There are many reasons why industry in nullsec is not able to reach self sufficiency, and since that is such a large topic I’m going to limit this post to one small aspect of the problem.
The problem with suggestions on how to fix ‘things’ is that a lot of them would require significant development work, or feature additions/reductions from the game. CCP has their mind and their plan, so suggestions of that nature, if absorbed, take a lot of time to manifest in-game.
With that preamble, I was linked a suggestion that not only has merit, but also can be adopted by CCP without too much development effort/time in the short term, setting up breathing room for a longer term solution.
The original post on EvEO Forums
Below is a copy of the original with my thoughts on implications to what LeoniaTavira is saying.
LeoniaTavira Writes:
Region-Specific Moon Minerals are Outdated
Fanfest 2015 included many exciting announcements from CCP, especially relating to nullsec sovereignty and structures.
One phrase that I heard a couple of times, as I watched the video, was CCP’s desire to ‘give nullsec players the ability to build everything in their space’. Toward that end Fozzie announced that nullsec ores will soon be rebalanced, but no mention at all was made of moon mining and moon resource distribution.
Potentially, the moon mining structures that were alluded to have some play in this towards which CCP has not yet given insights. I can see them intentionally keeping the cards so close to their chests over this subject due to the number of corporations/alliances that rely on moon income.
Currently it is not possible for nullsec alliances to harvest all the different types of moon minerals in their space, forcing them to import minerals or completed ships and modules from hisec (read Jita).
Moon mining is the process of extracting resources from moons. Those resources are then reacted twice into advanced materials, and then built into every tech two ship and module in the game.
There are 20 different moon minerals, split into five groups of four by their rarity.
First there are the gases, which are the most common and are found all throughout low and nullsec:
Atmospheric Gases
Evaporite Deposits
Hydrocarbons
SilicatesNext are the Rarity 8 moons, which are racial materials. Each one corresponds to a single race (being used in all T2 ships and modules relating to that race), and is found in a specific area of space:
Cobalt – used by Gallente. Found in space that has Blood Raider or Sansha rats.
Scandium – used by Minmatar. Found in space with Angel rats.
Titanium – used by Caldari. Found in space with Serpentis rats.
Tungsten – used by Amarr. Found in space with Gurista rats.R16 moons are non-racial, and are roughly evenly distributed through all regions:
Cadmium
Chromium
Platinum
VanadiumR32 moons are not racial in their use, but they are region specific in location:
Caesium – mostly found in space with Serpentis rats
Hafnium – mostly found in space with Angel rats
Mercury – mostly found in space with Blood Raider or Sansha rats
Technetium – the most famous R32, mostly found in space with Gurista ratsR64 moons are the most valuable, and are neither racial nor region specific:
Dysprosium
Neodymium
Promethium
ThuliumThis confusing mix of racial materials and regions means that it is impossible for any single nullsec region to provide the resources required to be self sufficient when it comes to tech two ships and modules.
I find it interesting that CCP has the Rarity 8s and 32s as regional, but not the 16s and 64s. If this was intended by CCP to be one of the original pieces of our EvE puzzle to drive conflict, then it’s clearly outdated. I would be interested in hearing the original theory on why this was done. LeoniaTavira is correct in pointing out that no individual region can be self sufficient.
Unfortunately for the EvE community, a blunder by CCP created a severe imbalance that made Technetium a chokepoint in the building of T2 ships. While that in itself is not overly bad, the fact that it was a region locked moon mineral made ‘The North’ extremely rich, very quickly exceeding the income of the alliances based out of any other region. The time in which that imbalance persisted in game is also a driving factor as to why certain entities are so brokenly rich compared to others. Since EvE is a sandbox, and humans are greedy, some entities created the Organization of Technetium Exporting Corporations agreement. The OTECH agreement consisted of representatives from the CFC, NCdot, Ev0ke, and PL. These four nullsec entities controlled 90% of the Technetium moons in the galaxy. This allowed the involved parties to effectively get rich safely and are a major factor in how imbalanced/broken nullsec sovblocs are currently, but that’s another article entirely.
(note: I’m just observing, I’m not making any judgement as I would likely have done the same thing if I was in their position)
To continue on with what LeoniaTavira is talking about, certain minerals being only available in certain regions…
The region of Fountain is a good example. Have a look at the publicly available Dotlan moon surveys of the region: http://evemaps.dotlan.net/region/Fountain/moons. When it comes to R8 moons, residents of Fountain are able to mine a vast number of titanium moons, but almost no cobalt, scandium, or tungsten. Because titanium is only useful for constructing Caldari ships and related modules, if the inhabitants of Fountain want to fly Tech 2 Amarr, Minmatar or Gallente ships they need to import either the ships or the moon minerals from hisec.
