EVE Online’s September 22 Major Update is almost here, bringing a substantial round of changes to nullsec logistics, Pirate Insurgencies, wormhole PvE, Pochven, ship balance and the Babaroga economy. Cradle of War launched back in June, so this is not a second expansion, but it is a sizeable mid-cycle update with enough moving parts to affect almost every corner of New Eden.
Gamescom coverage is still piled ridiculously high on my desk. Interviews, previews, videos, screenshots. But sometimes EVE sends a ping loud enough that everything else has to pause for a moment.
UPDATE: As I’m writing this post, Gallente just won the three-month race. Victory for the Federation! Gallente loyalists have completed Operation Rogue Edge, paving the way for new gates that will shorten the journey between Intaki and Dodixie to just six jumps. Not like my usual route, but hey, why not!
Table of Contents
Rather than simply reposting Fenris Creations’ announcement with different punctuation, let’s go through what is actually changing — and, where I have enough experience to have an opinion, what these changes could mean once capsuleers inevitably find creative ways to abuse them.
Ansiblex: Distance Starts to Matter Again
This is probably the headline change.
Ansiblex jump bridges are getting their own capacitor system. Every ship passing through will consume part of that capacitor, with different hulls carrying different costs. The bridge will then need time to recharge. Distance from the owning alliance’s capital system matters too: pushing ships outward toward the edges of an alliance’s territory becomes progressively more expensive, while traveling back toward the center costs less. There are two other important restrictions. Ansiblexes will be limited to subcapital ships, and only pilots belonging to the alliance that owns the structure will be able to use them. Coalition members will need their own infrastructure or another way around.
No pet alliances allowed. Merge or slowboat!
As a New Eden nomad, I cannot really call myself an Ansiblex power user. The whole system has always felt a little alien to the way I play EVE. I look at the map, find some route through wormholes, and stealth-cyno my micro-fleet into somebody’s backyard. Still, I can already imagine the spreadsheet enjoyers opening their map tools and calculating optimal alliance capital-city location, bridge locations, capacitor efficiency, and plan bait shenanigans they can devise to bleed someone’s Ansiblex dry before D-Day. Others will inevitably declare EVE dead for the 847th time, threaten to rage-quit, cancel fourteen subscriptions, and quietly return three months later.
But I also think there is another way to look at this change — one that has less to do with inconvenience and more with something EVE gradually lost as travel became easier. I have a story about that. It involves old nullsec warfare, forty minutes of gates, nervous jokes on comms… That is getting its own article and video because squeezing it into three paragraphs here would murder the story. Subscribe or follow my YouTube if you do not want to miss it; I will also publish the full piece here in the coming days.
For now, let’s just say I am very curious whether making distance matter again might create opportunities that have not existed for a while.
Pirate Insurgencies Are Getting More Aggressive
Insurgencies are being shortened and accelerated, with players getting more control over where corruption spreads next. Players fighting the Insurgency will gain more influence over its direction as well, effectively turning geography itself into part of the fight. I can already imagine pirate groups deliberately steering Insurgencies toward useful highsec connections, trade routes or other strategic systems simply because creating a temporary choke point sounds hilarious. From the pirate side, it probably will be hilarious. That is exactly the sort of thing EVE Online players do when the game gives them a lever marked “regional inconvenience.” The question is what the peaceful player does with that content.
That is the part I struggle to understand. If a player has deliberately chosen a quieter life in empire space, why push the exact kind of content they are trying to avoid directly into their face? Some will adapt, sure. Others will simply dock up and wait for the Insurgency to move on. But once EVE gives them a reason to close the client and launch something else for a few evenings, there is always a chance that “something else” holds their attention a little longer than expected. That is why I am curious what Fenris Creations hopes to gain here. Conflict is essential to EVE, but not every player wants to participate in every kind of conflict. If someone has already chosen a playstyle that keeps them away from PvP, forcing PvP pressure into that space may not change how they play EVE. It may simply give them a reason not to play EVE at all.
Oh, and FOB reinforcement cycles will also become shorter, while rewards are shifting away from farming individual activities forever and toward actually winning the Insurgency. Ice Refinery Heist and Mining Op Ambush payouts are being reduced as part of that change. There is also a new battlecruiser battlefield appearing from corruption stage two onward, carrying the same rather spicy battlecruiser bonus introduced with the Cradle of War Factional Warfare site.
Wormhole PvE Is Getting Some Attention
Class 1 through Class 3 wormhole combat sites are receiving what Fenris describes as a comprehensive modernization aka facelift.
NPC behavior is being updated, electronic warfare should become more intelligent (don’t ask what that means!), and objectives will finally appear through the info panel instead of expecting everyone to have a seventeen-year-old EVE University page open on another monitor.
There are visual improvements too, including newer asteroid models and the removal of that recurring pop-up every time you enter certain sites. The interface cleanup is welcome, and better encounter design is always worth considering. The problem is that the announcement is still too vague for me to decide whether I actually like the important part. How different will the encounters be? Will existing fits still work? Will site completion time change? Are loot tables being adjusted to compensate for additional effort? Does the risk-to-reward ratio move? If site-running behavior changes significantly, what happens to the materials entering the market?
I am not automatically going to celebrate that as an improvement. Sometimes people run PvE because they want a relaxing activity, not another miniature tournament room.
