With the issue of costs resolved, further design problems began to make themselves known. We can all agree that upgrading your own space is a great idea, but their implementation of that idea seems to redact previous designs and promises made about Dominion. The idea of simplifying the current three-tier sovereignty system into a single-tier one has been scrapped. Instead, two additional tiers have been added to make a five-tier system. This isn't necessarily a bad thing and it would help make the transition to the new system much smoother. However, it's a good indicator that the designs have changed significantly in a short space of time and with no player feedback on the changes. While the players don't necessarily make good game designers, as a group they're particularly adept at finding out what will and won't work. If anyone can highlight flaws in new mechanics, it's the players.
Upgrades:
To upgrade your space, you need to improve one of two other development indices. The "Industrial index" improves when ore is mined and unlocks industrial upgrades. Similarly, the "Military index" improves when NPCs are killed and unlocks upgrades relating to NPCs. The idea itself is solid and makes a lot of sense but many of the proposed upgrades are underwhelming or next to worthless:
- The "Pirate Magnet" upgrade adds two additional anomalies in your system per military index level, for a maximum of ten. CCP Soundwave admits that when the system is fully upgraded after 100 days, these anomalies will be barely on-par with risk-free level 4 missions in high security space. But why would anyone spend 100 days and piles of ISK to barely reach the same income stream as level 4 missions? Additionally, this upgrade will only provide resources for 10 pilots at a time while level 4 missions are an infinitely scalable resource pool.
- The "Ore Prospecting Array" adds one additional hidden asteroid site to the system per industry index level. Unfortunately, once again you can make more ISK per hour doing level 4 missions in complete safety than you can mining out in 0.0. Adding more asteroid belts does nothing to solve this issue.
- The "Entrapment" upgrade increases the chance of valuable DED complexes spawning in the system. Since the improvement is chance-based, it will be difficult to directly see the improvement. There is also worry that oversupply of high-end loot from DED complexes will cause prices to tank. Additionally, the sale of those expensive modules can't be taxed for alliance income like NPC bounties can.
- The "Survey Network" upgrade is a bad joke labeled as an upgrade. It increases the chance of worthless hacking and archeology sites spawning in your system. In addition to the aforementioned problem with chance-based mechanics, the loot from hacking and archeology sites is extremely poor and untaxable.
- The "Quantum Flux Generator" is another chance-based upgrade. It will increase the chance of wormholes to Sleeper space spawning in your system. The wormholes themselves could be lucrative but also pose a security risk as pirates may pop out to attack your pilots.
The publishing of this information so close to release has a lot of people worried, myself included. While some players have taken the news well, vocal doomsayers on the EVE forums are insistent that the proposed mechanics threaten the entirety of 0.0 gameplay. After the Apocrypha expansion's impressive gameplay and the solid foundation of ideas leading up to this point, my only concern is that CCP may have boxed themselves in by declaring a launch date of December 1st. CCP Chronotis seems to be taking feedback on-board. He's considering tying activity levels into a system of infrastructure discounts and has gone out of his way to answer questions from players but is it too late to make the necessary changes? I sincerely hope not.
Brendan "Nyphur" Drain is an early veteran of EVE Online and writer of the weekly EVE Evolved column here at massively.com. The column covers anything and everything relating to EVE Online, from in-depth guides to speculative opinion pieces. If you want to message him, send him an e-mail at brendan.drain AT weblogsinc DOT com.
