EVE Online is a game where players often band together for safety and shared prosperity in the universe. This usually results in massive player territories with corporations running giant sections of space. They entrench themselves into sectors and amass all the resources they will ever need, so there is no reason for them to explore space further. This results in a stagnant game experience and something that the developers never intended for their game.
After a recent change, it seems that EVE Online wants to break this stagnant effect and force players to venture further into space to gather their resources. This change is only a whisper of the many things to come to in-game updates.
This update was deployed into the game’s live server with no warning at all. Out of nowhere, the update reduced the amount of resources that can be mined from asteroids dramatically. This is a big change for the major empires’ current way of playing the game.
In the current build of EVE, Online, player-run empires live off of resources found inside massive asteroids. These asteroids can be found collected into giant anomalies that players warp to and mine. The resources go to create ships, structures, weapons, and armor systems and empower the empire. By using these resources, players are able to reduce their empire’s need to go outside their territory and slowly become self-sufficient nation-states.
The resources available in each anomaly has been reduced by up to 60% in total volume. This means that players will need to spend more time maneuvering their vessels around the reduced capacity asteroids and spend less time mining them to extract the minerals inside.
Ore anomalies are not the only place players can find minerals in EVE. Several mineral-rich asteroids will also spawn in naturally occurring asteroid belts, which are scattered through almost every star system in the game. These asteroid belts also felt the effects of the update as two types of ore were removed entirely from the areas.
The removal of ore from asteroid belts is not a big deal to most of the game’s community. Most players spend their time mining from anomalies as opposed to the asteroids. The problem appears from a developer blog post by CCP Dopamine that these are only the beginning of a larger, sweeping change to how resources will be handled in EVE Online.
The one thing that all fans are seeing is that these updates seem to be the start of breaking up some of EVE’s major empires’ ability to mine anomalies for everything. The massive empires will need to interact with neighbors. This means acquiring resources diplomatically or engaging in some large scale war.
Although the change is small right now, it could turn into a larger event in the EVE Online community. No one is sure what will happen until the next promised round of updates go into effect. It will be interesting to see which direction developers decide to take resource distribution.
