The basics of the classic EVE Online game were in place as early as 2005, with the first expansions adding mechanics that put the majority of resources into the hands of groups who maintained military control over nullsec space. The limited nature of the valuable resources (in belts: ABC ore, and in moons: tech II goo) available in nullsec meant that, over time, they maintained their high value relative to the rest of EVE's economy. The moon-based portion of this value was accessed through territorial control, while the rest was accessed through active farming by players.
Meanwhile, the game's power curve was also established by this time: capital class ships consumed outsized resources to build, provided the necessary tools to conduct starbase warfare, and the top end (particularly titans) dominated the tactical battlespace, at the cost of massive investment in infrastructure, resources, and player time. The importance of the power curve to military contests, combined with the large investments needed, ensured that the game's demand for tech I minerals would be sustained even as the markets for tech I subcapital ships became saturated during the first decade of the game's life.
The distinction between PvP, PvE, and resource acquisition in EVE quickly led to one of the first sandbox advancements of the game: renting. By allowing militarily inferior groups to farm the space while paying rent to a dominant power, the most powerful player groups were able to maintain revenue streams larger than if they had been restricted to territorial control and resources actively farmed themselves. This allowed the landlords to extract more of the space's value while not engaging in PvE gameplay that the PvPers involved didn't find interesting. Because EVE's original sovereignty system was a natural extension of the existing moon-and-starbase system, it led to relatively slow progression across defended territory while ensuring that militarily-capable sovereigns would have the logistical capacity needed to operate harvester moons and claim most of the conquered territory's income.
For most of the rest of the decade, it is remarkable how little the overall structure of these mechanics changed. There are two substantial exceptions bookending this time: Revelations I at the start of 2006, and Apocrypha at the start of 2009. Both expansions introduced new regions of space with special mechanics – the drone regions and wormhole space – which altered the balance of resource distribution in unique ways. The drone regions did not provide bounties from rat kills, but instead the drone rats dropped compressed minerals ("drone poo") which could be refined. Previously the number of belts present containing highend ore was limited by daily respawn mechanics, meaning the amount of highends that could be mined in any given day was ultimately capped. Thanks to rat and complex respawn mechanics, the drone regions changed this for the first time, even though the full effect of this at scale wouldn't manifest until later.
Meanwhile, wormhole space in Apocrypha provided a new and substantially improved method of farming for the advanced player, as well as an "endgame" piece of content that involved relatively fewer players than nullsec: wormholes allowed more limited numbers of ships and size of hardware, with an outright ban on supercapital-class hulls. While it took time before the content was fully solved, and before other power curve buffs (in e.g. Dominion) made wormholes more accessible to players, they soon provided a competitive source of raw ISK which did not require the territorial control of nullsec previously needed to print that much cash.
The Dominion expansion substantially changed many pieces of this system. First, it removed the starbase-driven sovereignty warfare in favor of sov-specific structures – infrastructure hubs, territorial claim units, and sovereignty blockade units. These new anchorables, generally speaking, moved the focus of nullsec warfare away from the back-and-forth of starbase control warfare to set piece battles over each individual solar system or key conquerable stations/outposts. These structures also introduced the possibility of upgrades which boosted the farmability of a solar system when installed – for the first time, nullsec players would have access to the “green sites” (anomalies) introduced to wormhole systems in Apocrypha – but on per-solar-system respawn mechanics, rather than the region- or constellation-based respawns used both in J-space and other repop mechanics in EVE.
Second, by this time period it was clear that the original design for supercapitals – titans in particular – was broken at scale, with fleet combat reaching a degenerate state in the presence of an increasing number of simultaneous titan [at the time, area-of-effect] doomsdays. In response, the capital progression track was rebalanced, introducing (in the subsequent Tyrannis expansion) supercarriers in something similar to their modern role (and fighter bombers as a drone type) and changing the titan doomsday to the single-target version still in widespread use today. It was in Dominion that the EVE progression game first contemplated the idea that many players would build a titan, and attempted to answer the question of what would happen when they did.
For better and for worse, these changes did not go exactly as planned: the rebalancing of the supercarrier in Tyrannis introduced an effective supercapital hull at a price point much lower than a titan. The initial supercapital balancing passes left them with stats which were extremely effective against much larger fleets of subcapitals, with even full fleets unable to challenge several squadrons of supercarriers or titans effectively during this period. As was the case in the previous age of EVE, the overall power & progression curve remained very impactful on how the strategic game for control of the map played out.
