What Went Wrong With EVE Online's Equinox Sov Mining

On Friday CCP Games published a dev blog about mining. In recent years the company moved away from putting an individual employee's name on a dev blog in an effort to avoid a hostile player base descending on the author blaming them for all the game's ills. But the mining dev blog was published under the name CCP Okami. I did a little research and confirmed that CCP Okami is a real individual and not an artificial construct designed to attract fire away from the rest of the developers. Although drawing player anger may indeed be included in the duties of the Game Design Director on EVE Online. Here are the duties the job encompasses:

• Collaborating with the Creative Director: They work closely with the Creative Director to understand and translate the design intent into actionable work for the team.
• Leading the Design Team: They lead a team of system, technical, mission, and level designers, ensuring the quality and timely delivery of documentation, levels, UI changes, gameplay tuning, and balancing.
• Maintaining Communication: They maintain communication and consistency with art, audio, and feature teams to ensure a cohesive game design.
• Incorporating Feedback: They incorporate feedback from Live Ops and Production teams to align with the Creative Director’s vision.
• Working with Monetization Team: They integrate monetization designs into core mechanics.
• Ensuring Quality: They are responsible for driving high-quality feature implementation within the game vision and desired game “feel”

CCP Okami started working at CCP Games in February 2024, meaning they are the veteran of two expansions, Equinox and Revenant. An important note as the mineral price index spiked with the launch of Revenant in November 2024.

From the January 2025 Monthly Economic Report

I want to address what appears a terminology issue. Equinox is both an expansion and the name of the feature set the developers implemented to drive gameplay under "Equinox sov". I believe during the dev blog CCP Okami is referring to the entire sovereignty gameplay system.

So, what happened to produce that big spike in the mineral price index with the launch of Revenant? One factor was the developers' wish to bring flexibility to player-owned null sec. Some of the goals included:

• We wanted to give Nullsec more flexibility and choice. 
• We needed to make sure that more flexibility was balanced against the rest of the universe. 
• We needed to account for different play styles. 
• We wanted to make beautiful, science fiction space rocks for you to enjoy. 

The goals sound nice. The implementation possibly left something to be desired. According to CCP Okami, the devs made the following changes to implement flexibility.

• We introduced Tier 1 and Tier 2 mining Upgrades that allowed Sovereignty system owners to choose which ore types spawned in their owned space. 
• We made more ores available in Nullsec, with greater amounts of flexibility and choice via. Sov Hub Upgrades. 
• We introduced new ores in these sites that were curated for Equinox’s flexibility. 
• The sites had more asteroids with lower amounts and low to medium volume. 

At this point I think CCP Okami was a bit confusing with the use of the terms ore and minerals, which might have resulted from the editing process. For years the devs worked to make each security band dominant in certain minerals. With Equinox sov mechanics that separation disappeared, at least for player-owned null sec. The minerals removed from ores in high and low security space would not return at the same time. So in theory, the mineral supply should increase. So what happened?

A major problem was the creation of the new Equinox mining upgrades. The design challenge was to make cherry-picking the valuable ore and leaving the lower-value ores until last a memory. With the seven sets of sites the dev team created for Equinox sov they had two design priorities.

1. They needed to get the majority of their value from a single mineral type, as their site was meant to be a specific Upgrade choice an organization made for their system. This could mean being 100% made up of that one mineral or being mostly made up of that mineral with a few traces of some others. 
   
   
2. They needed an appropriate ISK/m3 value to be placed in large quantities in sites that would spawn in large numbers (ie. they needed to be a fairly standard ore, not a super special jackpot ore) 

I do want to point out that CCP hired CCP Okami in February 2024, long before the resource distribution update of 2020 which divided minerals into security bands. So instead of putting minerals back into ore, the developers created five new types of ores specific to spawned sites in null security space. I guess the designers were focusing on improving null security space and forgot actions in one area of space impact the entire game. CCP Okami's rundown of the issues that cropped up leads me to that conclusion.

The first is that we couldn’t fully anticipate the correct distribution and choices of Upgrades and sites across the universe and what total percentage of maximum ore volume generated by the sites per day would be mined. That had a significant impact on how the overall value of these sites was being calculated and has led to a clear impact in how minerals are being mined. Next, many of these sites were actually balanced to be more valuable than previous sites. However, due to how the rocks were distributed and placed in the sites it meant that there was also an increase in micromanagement, effort and labor which leads to both a tangible felt decrease in value and a shift in paradigm that’s been regarded as a confusing change. This was done to both try and support a broader variety of playstyles and also for some aesthetic factors.

I want to state that the design goal, in a broad sense, to support a broader variety of playstyles succeeded. But mining playstyles? Not so much.

Another unintended challenge that arose is that effectively when it comes to choosing an activity in Nullsec, the ISK/hour and relative effort of ratting makes it an obvious choice in comparison to mining which has higher labor and, in some cases, offers lower ISK/hour. This has driven more people away from mining and into ratting, which means that our estimates on mining value are off even more, since we weren’t accounting for this shift in work.

The change in the size of asteroids highly contributed to the increase in labor. From my perspective from mining in low sec for years, the smaller asteroid size also means paying more attention to the mechanics of mining and less to things like observing the environment and detecting possible threats. Not an issue for fleets, but for solo or small-gang mining, possibly an issue.

My well-known allergy to bubbles kept me from thinking of the final issue EVE's Game Design Director mentioned.

Finally, we’re able to start measuring the real impact of the Metenox in the game ecosystem more thoroughly, which highlights some unintended side effects and challenges. The high ROI of Metenox's in lower and mid-tier moons, combined with its inability to extract regular ores, has contributed to the current increase in the Pyerite price, as moon mining is no longer able to supply the market with that ore.

A funny thing about the mineral affected by the 2020 resource distribution play: pyerite and mexallon. They were not included in the redistribution, at least not directly.

How the devs rearranged distribution in 2020

Is there an institutional disregard for pyerite as a common mineral? I also don't know if the 2020 changes removed ore from null sec high in pyerite, meaning the Metenox change had a far greater impact than it would in pre-2020 New Eden.

CCP Okami also addressed another issue: messaging.

I also want to touch on our messaging. I want to acknowledge that we didn’t do a great job of conveying the vision of Equinox to you all and leaned in on things like “rejuvenating” or “more wealth”, which is confusing when things don’t feel like they’re lining up that way for the average person playing out there. Our goals were more around flexibility and self-sustainability, as well as creating long-term systemic levers that we could develop onto for years to come. We definitely learned a lesson here, and we’ll work on better rolling out and being transparent with our feature visions in the future. 

I will admit I like the idea of developers striving to produce better communications. I can recall other times, like during the Chaos Era, where providing information to players about development goals was considered a bad thing. Perhaps I've spent too much time playing Final Fantasy XIV and listening to Yoshi-P try to keep the player-base informed about upcoming developments. But I really prefer openness in development where possible.

Finally, I'd like to end with a conclusion CCP Okami came to about the whole experience.

Hindsight is 20/20 and we can totally see where we made our missteps. While the intention was sound, our hypotheses and estimates didn’t work out and lead us to our high MPI that we have today. I personally have a lot of learning around how to better work with you folks around messaging our intentions around big, systemic reworks and I’m going to be way more in touch with you all as we roll out changes and updates like this.