- A number of mining changes are going out to alleviate a number of problems in Nullsec.
- We don’t anticipate these will be a one-and-done fix.
- I’ll check in with the community every two weeks and we’ll make additional adjustments around every four weeks until we get the ecosystem to a healthy place.

EVE Online - Simulation or Game?
The first thing I want to touch on is a bit philosophical and ask whether EVE is a simulation or game (or simulation-game)? I know a huge amount of EVE’s player base enjoys EVE because of its simulated economy and sandbox nature. This places a lot of value on the “simulation” aspect of EVE, sometimes even more than the “game” element of EVE (ie. micro-gameplay loops, game feel and feedback, etc…). Ultimately, in the market we trust, and so do you. The marketplace in EVE is perpetually the “great balancing engine” of EVE Online and in theory, whenever we change any of the universe’s inputs or outputs, we can trust the marketplace to do its job and hand the keys of that engine over to you - the players - to figure out, solve or push on in interesting ways. When things become less abundant and prices go up? That means certain things will become less available in the universe. That, in and of itself, is not a problem. The game is balancing itself, and access to everything is still there. It just means that there is a shift in the universe and folks should adjust to it accordingly. It’s fair and everyone has access to the same content and changes, so the universe should stabilize at a new equilibrium. In theory…
What Happened with Mining in Equinox?
Being super straightforward, Equinox was a fundamental redo of some of the biggest systems in EVE. Huge systemic redos like this are always full of pitfalls, risks, and challenges, and they usually take time to iterate to get to the right place. I think we made some missteps in how we communicated our design intentions around Equinox which has led to a lot of confusion and pain for the community. With big changes like these, designers have to make assumptions and sometimes you never really know how they play out until they land. The changes we made were:- We introduced Tier 1 and Tier 2 mining Upgrades that allowed Sovereignty system owners to choose which ore types spawned in their owned space.
- We made more ores available in Nullsec, with greater amounts of flexibility and choice via. Sov Hub Upgrades.
- We introduced new ores in these sites that were curated for Equinox’s flexibility.
- The sites had more asteroids with lower amounts and low to medium volume.

- We wanted to give Nullsec more flexibility and choice.
- We needed to make sure that more flexibility was balanced against the rest of the universe.
- We needed to account for different play styles.
- We wanted to make beautiful, science fiction space rocks for you to enjoy.
Why Balancing EVE is Hard
The first part of balancing that is a challenge is to ask the question is this actually a problem, or is it just annoying? In this case, there is a lot of anxiety about speculated impacts such as the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and ship/module prices. While some things are impacted, the game is still completely in a playable state and some folks have simply seen a shift from mining to ratting. That said, we do very much care about the health of mining, as it is part of the lifeblood of EVE. This is not an easy question to answer, and sometimes it takes time to see and measure what happens. Tuning too quickly and thrashing puts strain on EVE’s core principle of being a simulated economy as well. It can usually take about 3 months to see what the real impact of a change on EVE’s economic engine is and sometimes upwards of 6 to see how the simulation begins to stabilize and come to an equilibrium. The next part of tuning an issue like this that is challenging is that we have to consider stockpiles. A lot of folks are holding onto ores in storage. Unfortunately, there isn’t a technically clean way to separate ore and minerals pre and post a balance change. That means that even a small change in something like mineral refinement rates, can have a HUGE opposite impact on the problem we are trying to solve (ie. suddenly injecting a massive surplus into the economy). Sometimes we might be too cautious about this, but it is a real factor that we have to consider carefully when making changes to things like density or refinement rates. I’ve also seen people ask why we are afraid of returning to the Rorqual era. While we really want to see Rorqual use, that was also quite a divisive time. I wasn’t here for it, but I’ve heard stories. It fundamentally shifted the way EVE was played and the overall economy and market. For some folks, that was a lot of fun; for others, it removed aspiration and challenge. To us at CCP, it was an unbalanced and unintentional change to the game that we’re still feeling the echoes of today. So absolutely, we’d love to see Rorquals in space, but we need to take a more measured and safe approach to how we get there. This one can be a razor’s edge to dance on, and it’s better to move with caution.What We’re Doing Next
So with all of that out of the way, we are making some changes, now and in the future. I’m going to lay some of these out for you here. On March 12th we will be releasing a Revenant Major Update to EVE Online, with a number of significant game and meta balance changes. We really hope you like them! Many of them have been informed by super rigorous conversations with our current CSM19 (thanks!) as well as us monitoring the discussions among players taking place on various community platforms. Below are the changes we will be making to mining in particular:- Ore anomalies generated by both T1 and T2 Prospecting Array Upgrades in Nullsec have been rebalanced to contain a higher quantity of ore distributed across fewer but larger asteroids.
- This is to help address the fact that many of these sites have been expressed to be too small and inefficient, as well as having increased micromanagement due to rock sizes.
- We’ll be adding T3 mining upgrades for Sov Hubs that will introduce much larger rocks and have roughly 3.5x-3.6x the ore of a T2 site.
- This is to help create larger, more chonky sites that may also entice some more Capital mining.
- Mercoxit sites spawned from T2 and T3 Upgrades will be more plentiful and will distribute more evenly across systems that have the Upgrades installed instead of clustering.
- This is to alleviate some of the inefficiency around acquiring Morphite that is impacted by how our sites are currently being distributed.
- Mordunium will have a ~5% increased refinement rate - Stockpiles rejoice (I know you’ll be holding onto yours once you read this, naughty naughty).
- This is to help alleviate the Pyerite availability issue that is largely being caused as a knock-on effect of Metenox Moon Drills.
- New ORE Deep Core Strip mining module that will reduce waste on Mercoxit mining
- This is another lever to help with the Morphite faucet issues currently.
- Increased Magmatic Gas cost of Metenox Moon Drills by ~35%
- We felt that Metenox were unilaterally too cheap to run and anticipate that this will have an impact on the overall number of Metenox and on the moongoo and associated mineral market.
The Future of Mining
Now, I want to share with you some of the future vision of mining. I’m going to give you a heavy caveat here that some of these things are very real and in our near future, and some of these things are just discussions that we’re having internally. I want to share both because I’d love to hear what is interesting to you folks and spur some conversations as well. We’ll set up an official post on the EVE forums to hear out your ideas and feedback as well.