Hello again folks. I’m here today to talk a bit about pirate battleships, the costs of obtaining them and what were here at CCP are planning to do about it.
One of the major EVE balance concerns raised by the community over the past several months has been the low price of pirate battleships and their impact on the rest of EVE. Prices for pirate battleships have been dropping over the past three years, with the changes caused largely by buffs to BPC drop rates and to anomaly escalations in late 2014.
These price decreases have negatively impacted ship balance as pirate battleships become more competitive for their cost compared to many other ship classes.
Obviously the price isn’t the only balance concern about a ship group as prominent and diverse as pirate battleships, and other factors such as the strength of Upwell structure energy neutralization weapons contribute to the dominance of the Machariel in particular. However after giving this situation some thought internally and engaging in plenty of community discussion through venues such as Fanfest and the CSM, we agree that price should be the target of the first set of changes.
Our changes relating to pirate battleship prices will come in a few stages, with the first arriving next week in our June release and another set of changes coming in July, with the potential of more changes in the future.
In June we are starting to address the supply of pirate battleship BPCs, with moderate changes to the chance of escalations spawning from the most popular high-end anomalies and larger changes to the drop rates of the BPCs themselves from quite a few NPCs.
In July we plan to begin making changes to the material composition of the pirate battleships to increase their build costs somewhat. More details of these changes will come later.
We don’t expect any of these changes to be silver bullets, especially since there will be stockpiles of BPCs and ships to work through. However we do believe that these changes will be a solid set of next steps in helping to address this situation.
Thanks.
