causing rock to win more often to stop, possibly by changing paper and/or scissors. To Me, going with option 1, makes no sense, because it doesn't actually remove the imbalance, it just decreases the amount of times it happens. If you want a truly balanced game, you need to make all sides balance each other by their traits, not by how often they are used. Otherwise, you limit player choice.


Eve Online is very dynamic game and players should given free choice. If for some reason, CCP thinks pirate battleships are imbalanced, than that's a failure of game design, not of player choice. Players are always going to go for the best. What I would suggest is that if you think Pirate battleships are imbalanced, than change the traits of other ships and/or features to make it more difficult for them.

What I think will happen is that this pirate battleship scheme won't achieve its intended objective. If pirate battleships are unbalanced in whatever way CCP thinks they are, they will be continued to be used regardless of what they do. Especially since I think those who most use pirate battleships probably already have plenty of them or plenty of ISK. What this will really do is hurt the poor or inexperienced players from using pirate battleships by artificially increasing the cost of entry, which will reduce player choice, and hurt the game. Less Choices=bad. More choices=good

Something about this rubs me the wrong way.

I haven't played a lot recently, but why is this proliferation of pirate battleships considered a problem? Maybe someone can clarify for me?

Are there too many gangs of pirate battleships roaming around?

honestly i disagree with this approach.

I think a much better way would be to make pirate battleships use their faction components found in 0.0 data sites to build.

CCP can then control the drop rate of these components to increase or decrease the price as needed. This also removes the need to screw with any escalation or drop rate as the bottleneck to production will no longer be the amount of blueprints on the market, the bottleneck will be these components.


This would also finally make data sites worth doing as 99.9% of them are trash.

I strongly advise against any kind of nerf to the escalation spawns. Escalations are a great content creator in this game as they make people do risky stuff which tends to lead to many kinds of interaction with other players.

Keep the changes to droprates and/ or required materials please.

Sure.



Gangs? Try mainline fleet doctrines. T1 and navy BS have been almost completely supplanted by pirate BS.

Do you really not see why that's a problem?

I disagree. As someone who both runs escalations and sells escalations, they do not create much content. People tend to run the ones that are close to home and ignore the rest. They find safe travel methods to get to the escalations. It's practically impossible to become the victim of non-consensual PVP inside an escalation, because no one else can find it if you just warp out before they scan down your ship. And even if they do come inside to go after you, they cannot hotdrop on you inside the complex. In short, escalations are relatively risk free.

They need to drastically reduce the frequency of escalations. That will make exploration more viable. Then the upcoming T3 changes should increase the risk of people going out there to explore, which should further raise the value of the product.