EVE General Discussion

You couldn't have announced the switchover date would be six weeks after the BPOs were seeded before you seeded the BPOs and told everyone that the fuel switchover date would be a couple of weeks after the BPOs were seeded? Is joined-up thinking is short supply in Iceland?

Do you have any idea how much fuel 100 pos's go through and what it costs? You do realize the effects of the current system is driving fuel prices up, and will continue to do so. Couple this with the dramatic and unexpected increase in customs office taxes and now you're making fuel prices unpredictable.

The market is a fragile sandbox. We had people blowing up billions and probably trillions of isk of ships in protest of CCP "potentially" breaking the market over the whole Aurum and monocle thing. The timing of this, coupled with previous statements means that those who dutifully went around and filled their POS's and converted their fuel are getting screwed. Yes, they will be able to use that fuel later, but the cost per hour of running a POS is going to be significantly higher as a result of this change because of all the fuel that is now locked up and out of the system.

Look at it this way,
1. The supply of fuel is down because players simply stopped doing PI with the new tax rates.
2. Those that didn't have raised their PI product costs to cover the costs of gantries or the new taxes.
3. A *LOT* of fuel has been converted into blocks.

As a result of 1,2 and 3, there is less fuel on the market. Now I have to either buy more regular fuel or melt my blocks. Further, since we we're ALL led to believe that this was a change that was going to happen next week, there is now a huge shortage of regular fuel locally. Most POS's are fueled on a cycle of around 25-28 days. That means that only about 30% of the POS's in the game will require fuel next week. But because players have already started shifting regular fuel out for blocks, CCP basically set the end of life on regular fuel as next week. I'd bet that right now in game, 50-60% of the POS's will need fuel by the 17th of December. CCP has basically created the perfect storm of market forces on this market, and done so by basically telling everyone that DID listen to the original messages and prepared that they now have 4 days to undo all that preparation only to have to redo it in 6 weeks.

Is this the end of the world? No. But it is causing a ton of volatility in a market simply because CCP cannot provide clear direction in a market area that is already a mess and frankly the least completely rewarding thing in all of the game. I'd bet that 99% of the people that handle this do it because they have to, not because they enjoy moving green boxes. And now they've made these same player's lives harder simply because they can't provide either the ability to dual run fuels (which frankly amazes me) or a clear message on when such a major change is coming.

So glad, so very, very glad, that I bought all of the fuel and just shoved it into a couple of offline corporate hangars without doing anything with it until we were given an explicit date now. :)

i have to admit ive not tried this as i heard someone in local say you cant, but can you reprocess them?

this is some proper BUllshit .. they told us it would be Set to go live 2 weeks after the release of the Bpo's .. ive setup my personal poses to run out of fuel witnin Said week of expected release and converting all the other fuel to blocks .. and now your telling me i need to buy More regular fuel cause you felt like delaying this

Sorry to say but im Just about there with ccp .. im sick and tired

Now that we have a timeline do we still not know what the fuel block rate will do if someone's got a faction tower and/or Has sov owned in the system? I'm all for saving 5% in total fuel, but if my towers go to 10,20,40 per hour I'll be losing more money. I've tried searching the forums and sadly I can't find any information on this.

I realize that your original fuel changes blog posts did not give exact dates. But you did specify that you'll give a couple of weeks time from bpo seeding to fuel use switchover. However the wording of that seemed to indicate that it would be 2-3 weeks between the seeding and the implementation - not 8 weeks. Smells of "we need another 18 months ... again".

OK, so here's what happened.


We knew we needed at least two weeks between Crucible going live and us patching in the change, so people had time to sort out their logistics.

We can't safely do the switch between ~Decembec 17th and ~January 15th due to various key people leaving the country for Christmas, and the need for a clear run-up to the patch.

We had the patch on the 14th scheduled primarily to do this switchover, as it's effectively the last possible date before Christmas to safely do this (we don't patch later in the week because it means fallout drags into the weekend, and particularly in this case a lot of people are getting on aircraft that weekend).

Our original test plan would've seen us squared away weeks ago, but a series of various unforeseen events meant our critical "upgrade test" (requires a spare "full-sized" test server) got repeatedly bumped back in the schedule.

We finally ran the test earlier this week, and the thing we were most anticipating breaking, broke. The fix is relatively straightforward, but it requires us running another upgrade test to confirm that the fix works.

We weren't expecting the second test to be ready until today or Monday, and in the unlikely event that that didn't go smoothly it'd leave way too little time for you all to sort your towers out. Therefore we made the decision to push the deployment of the change back.

As above, once we miss the 14th we can't safely patch for at least a month. Given that we already had a small post-Crucible tidy-up patch scheduled for the 24th, we opted to bundle the fuel switch into that patch rather than running two "serious business" patches (ie, full client/server patch) less than a fortnight apart, because it's safer and causes less overhead.


It's not the way we wanted to do it, but it's the best option we have available to us right now. We're obviously very sorry for the trouble this is causing.

Other than all the problems and inconvenience you are obviously causing by extending the date a month and a half.




Then you should have no problem switching over now like you told everyone you would.

Alright.... my first response to this was to scream in frustration.... I have calmed down.


First off CCP, thank you for giving us a date we can hold you to. That is appreciated and everyone is welcome for that in some way shape or form. The rest of this is a bit of a rant... that said I do honestly appreciate the firm deadline.

Secondly, do you understand exactly what the effects of you jerking the market around like this are? (If so please reply)

If you don't I will try to explain. Lots of folks have stopped running PI, even if only briefly, because of the Custom Office changes.

At the same time you announced the fuel block change over with a short deadline. Those of us who are use to PoS Management are no stranger to working on short deadlines. So what do we do.... we get off our ass, buy however many BPOs we need and get them researched top priority. (This part doesn't much matter as we were going to do this anyway)

Next, we scrapped together an extra x amount of isk. Where x = about 210Million isk per tower we run. (this is for about 14 days of fuel at about 15 mill a day) in addition to our normal fuel costs. This essentially DOUBLED the demand for fuel at this point in time, which sent already high prices higher. None of us on the expense end are happy with it, but we only had 2 weeks so it had to be done. Besides in two weeks our lives will be much simpler when it comes to PoS fueling.

Now.... a week and a half into the two week period with everyone having made their fuel, paid exorbitant prices on a market that was in flux, Now you tell us oh we pushed back the switch over date till January?!

Lots of us were okay with the added expense of the fuel for a couple weeks as we would quickly recoup the loss by being able to use the old fuel in conversion rather quickly. Now you are asking us to sit on these blocks for an additional month and a half!?

That is 7.5Billion isk for my corp alone.

Congrats CCP you have dealt with the stupid inflation in the game for a short period of time, you have, at a guess removed at least a couple Trillion moveable isk from the market place.

And peeved a bunch of us while doing it.