The Rampant Drone Fabricator Pays Better
The Rampant Drone Fabricator is getting additional rewards after Fenris watched players experiment with the site over the summer. More Fabricator Data will drop, and the Pochven LP store will begin accepting that data for new rewards. These include four new mutaplasmids for drone-support modules, plus a new Hybrid Drone skill book granting hybrid drones 3% additional damage per level which every Gila pilot will want. I also expect hybrid drones prices go up as the demand shifts. There are some quality-of-life adjustments coming too, including changes intended to make interdictors easier to incorporate into Fabricator fleets.
And this is where I do something gaming journalists should probably do more often: I admit that I have no useful opinion. I have not played this content myself, so pretending that I can tell experienced Fabricator runners whether these changes are fantastic or terrible would just be filling paragraphs for SEO. Those of you actually living inside these sites can educate me in the comments.
Pochven Shifts Again, Because Of Course It Does
Pochven is also getting another round of adjustments. Vigilance Points will increase their fleet cap from 10 to 12 pilots, with payouts adjusted accordingly. Observatory Flashpoints move in the opposite direction, dropping from 15 pilots to 12, meaning successful groups will need tighter compositions while splitting the reward between fewer characters. Fenris is also making further changes to intra- and extra-Pochven wormholes alongside roaming NPC fleets.
Pochven and I have a fairly healthy relationship: it does weird things somewhere over there, occasionally breaks the economy in fascinating ways, then gets nerfed into the ground. That is usually the moment when I make some popcorn and go read Reddit.
So again, this is not an area where I am going to pretend expertise I do not have.
Ship Balance — Now You Have My Attention
This section is considerably more interesting to me.
Marauders and black ops battleships are getting reduced mass alongside agility adjustments. Heavy assault cruisers and assault frigates are receiving attention aimed at weaker hulls. Deimos, Phobos and Vigilant will regain some of the range lost during the previous medium-railgun changes, while lancer dreadnoughts are receiving stronger resistance profiles.
The actual numbers will decide whether these are meaningful changes or a glorious three-percent adjustment that technically qualifies as balancing, but the direction is encouraging. The black ops mass reduction in particular catches my eye.
Pair lower-mass Black Ops with the new limitations on Ansiblex networks and things could get interesting for smaller roaming groups. Wormholes already provide wonderful shortcuts around conventional geography. If BLOPs become easier to move through those connections without chewing through as much wormhole mass, suddenly you have another tool for slipping around the front door, causing some chaos deep inside somebody’s backyard and finding another route home before the response arrives. That is exactly the kind of asymmetrical nonsense EVE does beautifully.
Please Make the Thorax Family Interesting Again
Then we have the Deimos, Phobos and Vigilant.
When Legion arrived, these ships received fantastic new looks. I remember staring at them and immediately wanting an excuse to undock one purely because spinning that new model in space would make me happy.
Then I opened Pyfa.
Excitement successfully terminated.
For the kind of PvE activities I was considering, the Thorax-family hulls simply did not give me enough reason to choose them over the alternatives. That gorgeous model deserved some love. So seeing Fenris revisit the range lost after the medium-railgun changes is very welcome. Again, numbers matter enormously here — I am not declaring the Deimos suddenly resurrected before seeing the actual values — but at least somebody is looking at these ships and asking whether previous changes pushed them too far.
My shiny space potato with guns may yet escape the hangar.
And Then There’s the Babaroga
Finally, the Babaroga.
Come on.
Five-ish billion ISK for a hull with such specialized practical use was painful even by Marauder standards. I love strange expensive toys as much as the next EVE veteran, but there comes a point where “specialized” starts competing with “why did I not just buy another Marauder?” Fenris is reducing the material requirement of the Zero-Point Field Manipulator used in Babaroga production, with the expectation that this will also reduce production costs across Tech II Triglavian ships.
Good.
Bring that beautiful monster closer to the economic neighborhood occupied by the other Marauders and I might finally become interested in losing one irresponsibly to pack of Catalysts in Lanngisi.
There is another angle here for traders, too. If cheaper production eventually means more Babarogas and other Tech II Triglavian hulls actually entering space, do not only stare at the hull market. Keep an eye on the ecosystem around them as well: disintegrators & damage modules and other equipment pilots suddenly when adoption changes. I am not telling you to dump your wallet into Entropic Radiation Sinks because some guy on the internet wrote a paragraph about them. EVE markets have an impressive ability to punish anyone who thinks they have discovered free money.
But changes in hull accessibility create secondary demand. It is worth watching.
One Practical Thing Before September 22
There are a couple of less glamorous changes worth remembering too.
The AIR Career Program is heading toward retirement in its current form. It will migrate into Paragon Services achievements in November, so unfinished ACP tasks should be completed and their rewards claimed before that migration happens. Once converted, those activities can be completed again through the achievement system.
The September Major Update will also let the info panel track up to five achievements simultaneously, which sounds tiny compared with rewriting nullsec logistics but is exactly the sort of quality-of-life change I will probably appreciate every single day.
There is quite a lot packed into this update. Now give us the final balance numbers. That is where some of these changes go from “interesting dev blog” to “I need to refit half my hangar.”
Cradle of War’s Major Update lands on September 22. I will be watching the details as they arrive – and yes, that longer story about Ansiblex, forty-jump reinforcement fleets and why slow logistics once created some fantastic EVE gameplay is coming next.
o7
P.S. If anyone has a spare Babaroga collecting dust in a hangar, I will gladly accept the donation and solemnly promise to turn it into a full feature-article.
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