On Monday, March 29, CCP hosted a roundtable discussion and Q&A on their official Twitch channel. The discussion centered on the industry changes announced in via dev blog on March 26. Participants in the almost 90-minute broadcast (which begins at the 9:40 mark of the saved Twitch stream) included three representatives from CCP (CCP Rattati, CCP Psych, and CCP Swift), a member of the CSM (Kenneth Feld), and a noted EVE industrialist (Dr. Spodumain). The first 30 minutes were a roundtable discussion of the recent industry changes, followed by almost an hour of Q&A with questions taken from the forums.
A fundamental point of the presentation is that these industry changes are an just one part of CCP’s larger vision to completely remake the EVE economy starting from the very foundation. (For further discussion of this vision, see CCP Rattati’s interview on Oz_EVE from the beginning of March.)
In the roundtable discussion, the participants articulated a number of the key goals that are specifically driving the industrial changes:
- Establishing a more orderly framework for industrial progression between ship types (14:30)
- Creating additional tuning knobs besides raw minerals to adjust the economy as needed (19:30)
- Providing new, more interesting activities for new players (23:40)
- Creating more logical career pathways in industry (24:35)
- Encouraging an integrated economy where owning the entire vertical is more difficult (46:55)
The new framework for how ships are categorized for industry purposes will be particularly interesting for many players. In particular, a hard box is being drawn around T1 ships below Battleships (i.e. Battlecruisers and below) as the only ships in the game that can be built purely with minerals. Every ship type and size outside that box (Faction, T2, Battleships, Caps, Supercaps) will add additional materials and complexity to the industry process.
In addition to articulating the goals, the panel made several additional points of note.
- Three to six months of price volatility are expected across the EVE economy as a result of these changes, and CCPS will make adjustments and injections to various components as needed to maintain the health of the economy. (25:45)
- Having dealt with the fundamentals of the economy (resources and industry) CCP will be looking next at quality-of-life and the in-station aspects around reprocessing, manufacturing, etc. This will happen in the medium term.
- Ships will be rebalanced as needed to ensure they provide value commensurate with their price in the new industrial landscape (T3 Cruisers and T1 Battleships were in particular called out). (42:30)
- R4 moons (the only moons found in WH space and Hisec) and WH gas are expected to be much more valuable than before, with WH gas in particular potentially becoming a sort of “hard currency” that can not be brute-force scaled out in the way Rorqual mining could be. (30:40, 36:15)
CCP is committed to iterating on industry and the economy more frequently in the future than they have in the past (the last big industry update being in 2014). As CCP Rattati made clear in his interview at the beginning of March, the future of EVE is rooted in the economy, and not just PvP.
The changes discussed in this livestream are a key foundation piece for that future vision.
