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Hello again folks. I'm here today to talk a bit about pirate battleships, the costs of obtaining them and what were here at CCP are planning to do about it.

One of the major EVE balance concerns raised by the community over the past several months has been the low price of pirate battleships and their impact on the rest of EVE. Prices for pirate battleships have been dropping over the past three years, with the changes caused largely by buffs to BPC drop rates and to anomaly escalations in late 2014.

These price decreases have negatively impacted ship balance as pirate battleships become more competitive for their cost compared to many other ship classes.

Obviously the price isn't the only balance concern about a ship group as prominent and diverse as pirate battleships, and other factors such as the strength of Upwell structure energy neutralization weapons contribute to the dominance of the Machariel in particular. However after giving this situation some thought internally and engaging in plenty of community discussion through venues such as Fanfest and the CSM, we agree that price should be the target of the first set of changes.

Our changes relating to pirate battleship prices will come in a few stages, with the first arriving next week in our June release and another set of changes coming in July, with the potential of more changes in the future.

In June we are starting to address the supply of pirate battleship BPCs, with moderate changes to the chance of escalations spawning from the most popular high-end anomalies and larger changes to the drop rates of the BPCs themselves from quite a few NPCs.

In July we plan to begin making changes to the material composition of the pirate battleships to increase their build costs somewhat. More details of these changes will come later.

We don't expect any of these changes to be silver bullets, especially since there will be stockpiles of BPCs and ships to work through. However we do believe that these changes will be a solid set of next steps in helping to address this situation.

Thanks.

Really glad to see this discussion make it to the public, especially given the impacts it might have on other areas of balance, such as the Strategic Cruiser rebalance.

increase material cost and lower bpc means less availability for pirate bs
this means all the industrialists get to build pirate bs early and stockpile
screws over the young industiralist again

how about for once instead of increasing cost to benefit veteran industrialist
try lowering the cost of everything else to help the young industrialist and screw the rich fatcat players
would be niceto see this happen for a change

Finally. Good change.

I am seriously hoping that this is going to affect more than just machs

Pirate battleship proliferation has been a hotbed issue; most folks agree that the escalation rate and drop rate are too dang high. With these really good proposed changes, I can't wait to see the same folks start griping and complaining and getting out the pitchforks.

except what i said is the opposite of that
how does devaluing vet player stockpile help the vet player
it means they make a loss on their products

Will the barghest be affected by the production material increase?

Let go of the dream Asher. Barghest fleet ain't happening.

Power creep is bad.