Ecliptic Rift

First, go read the dev blog on emergence and sovereignty.

Ready? Okay, now we can talk about it.

First off, emergent behavior is really cool. Simple rules can create complex systems. Designing a simple ruleset to generate an interesting and long-lived complex system is really hard, despite what many forum warriors seem to believe.

So CCP wants to move from a prescriptive system (“do this and you have sovereignty”) to a descriptive system (“when you have sovereignty, you can do that“). And they want to get more people out into nullsec, partly by increasing the availability of resources out there:

Resource density in nullsec is too low to support a high player density, which limits the number of people that could theoretically live in nullsec.

EVE has a lot of players like, well, the folks in my corp. We love the idea of getting more into nullsec space, but as of now the only feasible places for a small corp to do that seems to be NPC-held space like Great Wildlands or Syndicate. As you can imagine, this presents lots of problems, not all of which are relevant here.

But among those problems, we have to deal with the existing players out there. Right now, they don’t really have a reason to let us do what we want to do. So we end up living on the edges of high-sec, sometimes into low-sec, and haven’t found a way to make null-sec really work for a trading corp. (That doesn’t mean others haven’t found a way. We’ve really just gotten started.)

So they want to devalue moon minerals, among other things, giving alliances a reason to charge rent and make space itself more valuable rather than have everybody spread out, just fighting over R64 moons.

I feel fairly confident that CCP intends to move most of the resources in null-sec to an exploration-based system in which the quality of available sites relates to the investments made in infrastructure by the holding alliance. This means that they can “devalue” moon minerals over time through an increase in their available supply. This will drive down prices over time and also give people reasons to live in other areas, those without existing highly-valuable moons.

It also means that alliances need pilots to live in their space and work it regularly in order to take advantage of the resources there. You can’t just set up a network of starbases and send freighters once in a while to refuel them and pick up the resources. Ninja miners, black ops squads, and all sorts of small-squadron warfare can result, in addition to huge fleet fights when some alliance says, “nice system, we’ll take it!”

I can’t wait to see more details on this and hopefully find a way for my little corp to do good business out in the wilds of null-sec.

Image credit Ethan Hein via Flickr

Related posts:

1. Post-Dominion Sovereignty: Small alliance options
2. Dominion: What I want to see
3. CSM 3 Meeting Minutes