Increasing the Risk, Gradually

I haven’t posted anything in a long time but my hiatus is soon to be over.  I’ve been keeping up with Eve while I was gone and one of my favorite subjects has come once again to the forefront of conversation; should high sec be truly safe or not.

I’ve posted on this subject before but time changes all things and so to have my thoughts on the subject.  Well, I still think high sec should be safe for the game to expand i’s player base, but a lot of the other details have changed.

All games evolve over the years.  Some better or some worse.  Eve has changed some but the core concepts are still the same since I started playing three years ago.  Sure the ships are being adjusted and there have been a few changes here and there, but for all intents and purposes it’s the same game.

During this time the average number of players logged in has remained fairly stagnant.  Which indicates that while subscriptions might be up the people actually playing the game is the same.  The game essentially isn’t growing and I believe the reason behind this lack of growth is due to the hostile nature of the game casual players can't escape.

Barging into Space

Earlier today I did a post about Exhumers and the changes from the patch.  I went ahead and worked up some builds for the Mining Barges (Barges) as well.  The Barges have much lower EHP but I was very surprised to see the output is very similar  or higher to equivalent Exhumer builds.  Combined with the ability to insure on a T1 level and Barges might just end up being the ship of choice for mining in high sec.  For now I'll just list the builds.

Exhumer Changes

A while ago I made a post about CCP fixing the mining ships by giving them some tank.  This week they put in the patch to make some significant changes.  One hull has a great tank with the smallest amount of yield.  The next hull has huge ore bay, medium tank and medium yield.  The last hull has the best yield but limited tank and an ore bay big enough for only one cycle requiring some kind of fleet support.  In theory this type of division sounds pretty good, giving each hull it's own role and providing options for miners to choose what fits their play style the best.

For the ice or gas miners there are no longer innate bonuses for those activities, instead there are two new rigs which boost ice or gas output but you can only fit one at a time due to calibration costs. 

The Path Less Taken

  Reading through the blogs linked on the left resulted in a huge release of information when the test server was uploaded with a data packet detailing future changes to ships, weapons, and modules.  The best review I saw was from Azual at The Altruist.  I'm not going to rehash all of the changes, but I did want to post about some of the things I'm looking forward to or concerned about.