EVE General Discussion

Right now, we don't have an ETA for drilling platforms, but after speaking with the team who'll be working on them, they won't be rolled out during winter 2016/2017.

For this reason, we've pushed them back to the fall in 2017 for now, however that date may come forward.

We use EVE Updates pretty fluidly to display the road map of what's coming up in the short to mid term future, so don't be surprised if things appear, disappear, shift around or change dates.

In January there'll be a sizeable update to the site that will show a lot more of what's coming in 2017. We just need to finish up planning and get everything nailed down first

I would speculate that overhauling moon mining and reactions will take a bit of time. Those are pretty ancient systems, the core mechanics of which have pretty much never seen a significant update.

Reactions, particularly - the whole concept of chaining structures together doesn't really make a lot of sense under the new structure model. There's likely a lot more work here than just having the art department whip up some models and stuffing some new service modules into the database.

They've all ready had to scale back on the Rorqual, my guess is they want to see how the other recent changes to mining pan out before potentially buffing mineral/ice/gas yields again with drilling platforms.

Considering that the entire reaction system is going to be replaced, I'm not sure that the complexity and age of the current system is actually relevant, unless were talking about how POSes interact with sov.



From what has been posted I don't think it is CCP's intention to replace moon-mining with ship-based mining. I could be wrong. I think integrating the PI mechanics to include moons would be a lot easier.

As far as reactions, I think a more likely scenario would be to change all the reaction blueprints to more traditional BPOs, and keep Drilling Platforms focused only on resource gathering, reprocessing, and compression. I think its also possible they could replace Customs Offices with Drilling Platforms.

At this point all CCP would have to do is balance the related mechanics so as to maintain universally similar consumption and production rates.

So, yeah, I am a little surprised at how far back Drilling Platforms have been pushed. A year or more? That's like saying "We haven't even started on this yet." But considering how far reaching and potentially devastating making a mistake on this could be, getting it right is very important.

The introduction of Drilling Platforms could potentially be even more impactful than Crius or Ascension industrial changes were.

Actually, there has been some talk about chaging moon goo into an active mining format, as in with ships. and as pi is annoying as all hades, i would HATE moon goo to become pi. would be easier for a drill platform ti either covert a moon into an ore field, or they change moon mining 100% and set the moon to deplete when the pos' die and move to a new system, like giant asteroids that a platofrm need to breka up so they can be mined or something.

but we dunno the current plans. And yea reactions need to convert to blue prints and be standard industry jobs, would make life a hell of alot eaiser

...He just did...

The delay might not be so big.
They are not ready for this winter.

What else do you need?

--Gadget

I do not fully understand what CCP intend to do with drilling platforms, but considering how big the Rorqual changes have been on the 'resource harvesting' side of the game balance, I think it's better for CCP to think long and hard about any other changes that's got to do with 'resource harvesting', in any forms.

Many things have crashed in price at serious level. Not all of them are related, but in terms of timing we are seeing crashes in different tier of materials are the same time (unfortunately). Minerals are very cheap now, and T3 and nanoribbons have been crashing so bad this year (obviously they are not related, but just mentioning them together as we are witnessing them at the same time).

If CCP implements drilling platforms or do any tweaks on moon mining or whatever other things that could lead to drop in price for materials used for T2, deliberately or by accident, we'd have an unprecedented case of T1, T2 and T3 materials all crashing at same time, dramatically.

We used to talk about 'baloon effects' where drop in low end minerals (such as Tritnanium) gets somewhat balanced by increase in price for higher end minerals or vice versa. But now everything's falling flat on the face. And the T3 products prices? I've never seen them so low since Apocrypha introduced them for the first time. If something happens in the resource harvesting balance that could result in drop in material prices for T2, we end up with everything,from T1 to T3, being cheaper, over produced, with over supply of materials at super cheap price, meaning production cost are not likely to rise for forseeable time, and no real increase in demand either.

EVE has always 'over produced' stuff to some extent, but seriously, I feel that many things are going totally off balance now. I just don't see the level of increased demand that could bring up the prices again, and I don't see any planned changes that would reduce the supply of stuff in future. I worry that we end up with over supply of stuff with no real demand to match, and people who's buying up stuff now thinking 'wow they cheap now and I think the price will shoot up' will end up waiting very long time until they see actual profit on their investment. People talk about spending a lot of ISK these days to buy up many different things being sold for cheap, and yeah, maybe prices on these things will go up again, but not any time soon.

I think many people have already over invested because prices on some stuff got too cheap and it was too tempting to buy up, and they are now low on liquidity, lower than they have been used to, and lower than they are comfortable with. Sooner or later, these people will want to liquidate what they bought over past few months, but will find that the prices have not gone up as they expected. Then we shall have these bought up stock flooding the market again as people feel the pressure of being low on ISK and want to sell to get some ISK, and that will suppress the prices even further.

I don't know - this is just my personal reading of the EVE market at the moment. There may be other technical reasons why CCP is delaying the drilling platforms, but economicaly, I'm very glad that they are delaying it. I don't think the market can absorb another major shock at this stage. Whether this is what CCP intended or not, this is a good news for the market IMHO.

Obviously there will be enough number of players who profit from the recent changes and the future market fluctuations, but I bet many people will end up with less ISK and more stuff (valued less) than they wanted.