On Self-Sustainability

[woeful spoke]

First, thanks for the dev-blog on this topic.

At its core, eve has two loops: making things, and breaking things.
This is classic supply and demand.
Profitable mining and cheap ships, in a pure homogenous environment, are antithetical.
To prevent stagnation, there has to be "scarcity", however the scarcity theory does not translate from the real world to games.
In the real world, if resources become scarce, people starve to death.
In a game, they play something else.
I believe prior iterations failed to recognize this fundamental difference, which has driven a lot of the pain we've seen over the last few years.

This brings me to the point:

self-sustainability

When you make it possible for any given class of space to be self-sustainable, you eliminate the incentive for conflict.
You break the "breaking things" loop.
Eve of old had scarcity, but it had geographic scarcity.
Certain moons were more plentiful in some areas than others.
Some regions had surplus of one mineral and shortage of others.
This drove conflict, as well as trade.
The more you grant an area of space the flexibility to no longer have to interact with other regions of space, you create incentives for bubbles to form; the dreaded BBD.
Why attack your neighbors, and risk those assets, only to gain space that will need to be upgraded again to end up with the exact same mineral mix you have now?

Eve in its current state needs less self-sustainability in terms of resource availability, and more geographically constrained scarcity.
We need crap space, and good space.
The crap space is where new alliances have a chance to form, the good space is where the established fight for control.
But again, that space isn't worth fighting over if it's materially no better than the space you already have.

I encourage you to pull the old designs on material input requirements by empire, and the mineral mixes by region prior to the removal of null belts, and the iterations on industry that followed Apocrypha.
Prior to those changes, Null was more of a conveyor belt, with clear cradles and graves for Alliances.
It was dynamic, as people fought for access to better grades of space.

I also encourage you to think of any change in terms of osmosis.
Player activity will permeate across a pressure/incentive gradient.
So ask yourself: Where are your gradients?

[woeful spoke]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/s/fVMVh2P9C5

This hints as some of the effects mentioned

[echo fog]

While I totally agree with you, I fear that recreating crap space and good space now would just lock good space to current greater blocks with near infinite ressources from more than a decade of building up their spaces while newer would have to step up with even bigger challenges because of their crap space

(I don't think I got a solution either though)

[woeful spoke]

It's doesn't have to be a dramatic gradient, and it may be as simple as putting the old belts back, but a gradient of some kind is needed in order to have a value proposition for conflict of any kind. Up starts have to have space that's valuable to them but not valuable enough to defend by people who hold better space.

[echo fog]

Hmmm, hard to balance but I get the idea indeed.

(and anyway, what's easy to balance down here lol)

[woeful spoke]

For sure. It's one of the things that makes eve great, the sandbox, also makes it extremely difficult to balance. Everything is a multivariate problem, and predicting how the landscape will shift isn't easy. I'm glad CCP is handling it the way they are tho. Good faith discussion is how we root out the variables and iterate into a healthier game overall.

[warped trench]

Hey there, this is a great writeup! Thanks for the clear thoughts here.

I don't disagree with you. I'm going to be a bit speculative and theoretical as well, and I don't have an exact remedy for this I am ready to fully share yet but I think it's great to talk about.

My observation of EVE and its universe goes beyond just the gradient you talk about and goes into the dynamism of the universe itself as well. Right now, it's all pretty static. If you have a "good space", it kind of is always "good space". If you have the ability to keep it, you keep it and it's always good forever and nothing really changes.

On your gradient, it works but the universe never provides opportunities or incentives to drive you to take action. EVE fully relies on players to do this right now, and in some ways that's good and in others it means everyone can just sit still and nothing happens (and we have to design perfect gradients to get it right).

Beyond what you're talking about, I want to keep exploring ways to keep the universe feeling more dynamic. Think of this as "weather" in the real world. There are times of surprise, times of abundance, and times of famine. These times can be semi-predictable and drive us to make interesting and challenging decisions.

When I talk about "surprise" in mining, in my dev blog, this starts to lead us towards exploring these more dynamic systems.

As far as the system belts, there's some history here I need to dig into but I'll put it on the table for a convo with the design team at very least 😊

[echo pewter]

I sincerely appreciate all three of you for taking the time to share such constructive opinions. As a fellow player who loves EVE, I’m truly glad to see such passionate discussions taking place!

[echo pewter]

The "weather" system you're talking about is something I've personally been hoping for. If I could add a bit more to the discussion, I would love to see the inclusion of disaster systems like "storms" that players need to prepare for.

In reality, these kinds of storms cause significant damage to us. This forces people to evacuate in advance, establish countermeasures, and make efforts to predict them. While storms may cause temporary harm, they also bring new vitality to nature and ecosystems. If a cyclical system could naturally generate such events, it would create a truly dynamic environment.

Of course, I understand that planning something like this at the current stage may not be ideal and could place additional burden on the dev team. However, I hope that in the future, if resources allow, you will engage with the players again to discuss the possibility of such a system.

When the 'Metaterminal Storm' content was introduced, I had hoped it would serve this kind of function. Unfortunately, the current player perception seems to be that it is merely an inconvenient and abandoned feature. I think a large-scale rework of this content could be a worthwhile direction to consider.

[zealous sky]

On Dynsnism, I'd like to point out Pirate FOB's do add some spice to mining.. Those rats hurt..

Maybe more content like this to tease Miners into adjusting how they respond...

Maybe something to change up Joint Harvesting rats as well.. Heck. Combine the 2 Concepts.. Kill the FOB and thier Mining Fleet despawns for a while

Trig Invasion was fun with thier roaming spawns. Maybe something like this for FW systems