The Latest EVE Online Update Kicks Off the Industrial Chaos Era

Today’s patch will see the second set of major changes go live which will update blueprints, reactions, and components that are required for ship manufacturing.

–CCP Patch Notes for April  27, 2021

There was a quick reminder from CCP Paradox for those paying attention yesterday that Phase 2 of the planned significant industrial changes were set to hit New Eden with today’s patch as planned.   The announcement of these changes and the initial patch sparked a rise in production around week 40 of the war, and was reflected in the MER charts.  Look at that red line climb.

Production vs Destruction vs Mined – March 2021

I will be interested to see if the warning was enough to spark a last moment spike in production.  Numbers in 1DQ1-A seemed on par with the early announcement rush.

Down from 3344 when I last looked

Likewise Jita numbers seemed about the same.

Today though, and tomorrow, and next week… that might be a bit different.  We shall see.

The blueprint changes add new components to the build requirements for battleship and all capital hulls.

For example, the doughty Megathron, a workhorse battleship used by many, has three new components added that come from the new reactions CCP brought in with the previous patch.

The new Megathron BPO

If you have been on the ball and grabbed the blueprints when they first hit, researched them, were able to get enough Mykoserocin gas and other supplies, and get them into production, you might have some around to start building battleship and larger hull.  Or you could just try to make bank by selling the new items.  Supply is extremely tight at the moment so prices for those items… volatile to say the least.

Auto-Integrity Preservation Seal supply in Jita

If you need 200 Auto-Integrity Preservation Seals to build a Megathron and you are expecting buy them off the market… well, that alone looks to add about 1.3 billion ISK to the price of materials.  And if you want to build an Archon carrier… well, there are not enough on the market because you need 1,600 of those seals to build one.  The cost of an Archon today is close to what an Aeon super carrier was yesterday.  And a titan?  Well, CCP’s plan is that once things settle down those hulls ought to run about 200 billion ISK if leaks are correct.  But they are pretty much unbuildable today due to supply.  An Avatar needs 5,000 of those seals now, which seems likely to represent a significant percentage of what is available on the market.

Now, that is a temporary situation.  At some point harvesting and production will catch up and supply will drive the prices down.  But for a while battleship and capital production is simply going to be dead.  There isn’t enough supply and, at those prices, you would be a fool to build rather than just sell while they are high to reap the ISK of those in need.

But if you don’t fly battleships or capitals, if you stick with battlecruisers and below… well, everything is still more expensive than it used to be with the mineral drought still in full effect… but the build prices are not completely crazy.  A Ferox, for example, is still made of just T1 minerals, the same as it was yesterday.

Other changes that came with today’s industry update:

• Adjusted all T2 ships to no longer return basic minerals as materials when reprocessed.
• Reworked EDENCOM ships blueprints to more closely aligned to their Triglavian counterparts paradigm
• Adjusted Standup T2 fighters to require T1 standup fighters in build requirements.
• Doubled the effective bonuses on Mykocerosin Boosters
  • Synth Blue Pill – Increased Shield Boost Bonus from 3% to 6%
  • Synth Crash – Decreased Explosion Radius Bonus from -3% to -6%
  • Synth Drop – Increased Tracking Speed Bonus from 3% to 6%
  • Synth Exile – Increased Armor Repair Bonus from 3% to 6%
  • Synth Frentix – Increased Optimal Range Modifier from 3% to 6%
  • Synth Mindflood – Increased Capacitor Modifier from 3% to 6%
  • Synth Sooth Sayer – Increased Falloff Bonus from 3% to 6%
  • Synth X-Instinct – Reduced Signature Radius Modifier from -2.25% to 4.5%

The EDENCOM ship change is no doubt part of the ongoing attempt to dig those ships and their weapons out of the hole CCP put them in.  The ships are not great, but the big problem for quite a stretch was the price of the ammo, which was too expensive to make them anything more than a meme fleet option.

The improvement in boosters is probably there because, as Mykocerosin is suddenly in demand for other things, the price of them has doubled.

Anyway, the patch notes, such as they are, are available.  The update has been deployed.  If you’re reading this now, it is too late to get a battleship into build with T1 materials.  They new reality is upon us.

The March MER and the Mineral Squeeze

The EVE Online Monthly Economic Report for March 2020 arrived last week, so it is probably time for another peek into how the mineral starvation plan is changing things.

