First off, I love your name.

CCP made changes awhile back that dramatically altered the industrial sector of the game. Some regions of space then became hotspots for some types of minerals, and other regions other minerals. For example, being in Nullsec, there was a strong lacking of Isogen, something we had to set up an agreement with a highsec alliance to have a steady supply line for; no longer could an alliance find everything they needed everywhere all the time.

This honestly doesn’t sound terrible and sounds like it would encourage cooperation, which is good. I dig it.

However, they then altered a lot of blueprints to require 1.5-10x more materials to build. Capital ships required multiple haulers just for the water required to build them. It’s just got kind of ridiculous, and as a result, a lot of capitals got so expensive that no one wanted to use them for fear of losing such expensive assets.

Around the time I left, they had announced changes to mining. I don’t recall the exact details, but it essentially introduced an efficiency factor. If you mine ten unit of this rock, it should, in theory, refine to [these minerals] in [these quantities]. However, the efficiency made it so that you’d only get about 20% of that rock material in those quantities. This skill had to be trained, and I think without other factors, your personal efficiency would cap out at around 60-70%, on top of the refining efficiency.

This all just sounds like a pain in the ass, but mining is the first revenue stream a lot of new players establish, and these changes made it so a lot of new players wouldn’t be allowed by whatever corp controlled that space to mine. For instance, if we pulled up a moon rock, something that takes 2 weeks, they weren’t allowing new players to mine it because a large portion of that rock, that we all effectively shared via buyback programs, would basically just… disappear, due to these inefficiencies.

The solution then sounds like you should stick to highsec mining, and this is what a lot of new players do, but the ores you dig up in highsec generally have even lower rates of yield.

It was also generally poor timing that shortly after announcing these changes, they announced a sale in skill injectors. Not skill extractors, injectors, meaning you could then pay for skillpoints that came out of thin air. It made it pretty clear this whole thing was a shitty cash grab.

Despite player outcry, CCP committed to these changes and did not alter course, citing “it’s just the goons that are complaining”. It wasn’t. All of these major blocs have pretty competent number crunchers and knew what kind of effect it was going to have on the industrial players, and thus the overall game.