Perhaps the plan, many years ago when resource distributions were first done, was to create a need for inter-regional trade, however the vast distances between some nullsec regions and the placement of nullsec in a ring around hisec means that the simplest place for this trade to occur is in the middle.
Over the years there have been many calls for nerfs to jump freighters, and the initial devblog detailing the Phoebe changes included one of those nerfs, however it was rolled back after a massive player outcry.
Reducing the ability of nullsec groups to move items from the ‘rim’ to the ‘centre’ will do nothing to enable nullsec groups to survive without those items, and making nullsec to hisec trade harder will not make nullsec to nullsec trade more viable.
What nullsec alliances need, in order to be able to be truly self sufficient, is the ability to source all their resources locally, so that the decision of whether or not to import items from hisec actually becomes a decision, instead of a requirement.
The ability to gather all the resources needed to support and sustain an alliance within a single region would go a long way to making ‘outer rim’ territory desirable. With the impending sov changes, there is much talk of people simply dropping/not defending systems at the extremities of New Eden and focusing on a select area to defend. Talk of basing out of NPC Nullsec stations and only taking the adjacent sov is quite a popular suggestion. Likewise the idea for living in Lowsec and projecting slightly into nearby Constellations is frequently mentioned.
Is creating an environment where the inner core of Nullsec is hotly contested and the ‘outer rim’ left to foolish or smaller entities looking to break out the desired path? I feel that if CCP pushed hard to make the furthest reaches of the galaxy most desireable, and provided a potential platform for sustaining living out there, the upcoming sov changes can be really positive for the game as a whole.
LeoniaTavira has three potential solutions/fixes to the problem:
Simply seed currently empty moons in low and nullsec with R8 and R32 moon minerals that aren’t naturally present in the region, to bring the balance towards parity. This should be relatively easy to implement (the seeding of new R64s back in 2013 proves that it’s doable), however it has an obvious economic downside. A massive increase in the number of available R32 moons would result in the market price of the moon minerals decreasing. There would likely be little effect on R8 prices, as the vast majority of these are currently unused anyway.
The majority of R8s are empty, and most R8s barely pay for the tower to run them. (A titanium moon nets roughly 110m per month, and a small tower costs approx 100m per month)
I feel that simply adding more would not help the state of the game, and just add more scanning to the collective knowledge of mineral locations.
Wipe and reseed all of the current R8 and R32 moons so that they have a ¼ chance of being any of the four types, with an aim of creating balance within each region. Players would then know where the new moons are, as old R32s would still be R32s, thus reducing the need to rescan tens of thousands of moons, however a lot of player mining and reaction activity would be temporarily disrupted.
This is my favourite immediate idea. I would like to see a moon shake up quickly as the tools already exist for the developers to pull the trigger on it.
Remove moon mining from the game and introduce a new method of harvesting the materials required for tech two production, for example comet or ring mining (to name a couple that have been discussed in the past). Obviously this would be the hardest to implement, as it would require significant development time, however replacing passive structure based gameplay with player activities seems to be in line with CCP’s goals.
With a shakeup done quickly, and the eventual removal of moon mining in it’s current form, the game can potentially open it’s doors to new immersive game play over passive income.
My preferred option is a combination of 2. and 3. Move the moons toward equal distribution and give the playerbase time to adapt to the new opportunities that brings, while working on a new system to replace POS based moon mining.
Why does it matter if nullsec alliances are dependent on Jita?
Firstly: geopolitics and strategy. Because nullsec alliances are reliant on jumpfreighter logistics to bring in massive volumes of ships and materials, they need stable and secure lines of supply between their sovereign space and hisec. Many nullsec regions, but most notably Branch, Tenal, Cobalt Edge, Omist, Paragon Soul, and Period Basis, are a long way from hisec, with multiple intervening regions. Alliances trying to live in those regions are forced to choose between blueing the people who live between them and hisec to protect the safety of their supply line, or dying to their better supplied neighbour if they try to fight.
Allowing nullsec groups to locally harvest all the required materials would enable small groups to carve out their own chunks of space on the fringes and allow them to hold out even with enemies positioned between them and hisec.
Secondly: choice. A quick look at the in-game map statistics shows that the vast majority of industrial activity still takes place in hisec. Much of this work is done by alts, some of whom are owned by players with mains in nullsec alliances who place them in the only place that makes sense: near the resources they need to build with. Enabling local harvesting of all moon minerals would allow those players to choose whether to keep their alts in hisec, or move them out to sov space to take advantage of upgraded stations, and it would provide more of an incentive for nullsec alliances to maintain a strong industrial wing.
I agree with LeoniaTavira’s conclusions, and anything to break EvE’s problem of highsec industry overshadowing nullsec industry for people who live in nullsec is a great move in my opinion.