Finally, a rebalancing of tech II inputs and the introduction of alchemy changed the layout of moongoo needed for tech II production. This had the effect of generally dropping the price of certain R64s like dysprosium, but left the universe in a state where technetium – a northern regional R32 – was seriously bottlenecked against the overall “basket” of moon minerals, which absorbed the majority of the price of tech II finished goods. This ultimately preserved the value of moongoo – and hence the value of conquest as a game mechanic – but rearranged the worth of various sections of space in an unexpected and game-defining way for EVE due to the regional arrangement of technetium ore.
These space riches led relatively directly to new metagame advancements: Led by early innovators in Goonswarm Federation and TEST Alliance Please Ignore, it was during the Dominion era that general-scale military reimbursement (or “SRP”) became commonplace in nullsec alliances. This put competitive pressure on poorly-led alliances where income and wealth were improperly managed or diverted to corrupt leadership, as well as providing an engine of competition against the freshly dominant Dominion/Tyrannis supercapital meta.
It was also at this point that the forges of the drone regions saw their highest relevance: newly empowered by Dominion’s sovereignty upgrades, producing T1 minerals at a scale unavailable to miners in highsec or nullsec, and under the relatively unified political control of the Russian bloc, supercapital production surged under new demand for the hulls based on the Dominion and Tyrannis mechanics. Combined with the relatively peaceful and politically diverse Northern Coalition, supercapitals became available to high bidders and “endgame” progression players in a way that was not previously widespread.
Some changes were made in order to control these elements in later expansions: In particular, supercapitals’ ability to affect subcapitals was nerfed in the Crucible expansion in late 2011, and the drone regions’ special loot tables (and hence, “gunmining”) disappeared in the Odyssey expansion in early 2013. However, these changes ultimately did little to change the broad shape of the EVE strategy game: the power of supercapitals and capitals defined large portions of nullsec combat, and their ability to respond to fights quickly from anywhere on the map led to ever-escalating confrontations between all of the large players. Eventually, this culminated in a well-known showdown in early 2014: the Battle of B-R5RB.
This period was ultimately bookended by the Phoebe expansion and the introduction of jump fatigue. In an effort to introduce a new layer of tactical and operational decision-making, capital jump drives were significantly rebalanced to dramatically change their range and restrict their ability to reach more than a region or two away in a short time. This single change was far-reaching enough that it completely upended the existing strategic game, setting the stage for a new era of EVE Online. It is in the period between Phoebe and Aegis that the next true metagame innovation took place. In light of the new jump fatigue mechanics, capital pilots could choose whether to deploy while considering far more limited threats. Combined with Tiberizzle’s invention of the jump-capacitor-stable ratting Chimera, it was in the aftermath of Phoebe that the game saw the creation of the first capital defense umbrella.
This new era also opens with a new – and to current players, familiar – sovereignty system, introduced in the Aegis expansion. With the playerbase and CCP generally feeling dissatisfied by the set-piece battles over high-EHP objects like infrastructure hubs and TCUs, this new system attempted to refocus sovereign warfare on establishing grid control across multiple systems at once, bringing together certain mechanical ideas that had been debated on the Kugutsumen forums throughout much of the Dominion era. However, much like the previous epoch of EVE, this time period is not defined by the sovereignty system, but rather the other sweeping changes to the game which closely followed Aegis.
In Citadel, the nullsec progression track was rebalanced again, splitting the “carrier” ship class – formerly capable of triage mode – into its modern halves and introducing the controllable fighter squadron. Simultaneously, a new line of anchorable structures were introduced to provide an eventual replacement for both the starbases and conquerable/constructible stations in use up until that point. Crucially, these new structures – the eponymous “citadels” – were balanced around the existing capital and supercapital metagame, introducing damage caps and possessing armaments which posed a reasonable threat to the nullsec fleets of the age. Unlike the player-constructed outposts, which became mechanically similar to NPC conquerable stations once built, citadels were fully destructible in spite of offering station-like docking and other pilot services. This had the effect of nerfing a portion of the map-and-conquest game – where previously player investments in outpost upgrades became a permanent feature of the space, destructible citadels moved those upgrades to rigs (a source of salvage demand) and required players to re-invest in the space after conquest and settlement.
The following expansion fundamentally changed EVE further: Ascension converted the game to a theoretically-freemium model, introducing alpha and omega clone states and adding a new product to the list of things CCP sells: skill extractors. Beyond game time, cosmetics, and one-off packs, skill injectors became a mainstay of the EVE product line, firmly transitioning EVE towards “pay-2-progress” as opposed to the then-traditional subscription-only model. Skill injection vastly shortened the power curve for whole sections of the playerbase: where previously, skills were the most difficult part of EVE’s progression curve to move through quickly, now they became one of the easiest, with the mechanics of extractors-and-injectors especially well balanced to support the rapid creation of cheap and specialized “alt” pilots.