EVE Online nerds harder

Last month I looked at mining because February was the first month where the first phase of the mineral starvation plan had any impact.

Now, with the full month of March under our belt, we can look to see how things have moved along.  The first thing is the price of minerals.  Scarcity should drive that up, and it looks like that has gone as expected.

March 2020 – Economic Indices

The slope of the mineral prices line maintained a steep upward angle from February to March.  Mineral pricing will hit a three year high if it maintains that slope.  The pricing is even significant on the long term picture.

March 2020 – Economic Indices – All Time

We’re still well shy of an all time high, but it is within the realm of possibility I suppose.

As for where the mining is happening, in February overall mining totaled 28.6 trillion ISK in value and the top regions were:

1. Delve – 2.40 trillion
2. Domain – 1.68 trillion
3. Oasa – 1.44 trillion
4. Esoteria – 1.13 trillion
5. The Forge – 1.11 trillion
6. Feythabolis – 861 billion
7. Sinq Laison – 821 billion
8. Lonetrek – 791 billion
9. Malpais – 748 billion
10. Fountain – 729 billion

With March the total amount mined added up to 35 trillion is in value, with the top ten regions as:

1. Delve – 2.92 trillion
2. Domain – 1.60 trillion
3. The Forge – 1.55 trillion
4. Oasa – 1.27 trillion
5. Esoteria – 1.17 trillion
6. Fountain – 1.17 trillion
7. Sinq Laison – 1.14 trillion
8. Lonetrek – 1.05 trillion
9. Metropolis – 971 billion
10. Feythabolis – 958 billion

That is almost the same ten region (Metropolis replacing Malpais) and up for totals on average.  But with prices up even it the value of the amount mined was up that might still mean that the actual cubic meters of ore mined was lower, since every bit is worth more.

Delve was up the most, along with Fountain, which are both null sec regions that are heavily mined, especially when it comes to moon mining, which did not get its nerf until the end of the month when most basic ores and minerals were removed from moons.

In the run up to that I know that the Imperium set all moon extractions to a seven day cycle to get the most chunks harvested as possible before the big nerf hit.

And now that it has, there is no reason to think that a further shortfall in minerals will make the prices go anywhere save up.  So we shall see what the numbers look like in April when the starvation plan will be in full effect.

Likewise, with the nerfs to titans and super carriers that hit in early April, next month might be a prime time to take a look at NPC bounty numbers again in order to do some before and after comparisons.

But that will be next month.  Until then all the charts and data for the report are available from CCP.

Daybreak and All Their Sins Remembered

What a week it has been for Daybreak.

That eye should be crying after this week…

First they get caught in a pretty big lie.  And it was a lie nobody expected so when they said it people immediately questioned it.

There is absolutely no question they were lying, it is just a matter of what they were lying about.

Either Columbus Nova was part of the purchase of Daybreak back in 2015, or the company has been misrepresenting that material fact repeatedly for the last three years.  Either there was some financial benefit for them lying over and over for three years or they have chosen to start lying now as a measure of expediency due to sanctions against Russian oligarchs.

And honestly I can’t decide which is correct, mostly because I can’t figure out who they might have tricked by lying for three years.  (As a side note, somehow the same “mistake” was made with Harmonix back in 2010 when press releases announced Columbus Nova was purchasing them, but now they also say it was Jason Epstein all along.)

And Daybreak can’t manage to fully close the door even with its own definitive, we’ve said all were going to say statement posted to all of the forums.  Quoting for truth, since they’ve gone in to edit this statement already like it was on Wikipedia:

Dear Daybreak Community,

There has been some confusion concerning Daybreak’s ownership and rumors about the state of the company that have circulated from a few online game websites, and we want to set the record straight. We assure you that these rumors are entirely false and that there’s no impact on our business or games in any way whatsoever.

From the get-go, Daybreak has been primarily owned by Jason Epstein, a longtime investor who also has investments in a variety of media properties. Jason acquired Daybreak (formerly SOE) in February 2015 and has been the executive chairman and majority owner of the company since that time.

We’re well aware of prior statements from Daybreak indicating our company was acquired by Columbus Nova. We have since clarified that the company was acquired by Jason Epstein when he was a partner at Columbus Nova, which he left in 2017. We’ve also taken steps to clarify those facts on our website and on third-party internet sites to ensure that all of the information currently made available is consistent and accurate.

