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Maybe now we can put to bed the idiotic often quoted dev comment "cost is not a balancing factor". That one was beyond stupid. Clearly given this post it is (and always was).

The market is in a frenzy and prices have gone up over 25% in some cases especially in the rattlesnack and other popular faction based ships.

That news mail showing the drop rate was being reduced should of stated an over all drop reduction % or expected result versus the old result, with out this information CCP has just made another ship unaccessable to a great number of people. It's only thing to pay 350m for a ship it's another to pay 530m.

Perhaps this is the point all a long to raise prices so players buy plex in order to buy the ships they want?

I fear this market change is going to be perm unless a member of CCP comes out and states the actual change ratio/percentage. I am a Senior Game Moderator for another company and I happen to be trusted internally with important information, one thing we never tell our player base is what items are dropping and if any chances are made to the drop chance, because we do not want to influence the economy.

CCP needs to start taking this approach when it comes to what drops where and how much, keeping a tight lip keeps things nice for all the playerbase.

I will admit that I am incredibly disappointed with the announcement of that specific change, it's likely that the chance is so insignificant and only affects a fraction of what the player base is speculating it to actually effect. Buy orders shot up from 325m to 472m in a matter of 4 day, please CCP acknowledge in a separate post what the Faction BPC change drop rate actually went down to, so we can settle this economy.


Continuation, CCP is making things cost more in this game so young alpha's buy more plex to afford their fancy new ships while destroying the players that have played for 5 maybe even 10 years and earned everything by reducing the value of what they own.

Also ISD Max, thanks for locking my other topic illegally even though it wasn't a repost thx bro thx, I know you're harassing me because I reported you.

It's not so much the price that is a problem as much as the availability. As long as they stay the only platform that can effectively fight on a contested citadel grid, their price won't matter. Passive fit armor tank + capless weapon + good set of stats make Mach pretty much alone in their category. They will get used even if the cost go up as long as they can be found on the market. With the previous prices, a full fleet welp of them would put a dent on the market but it would recuperate fast and then come back to regular. With those change, each welp will actually bring back some rarity to those ships. Once the current stockpile of ships is burned through (no idea how long that will take TBH), then the change will start to have it's intended effect of making them harder to replace.

Cost not being a balance factor does not mean the price was always to be meaningless. It's still important but you can't really base balance choice just on that since most cost can be grinded through anyway. Titans are a good example of this. They learned that cost was not that good of a balance factor when they realized people were willing to go through the effort if it looked worthwhile even if it was relatively high compared to anything else in the game.

Pirate BS have been cheap for way too long IMHO. It should have never been allowed for these ships to reach this low level. By adjusting drop rates and such over the past years, instead of a mega change right now after not touching them for so long.

But that's the fault of past management, which hasn't been ideal, but nothing we can do to change now (i.e. CCP should have done it better/earlier but oh well, it will just have to be done now).

I think increasing the 'cost' of pirate BS is the best option as the 'first step'. Surely there would be other steps to follow, which could include ship balance changes in terms of bonuses, functions, specifications, etc. But these are secondary issues to be looked at. The price of pirate BS has to increase in order to make any possible future changes to have any meaning. It wouldn't make sense to bring any ship balance changes without first tweaking with pirate BS costs, and although people talk about market already changing for this now, it is much better to tweak with cost now than after you release the new ship balances - you want people to speculate on it without really knowing what changes will happen to these ships.

As Frostys has said, it's the 'rarity' that will ultimately prove to be significant, not the 'cost'. I think 'right' price range of pirate BS should be at least 1b. This is still easily affordable for most players who have their basic income operations established, but it will not really be a throw-away ship for even people with hundreds of billions. This more psychological IMO. Unless you don't relly care at all, you do not want regular 1b loss mails on your KB. Your wallet can tank it without a problem, but it just start to look pretty stupid if your 10 most recent losses were all over 1b+ loss.

Rarity is also important here. Maybe one could afford to lose officer modules, in terms of ISK it may not matter at all with someone with enough ISK. But how quickly can you replace it, if it's a really rare drop? Also, for AT ships, there are people who can afford them and fly them - it's the 'rarity' that makes it more risky, not the cost - even if you had trillions, if the availability is so limited and no such ship was on market, you don't really want to lose it, not because you can't afford it, but because you can't 'replace' it.

** A bit off topic, but I feel generally many things are in f**ked up prices now. To some extent this is due to 'player driven economy/content' that EVE is famous for, but I think there also had been some silly decisions on game mechanics that devalued many things. I am not as active on the market as I have been before, but I don't really see anything where price has increased significantly over the past year or two. Most things I look at, the prices have actually dropped quite a lot over the 1~2 year periods. All this downward trend in prices (especially of things that cost many times more before, WH stuff, pirate ships, capitals, DED mods, etc) actually happened while people became more and more capable of making more ISK in shorter period of time.

tl;dr - prices have been crashing while people were making more ISK. Doesn't look too good to me