Completing the trifecta of post-Aegis changes was Lifeblood, which changed the way moon resources worked: Starbase-based “harvester” moons were replaced with the citadel-driven “fracture”-style moons in use to the present day. This was also the expansion which greatly upgraded the Rorqual-class capital mining ship, and the ensuing period is frequently known as “Rorquals Online” thanks to the way they interacted with the rest of the game’s mechanics during this period. While these changes were narratively in keeping with the pro-”farms and fields” playerbase attitudes of that day and consistent with CCP’s envisioned player exploration-and-building arc for EVE, the underlying mechanics proved extremely destructive to the game’s ecosystem for multiple reasons.
Rorquals and Lifeblood mechanics were the final piece of the puzzle needed to break the game’s original tech I progression curve. By combining multiple previous mechanics and metagame innovations, multiple groups – most notably Goonswarm Federation in Delve – were able to “go infinite” by scaling out PvE operations in a way not previously seen in EVE. It’s important to note that this scaling interaction was not solely due to Rorquals, but rather the combination of multiple mechanics:
Dominion repops of gravimetric anomalies Home defense via capital umbrella Rorqual PANIC module Player-driven enforcement of anom repopping Skill injection for fast, ISK-based alt creation
Under these conditions, the game’s ecosystem broke very rapidly – the rate of capital and supercapital production skyrocketed, and the available mechanics allowed new players to advance through the game’s progression curve in a matter of weeks or months, rather than over a period of 3-5+ years. Eventually, tech I mineral prices crashed to something close to the game’s mechanical insurance floor, making it essentially free to buy and use a capital-class hull for several months before self-destructing it for the insurance payout which covered the original mineral price. Within 2-3 years the tech I progression curve had finally been exhausted, with capitals and supercapitals widely available to essentially any player willing to devote the correct amount of effort to their acquisition.
Ironically, the way Rorquals and their interaction with other mechanics broke EVE’s progression game wasn’t the largest or most disruptive change of the Lifeblood expansion. That belongs to the moon changes specifically, which – by way of the change from harvester to fracture moons – removed the floor of value acquired for the conquest of nullsec space. As observed at the beginning of our journey, conquest for space and the value present in it was the heart of EVE’s player-vs-player game. This is what the Lifeblood expansion also broke: by requiring that players hold and invest infrastructure and labor into space to extract any of that value, a key fundamental of the original game was removed.
As mentioned above, after several years of these prevailing conditions, the power curve of the game appeared to be severely damaged, with capital proliferation so-called a frequent target of the playerbase’s ire. The following period, often known by the “Scarcity” moniker, is interesting especially thanks to the effects it had on player behavior relative to the previous time. Due to several changes – ore revamps throughout New Eden, the surgical strike patch and related nerfs to supercapitals, and the capital blueprints patch – player behavior around supercapitals has retrenched to their use case as a deterrent – an intentional though inexact analogy to the behavior of real-world nations with respect to nuclear weapons in the modern era. This means that they are needed for the capture and defense of space, but are too valuable to be otherwise deployed in order to win wars of aggression at any substantial risk. Indeed, the period’s largest war (World War Bee 2/Beeitnam) is most properly seen as an attempt by the aggressors (PAPI) to cause either serious attrition or the breakup of the Imperium supercapital fleet at the lowest possible risk to themselves.
The effects of scarcity (connected to player income) on the overall nullsec meta have added to these outcomes. More valuable farming elsewhere at similar difficulty levels (mostly due to inflation in i.e. abyssals, Pochven, and wormholes, but partly connected to the DBS/BRM) has drawn a great deal of nullsec’s day-to-day krab population elsewhere. Meanwhile, the lack of a replacement for the pre-Lifeblood harvester moon system has left the game’s conquest-based income layer completely absent, meaning that there is a rapid dropoff in effectiveness to conquest after any given organized group has conquered sufficient space to live in. When combined with the lowered overall population, this leads directly to the so-called “floodplains” effect, wherein many regions are not worth either attacking or defending except in the cases of a greater war, and border conflicts are relatively uncommon and low in meaning.
On net, this has led to a period where strategic realignment is difficult to achieve by force of arms and progression through the power curve cannot easily empower new actors to challenge existing alliances. The playerbase interprets this in various ways depending on their factional allegiance and position in EVE’s progression curve, but ultimately this creates a situation where the game is more like a theme park – players are happy when there is new content, but will quickly fall back to various forms of dismay as new content is exhausted and the sandbox competition game does not respond to their efforts.