We apologize for the previous miscommunication and hope that this clears up any confusion. As always, we greatly appreciate your continued support for our games, and we’ll continue to work hard to bring the best experiences to you.

So that settles it, right?  Maybe.  I just trip over the first sentence of the second paragraph:

From the get-go, Daybreak has been primarily owned by Jason Epstein…

When you feel the need to throw in the word “primarily” it does suggest that there were other owners.  Maybe it was Columbus Nova!  Maybe that was the bit Sony held onto.  Maybe it was a couple old ladies from Sheboygan.  We don’t know and Daybreak doesn’t seem in a mood to offer anything beyond a lame understatement of their actions over the last three years.

By the way, after Daybreak edited their Wikipedia article to take out any mention of Columbus Nova, somebody went back and added this:

Evidently wanting to distance itself from Columbus Nova, Daybreak started claiming in April of 2018 that the original press release was in error and that Jason Epstein purchased the company personally. It is not clear when exactly Columbus Nova, Daybreak, and Jason Epstein severed ties.

So yeah, their efforts haven’t exactly born the fruit for which they were likely hoping.

And the kicker is that it probably doesn’t matter.  Lying to us is futile and, as you can see, even counter-productive.  A wasted effort.  If the FBI wants to know who bought them they’ll find out.  I am sure they can subpoena Sony to see who signed the check and where the funds came from.  So the lesson here is, if somebody asks you if you’re going to be affected by sanctions on Russia, just say, “No.”  Don’t use that moment to bring up a tale about how you’ve never been owned by the company you’ve been telling everybody was the owner for the last three years.  It clearly will not turn out well.

That was enough silliness on Tuesday and I figured once Daybreak got their story straight and stopped trying to gaslight the internet we’d all wander off to fret about lockboxes or whatever the next story of the moment turned out to be.

But then yesterday another blow landed as we found out that Daybreak had a significant layoff, with a reported 70 or more people being let go.  Sure, that probably had more to do with how the company has been doing rather than anything related to Russian sanctions, but could the timing be any worse?  We’ve never been owned by that Russian company, Russian sanctions won’t have any effect on us, but we’re laying off a huge chunk of our staff.

And MMORPG.com threw a bit more fuel on that fire with a rumor about Daybreak possibly being acquired by another company… at which point Jason Epstein would drop out of the picture… maybe… he might be there as well.  That story felt really thin, and given that the author also said that Daybreak acquired Standing Stone Games, I wouldn’t give it much credence.  After all, we know that it was Jason Epstein who acquired Standing Stone… erm… no… Daybreak got into a deal to be Standing Stone’s publisher, a deal that seemed to bring almost no benefit to Lord of the Rings Online or Dungeons & Dragons Online so far as I could tell.  But Daybreak didn’t buy them.  I don’t know who actually owns Standing Stone Games though.  It could be Jason Epstein though.  I wouldn’t cross him off the list.  He is a busy guy.

Anyway, it was enough to make a long time fan of the Norrath feel more than a bit defeated.

I mean, I am used to having the weight of SOE and then Daybreak’s foibles drag me down.  To be a fan of theirs is to suffer.  So instead of posting a piece I already had written about the EverQuest Agnarr server launching the Planes of Power expansion and how that is the centerpiece of their locked-in-time plans for this retro server, I am spewing out text about yet another bad turn in the life of this company and its games.

What is going to happen?  What does the future hold?

My gut says that there is value in the EverQuest franchise and that, run properly, EQ and EQII could be a nice little niche money spinners wherever they end up.  I had been feeling that Norrath was doing better than anybody had a right to expect under Daybreak, with yearly expansions and content updates in between.  But with layoffs is that at an end?

I guess DC Universe Online is safe, being that it is said to bring in a reliable revenue stream.  But PlanetSide 2 has been troublesome in the past and H1Z1… or whatever name it has now… was looking pretty good, right up until the point that it got trampled in the fight between PUBG and Fortnite over the battle royale space.  Now it is going onto the PS4, but will they bother bringing it to China?  And it feels like Just Survive just won’t.

And this one-two punch of lies and layoffs has brought up all the old resentments and recriminations in the rather close knit world of MMORPG gamers.  So it seems to be the time for some to replay every grievance from the past, from the NGE and the fall of SWG to the false hopes of The Agency to the replay of false hopes and the faked demos of EverQuest Next to the early death of Landmark and every foible big and small in between.

