Loving this post from CCP Fozzie:
Hello everyone!
In the upcoming Summer release we are making a lot of changes that we expect will impact player behavior surrounding manufacturing, mining and starbase use. We see an opportunity here to make some adjustments to the way that Jump Drives consume their isotope fuel that will hit a few birds with one stone.The goals of this change are:
Stimulate the isotope (and therefore ice) market to help cushion any drop in demand from players using smaller starbases after the science and industry slot changes.
Help encourage cost competitiveness for local resource gathering in nullsec.
Although we don’t expect this change to significantly impact behavior around jump drive power projection, it should at least provide a small incentive change through higher costs for moving huge capital fleets often.
The plan for this release is to start with a 50% increase in the fuel cost of all jump drives and jump portals, and adjust further if necessary once we see the results. This change applies both the the base consumption of ship based jump drives, as well as the isotope consumption per kg of mass on all jump bridges and portals.
We will also be increasing the fuel bays on all jump capable ships (and the fuel storage on starbase jump bridge arrays) by 50% (60% for Black Ops Battleships) so that they do not need to refuel more often.
For reference, this will increase the cost of running a max skilled Rhea from Jita to RIT-A7 (jump drive transit the whole way) from ~50m isk to ~75m isk.
The tears from capital and supercapital pilots have already started and the reasons are not hard to see why: Carriers and Supercaps carry large reserves of fuel in fleet hangers which are not getting a size boost. Therefore this is a huge nerf to their independent range. In order to have the same power projection they enjoyed so easily before, they will have to coordinate refueling more often. Not to mention the cost of running these ships is a lot more expensive (but still trivial to these vastly wealthy players TBH).
Its not much of a huge change overall but its a start to nerfing capital power projection.
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