Nah, that’s no different that the fact that sov structures under Dominion regen’d shields if you didn’t shoot them. The real problem they ran into was much older than that: introducing super-capitals without a clear idea of how they and subcaps were supposed to co-exist.
There’s basically 2 possible conditions for the economy: it can either be in accretion, or depletion. If it’s in depletion, where more is being destroyed, in a sustained way, than is being created, you see prices on everything shoot up, and people having problems replacing their ships. After all, in that situation, everything’s getting blown up, faster than it’s getting made. So you will run out.
If the economy’s in accretion (which we are, and always have been), then people are amassing more than is getting blown up. And the thing about accretion is… it’s accretion. It snowballs. So the people who have more have the ability to push harder, longer, in getting more. But if a thing is worth getting[1], then someone will get it. And in an accretion model, if people are building X, then eventually, you’re gonna wind up with a lot of X. It’s inevitable. So, as a developer, before you introduce X, you better have a clear idea of what X’s purpose is, how X interacts with everything else, and what your balancing mechanism is for when X is numerous enough to be considered ‘saturated’.
CCP, famously, thought there’d never be more than maybe 4 titans in the game. They’ve never had an idea of how to handle these things. But these things keep getting built, and because they take so long to build, they have what feels like significant value. Because they have that perceived value, people (in general, there are obviously outliers) are loathe to lose them foolishly. And accretion continues.
Then you add in short-sighted, blatant cash-grab moves like the Rorqual changes when they redid Command Bursts. Everyone know it was too good. Fozzie even said ‘we know this is too good, but we can dial it back later’. But they haven’t, and in some ways, they can’t. People have invested a lot of ISK or even real cash into skill injecting up into Rorqs, because they’re blatantly the best mining ship. Even after the changes to Excavators and improving the mining bursts, a Rorqual using Mining Drone IIs still outperforms a Hulk getting full mining boosts… so it’s always going to be more effective to run 5 Rorqs instead of 1 Rorq + 4 Hulks. And considering the difference in survivability (especially since you can run Shield bursts, since you don’t need the Mining links), the Rorq is easily the more practical investment, too.
Which, again, was all not only predictable, but predicted. And those big toys, from Rorq to Titan, become a problem… because they have that perceived value. If you could burn a titan fleet down and replace it quickly, they’d get tossed around like frigates do. If Rorqs didn’t use fragile little drones that can get wiped out by a couple of bombs but cost more than the capital ship that launched them, people would be more willing to risk that, too.
Added onto the issue of ‘perceived value due to investment’, there’s also the competitive issue. We need as many titans as we can get. Why? Because eventually, All of EVE™ will come after us again, for the crime of existing. If we don’t have enough firepower to win that fight, we’re not properly preparing for it, and we’re wasting our members’ time, effort, and subscription fees. Because every side needs Titans, every side has Titans. And because everyone’s enemies have Titans, everyone needs to get more.
Perversely, having these things means you need them so much, you can’t afford to lose the ones you have. Not in any real quantity. And this is EVE: if you can’t afford to lose it, you don’t fly it.
We have reasons to fight. What we really don’t have is reasons to do is risk. Because the cost of a bad risk could be unrecoverable.
- This is one of the big reasons nobody’ll build a Palatine Keepstar: it’s not worth it. For the same materials, you get some ridiculous number of ‘normal’ keepstars. Like, still more than the Imperium owns, even now. So why would you waste all that stuff in a single structure? The people who amass that kind of wealth don’t do it by being stupid enough to build the Palatine.