There is a lot of resentment and feelings of betrayal when you look back down the road the company has traveled.  Every game shut down, every bad decision they had to reverse on after announcing, every upbeat demo or announcement followed by months of silence, every update that didn’t meet expectations, every bug that lingers for year after year, every nutty side project that ate up dev time only to be abandoned… it all adds up.

Games don’t last forever.  Mistakes happen.  Bad decisions get made.  Every feature, no matter how bad, is somebody’s favorite.  You’re always going to piss somebody off no matter what you do.  But Daybreak over the years feels like it has done more than its share of all of that, and it isn’t a big company like EA or Blizzard where they can piss people off and get past it by launching another Battlefront title or WoW expansion that will sell millions of copies.

It feels like we’re getting to the end of the story of SOE and Daybreak.  Maybe not today, or even this year, but things are headed in that direction.  They’re maintaining the old titles, but the only hope from the new was H1Z1 and it seems to have fallen by the wayside in the genre it helped spark.  There might be a new title in the works, but having to lay off so many people is going to impact something.

What do you do?  Do you cut back on supporting the old base?  No more expansions for EQ and EQII?  That brings in money and keeps the old base there.  But if you don’t work on something new then the future is set as an ever dwindling player base will lead to an every smaller staff and an eventual shut down.

Not a good week to be a fan of any of Daybreak’s remaining products.

Maybe I’ll feel better about all of this tomorrow and put up that Agnarr post.

Other coverage:

• Massively OP – The fiasco begins
• Massively OP – Covering layoffs and further updates
• Massively OP – Their podcast talking about covering the story
• Massively OP – Speculating on where Daybreak is going
• MMORPG.com – Daybreak acquisition rumor
• MMO Fallout – The change of ownership clarification
• Ars Technica – Questions Daybreak’s change of owner story
• Venture Beat – Layoffs and skepticism
• Inventory Full – Everything you thought you knew is wrong
• Keen & Graev – What happens now?
• Endgame Viable – Part of the weekly summing up

Your Space Wealth Revised

Or how I lost almost 5 billion ISK in virtual assets.

A while back CCP put in a new feature that would give you an estimate of your total worth, liquid ISK and assets combined.  I was a bit dubious of my result, as it showed I had nearly 22 billion ISK in assets squirreled away somewhere.

Wilhelm… back in March

CCP was apparently a bit dubious about the results as well as today’s quick patch includes some changes for the asset calculation.

Post patch valuation

Happy days, my ISK has increased over the last month.  I am still not rich by any measure, but I have enough to do what I want to do.  Fortunately, what I want generally involves sub-caps.  I am mostly up due to skill injector sales.  The price of injectors has been going up, making that a profitable sideline.

Assets, on the other hand, are down almost 5 billion, dropping from nearly 22 billion ISK to just over 17 billion.  17,108,645,956 ISK to be exact.

And still that number seems high to me.  It could be over-valuation of collectables as was suggested in the comments of the last post.  I have hung on to all of those over the years.  Among the items I pulled out of Deklein a year back was my commemorative piece of Steve.

In the comments of the last post it was suggested that I check out jEveAssets, a utility that will value you holdings. (Find it here.)  Unlike other things I have tried, jEveAssets has been updated to count assets you have in citadels.  Running that today I get the following output:

jEveAsset calculation

That also puts my assets at about 17 billion, off by about 68 million ISK compared to CCP’s calculation, with CCP being the lower of the two. (Also, Prototype Hyperspatial Accelerators seem to have dropped by about 90 million ISK in price since I last checked.)

That asset count still seems like a lot.  Certainly more than I can account for, though it may still be collectable inflation.  But at least I have two data points that are close this time around.

Quote of the Day – The PCU Will Crater

As you can see, going free-to-play and increased botting activity could only stabilize them for one year, the concurrent logins are exactly where they were a year ago and the summer dip is just coming. Unless they have one more “free to play” level stunt in their sleeves, a year from now they’ll be under 20K concurrent players.

Gevlon, Seems I was right about New Jita

More proof that EVE Online is a special game, Gevlon cannot stop writing about it.  And not just derisive comments in the flow of a narrative about another game, as he does with World of Warcraft, but full on posts about New Eden.

