Ships & Modules

Of course you're going to see more people lose smaller and cheaper ships. No one thinks twice about going on a suicide roam with a cheap ship but not many want to in a more expensive ship.

Battleships aren't extinct from PVP although new ships such as attack battlecruisers have given players more choices.

Some pilots fly ships costing over a billion ISK in PVP but they're not foolish with them either. Many players can't just lose 200 mil ISK ships on a frequent basis. This is nothing new in Eve. Just don't buy the most expensive ship you can fly.

If you want to fly larger ships in Eve your best bet is to join a nullsec alliance that offers ship reimbursement.

Ships were balanced in the sense that they were given different purposes. I don't think the mineral costs were changed.


TLDR

No PVP isn't becoming too expensive. I've played since 2009 and it seems about the same today as it was then. The cost of failue in Eve is one thing that sets it apart from some other MMO's

You obviously don't have anything to do with construction of ships or industry. Aside from the majority of the 'rebalancing' which I would argue has been largely unnecessary & destructive to other elements of EVE Online the mineral costs for all ships that have been 'rebalanced' has increased exponentially.
'Extra materials', which are not reduced by ME research, have been added to the BPO's for all ships that have been 'rebalanced'. These 'extra materials' are typically adding approximately 40% to the cost of building those ships. If this happened in real life, and in some instances it does, it has a horrendous effect on economies both in New Eden and in RL. For those who got in before the changes to these ships there were significant profits to be made but after the fact construction of affected ships is ruined for months or longer.
It does seem that CCP has, and is, making other changes to bring about and/or exacerbate the current fall in mineral prices to fix this situation. But this just brings about more problems for other careers and parts of the New Eden economy.
At the moment the best we can hope is that once the T2 ships have all been 'rebalanced' that this plague stops at that threshold. I for one would not like to see capital ship & freighter BPO's touched with this infection.

before the patch people hoarded staggering amounts of the original price battleships. Like i have said above, the use of battleships is extremely rare now, they never really die, as they aren't worth the risk when you consider their cost.

This means we have literally thousands of stored battleships in sellers hangars, and almost zero demand for them. The result is that months after the patch was released, Geddons for example are still selling 70mil under the build cost. Currently thats good for the PVPer, but **** for the construction industry.

Your concerns is different to mine, but they are still linked.

Your question was "Is PVP becoming too expensive?" and the answer is no.

Since I started playing in 2009 the price of battleships has gone up slightly while the price of PLEX has almost doubled. Buy orders for PLEX used to be around 350 mil and currently they're over 600 mil in Jita. This means the actual real money cost of battleships have gone down.

Yes I don't know anything about manufacturing so you got me on that one. If something CCP did to mineral costs effects the price of ships down the road I can't say but currently this has not happened.



TLDR: It has always been expensive to lose battleships in PVP. This is nothing new and hasn't changed. Most people that PVP in more expensive ships take care not to lose them.

yes it is.

this post got eaten - pls stand by... ♫

I have the feeling as if the average pvp-ship (that I use atleast) has become cheaper over the time, instead of more expensive. Most of it though comes from ridiculously cheap t2-rigs.

The solo-BS issue though might have it's roots with the ongoing populisation of new eden, it atleast feels as if there would be more people around every month, and thus gangsizes increase.
Meaning in special that what has been a falcon and 6 guys camping a gate is now 6 guys, 3 falcons, aswell as 3 exquerors on backup to save the fleet if something shoots back.

To the pricing, subjectively it's just getting cheaper, some of the fits I flew for quite a while (sadly only the artyloki still fits the same) they all went down in price - artyloki precisely went down from ~1.2bn each to almost 0.85bn over the course of the last year, mostly due to t2-rig-prices.

If anything is driving up your costs, it's the need to invest even more to gain the edge over some camps back (like going with a deimos/NExqueror instead of a thorax, active AB), sometimes you plain can't level the field anymore due to the high performance of t1 ships.

On a sidenote, 300mil really ain't that much beyond the 25mil SP.

90-100mil back in the good old days

I'm saying that you're making unsupported assertions and also you're using the rather low rhetorical trick of saying that "battleships are too expensive" without explaining what "not too expensive" or even "not expensive enough" would be.

I am providing data to the effect that relatively speaking battleships have been far more 'expensive' than they are now, using the only reliable metric of value that we have available (game time). It's scarcely disputable that the income of the average (median) EVE player in absolute ISK terms is much higher than it was in September 2006 (which is when I started playing).

Additionally, I flatly don't believe your claims that battleships aren't used in PvP and hardly ever die when they do, and I bet you don't either. I don't believe you're that ignorant either, just dishonest.

My personal experience totally contradicts that: not only are battleships once again the standard for fleets, they're used more than ever, and they die in large numbers tyvm. Looking at INIT's alliance killboard, with the campaign that conveniently started in 01.01.2013: http://killboard.the-initiative.com/?a=cc_detail&ctr_id=5 I see 1659 BS killed and 776 BS lost. That's just from one medium sized alliance. More to the point it shows more Battleships lost and killed than any other ship class.

You'll see a similar story in most PvP alliance killboards.

Furthermore, CCP have revitalised T1 cruisers and battlecruisers, giving players access to viable yet cheaper options if they feel that battleships are too expensive for their taste.

So do you believe 300mil per Rokh to be a fair price? For their purpose, their life, and how they come to an end, do you think 300mil is a fair cost?

i don't

i believe that is now too expensive.

plus it's worth pointing out that my very first line relates to certain types of pvp, obviously moonfest puppet fights where everyone is insta-popped and then reimbursed doesn't fall under the category of cost concern.

But still i'd like the know....


Why are they the price they are?

Why did CCP choose to "rebalance" all BS to the tier 3 price instead of the tier 2 price?

Will the other ship classes follow in this pattern?


I know alot of highsec and low-sec players will be wondering the same thing. I just hope CCP isn't hoping that when the isk runs out of peoples wallets they will simply buy more plex to cover it. I know i won't be, i'll just ending my sub.

Umm wasn't that kind of the point of the OP's post? New ships haven't gotten expensive arbitrarily. CCP made a deliberate change in mineral requirements in order to influence the new price of rebalanced ships. At this point they could have chosen any number of amounts to make some ships more or less expensive by adjusting mineral costs. In large part they adjusted up to the highest tier.

[edit]

Oops i totally missed the "I don't think the mineral costs were changed. I must learn2read better.