Anyway, he is on the “EVE is dying” path, ever popular with those who dislike the game, with what can be construed as a very specific claim.  He is saying that the average concurrent player logins will be 20k in a year.  (Data source: EVE Offline)

PCU for the last 12 months with avg at 35K

In a post rife with abductive reasoning, unsupported declarations about RMT and botting, and an ongoing tendency to strip facts of their context in order to give them new meaning, he has foreseen the death of EVE Online.  Or, if not death, then a state of decline well beyond anything witnessed previously.

But you cannot argue with him, because he won’t admit any possibility beyond his own conclusions.  His world view is set in stone.  So I’ll just put this post up and we’ll come back to it in a year and see how things have played out.  It is very easy to apply your own narrative to things that have already happened, to claim that CCP “knew” things.  It is altogether a different beast to be able to predict the future.

Finally, I borrowed the term “crater” in the title from Dinsdale.  He likes to say that the PCU has already cratered, while Gevlon is saying that is a coming event. It amuses me that two people who are so angry about the game differ on that front.

Citadels Arrive in New Eden

The long awaited, anticipated, feared, speculated over, and otherwise examined Citadel expansion arrives on the Tranquility server today.  Seriously, we’ve been all over this since EVE Vegas last year.

Now Available

Citadels, the new structures in New Eden are here and will likely change the game in unexpected ways.  There are four citadel types:

• Astrahus (Medium)
• Fortizar (Large)
• Keepstar (Extra Large)
• Upwell Palatine Keepstar (Extra Large, Extra Special, one per New Eden)

And there are all sorts of details that players will need to sort out as time goes along.

• Deployment and unanchoring
• Vulnerability
• Fitting
• Asset Safety
• Ship Tethering
• Access Lists
• Profiles
• Citadel Management (Structure Browser and Fuel)
• Service Modules

For me, one of the more interesting items is how players will attack citadels.  In what I can only see as something of a rebuke of Fozzie Sov, players will actually shoot things rather than fly around them in circles running an entosis link module.  To my mind, shooting something is always the best option.  CCP has tried to give us a feel for shooting them in its cinematic trailer.

So a huge change there, with CCP relenting somewhat at the last minute on the whole tax thing meant to drive people to use citadels.  I expect the unexpected and for comedy to ensue.

And, if that were not enough, there are a range of capital ship changes going in today as well.  Starting off there is the introduction of the Force Auxiliary capitals, already commonly called “Fax Machines.”

Fax Machines are all Vertical

They come in four flavors, one for each major NPC faction, and replace the triage role that carriers used to perform.  They are:

• Apostle (Amarr)
• Minokawa (Caldari)
• Lif (Minmatar)
• Ninazu (Gallente)

Carriers and super carriers will no longer use drones, but will restricted to fighters.  Fighters themselves will have new functionality and controls.  A lot of things will transform with the expansion drop, triage carriers into fax machines, old fighters into new, and drones into some location you may not have considered.  The transition is covered in a forum post.

I have a carrier that will still be a carrier after the update and which will be pretty empty since all the drones will get dumped out and I never bought any fighters for it.  But, then, I have only ever used it to haul around subcaps.

In addition, dreadnoughts are getting rebalanced in order to turn them into the gun platforms they ought to be.  Titans are getting a rebalance and new doomsday weapons.  Carriers are getting a rebalance too, and so are supercarriers.  There are also pirate faction capital ships and capital level escalations for anomalies and new anti-sub cap weapons for capitals and the removal of ewar immunity for supers.

And then there is the usual round of fixes and updates and changes to various aspects of the game, most of which (but never all) are summed in the patch notes and on the updates page.

There are enough things going on with this expansion that if it were the old days I would have started training a long skill.  Even CCP is running long on just the deployment.

Today's extended downtime for the deployment of EVE Online: Citadel will be extended due to long running patching. More info as we have it!

— EVE Status (@EVE_status) April 27, 2016

But, since my skill queue already goes out past 500 days right now, I am not so worried about that.  Still, I suspect there will be issues and some patches coming pretty quickly given the scale of things.

Wait, there it is, the announcement… the expansion is live and the server is up… for now.

Tranquility is now back online and accepting connections! Happy hunting, capsuleers and mercs!

— EVE Status (@EVE_status) April 27, 2016

But even if the server goes down we will at least have a new theme song to listen to.