I really don’t care much about the issue but it seemed deleting Niarja’s linking route between Amarr and Jita has only worked to isolate Amarr which was once a vibrant hub.
I missed the why as to how it disappeared, apparently player choice. If it magically reappeared how would it be perceived?
Badly?
Amarr is a more vibrant hub now than it was before. Before, all the miners and mission runners around Amarr would just fly to Jita to buy/sell stuff, because Niarja shortcut was there. Now the number of jumps is too high, and because they’re PvErs they refuse to ever take a lowsec shortcut instead, so they shop in Amarr instead.
A lot of the people who participated in the battle for Niarja did so because we wanted to cut Amarr off (that was my reason anyway), we made a big impact on the game world, which is really cool. Don’t take that away from us.
Anyway, CCP did add a new shortcut between Amarr and Jita not that long ago. It’s through Ahbazon. So I think they’ve made their view on the matter clear.
Trade in Amarr is not doing as bad as you think post-Niarja, and in fact, has been on the incline for the last three years. Meanwhile, Hek, Rens, and Dodixie (the hubs still connected to Jita by highsec routes) have remained static. This would indicate that when players have easy access to Jita, they go there. When they don’t, they use the secondary hub.
Back then a lot of us were trying to figure out how to predict which systems the Trigs would target, so we could ultimately cut all of the empires’ highsec routes off from each other and turn them all into highsec islands.
Unfortunately didn’t end up happening, but I think it would have done a lot to improve the game. Create many small chokepoints for hauling between the empires, and make them feel more impactful.
Such a return would be perceived as if player choice apparently does not matter.
Any subsequent ‘player choice’ event would be ignored, as it apparently does not matter anyway.
They were doing something similar but also diferent on the Chinese server.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/w0rmog/eve_new_dawn_map_testing_on_chinese_server/
Not sure how it went or what the current status of that server and its map layout is but you can research the details if interested.
Oh wow, I didn’t know that. That’s really cool! Sadly I don’t imagine it ended well, considering Chinese corps just set everyone else blue pretty much by default, so their null is pretty safe even on autopilot.
Good God, what is this abomination?
“Highsec isn’t safe” has been a controversial issue for players since the very beginning. In the new universe, all safeties will be locked green in highsec so players can not lose their ships to unexpected PvP.
In the new universe, we want players to get more value from their ship collection. So owning ships will give bonuses to the current piloted ship. This works like a new fitting resource and the more powerful bonuses granted by owning hulls will require more fitting. Combining ship bonuses can create many different reactions.
In the new universe, Stellar Express Recovery Service can allow a player to recover a destroyed ship (minus cargo) in their last docked station after paying a fee. Once the ship is recovered it can be used again. However this recovery is not unconditional. A ship exploding will cause the ship and items to lose durability, and items with zero durability will vanish. We hope this change will greatly alleviate the frustration of new players losing their ship, and allow them get back in the fray more quickly, and mechanically, remove the despair of a catastrophic “all your eggs in one basket” event.
In the new universe, we will be testing what we call a “suitability system”. The capability of ships can expand beyond that of just pilot skill. As the pilot pilots the ship, completes certain challenges, and uses certain in came consumables, the ship will gain additional bonuses.
No wonder we have so many Chinese players on TQ nowadays. If I ever made a statement to the effect of annoyance over the communication barrier between us, I take it back. I am so, so sorry NetEase did that to you.
I absolutely love it that Amarr is as separate from Jita as it is now. 2 trade hubs don’t need to be as close to each other as they once were. And the way it came to be was ingenious. Not just CCP deciding to separate them, but that was fought for by the players on the field.
Also, Amarr is still vibrant. You can get everything there with the same price levels as at Jita. You only need to travel to Jita for vanity items.
No it’s not. You can’t even buy many ships and types of ammo in Amarr any more, and what you can buy is heavily inflated. I know… I’m actively profiting from it. The trade route is cut, years have passed and no one really expects for everything to be available on the market, except what’s locally used.
I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but the decision to remove Niarja was not yours and you didn’t have any influence on what was happening. The decision was made by CCP to concentrate what’s left of the players (at the time) in Caldari space and Jita to keep an appearance of a relatively healthy game. With rapid trade route between Jita and Amarr, the commodities would be split between the two closest hubs. Due to player numbers significantly shrinking at the time, Jita would have been left without many items on the market. A true sign of a dying MMO - items not available to buy (in this case, in the main trade hub). But they sold the cover story pretty well, so I’m not blaming you for believing that you had an impact.
Ahbazon is lowsec. Not really a trading route.
I agree. This separation should also happen for Dodixie–Jita, Hek, and Rens.
I don’t disagree. I’d be wary of taking that route even in a blockade runner. But as a statement from CCP on all the whining about "please undo Niarja liminality”, it’s pretty clear: “No, we won’t.”
Pakhshi also got a new (ridiculously long on the map) shortcut highsec to highsec, so CCP clearly weren’t averse to adding highsec shortcuts. They made an active choice not to link Jita and Amarr trade route back together so tightly.
If that was the case they wouldn’t have left it up to the players in terms of letting us fight for it, they would have grabbed Niarja at the start as a warning like “this is what happens if you let the trigs win”. EDENCOM and other carebears were whining in local the whole time “please just let us win here, if Niarja goes final lim the game will be dead!!!” and if we’d chosen to listen and hand them the win, the shortcut would have stayed in. And if CCP didn’t want to give us this chance they would have just silently excluded Niarja from the list of final lim candidates and we’d have been none the wiser.
If there’s an issue here, it’s that it’s still too convenient (in general) to simply go to Jita.
There is one scenario where they reintroduce short highsec route between Jita and Amarr - if EVE gets so many players that Jita can’t realistically handle it. (The opposite conditions from when it was severed.) I really doubt that will happen.
I don’t care anyway. Stain is blue to Ahbazon locals, so I can move freely.
A high-sec shortcut between Jita and Amarr won’t make or break EVE Online
Hmmm I see
Amarr was doing way better when it was connected to Jita, as your graph clearly shows. The cutoff has massively damaged Amarr’s viability as the second-best hub because it’s not the second choice to drop off stuff anymore for sale there or shipment to Jita, it’s a backwater now. The gains you see only compensate the losses of the invasion and only barely so. Nowadays, Amarr is in many areas worse off than Jita, not just price and comparative sale volume.
Player choice never matters. It’s nothing but an illusion of choice in all events that CCP has run based on “player choice”. That Niarja would fall was an inevitable outcome, it was predetermined. Just like player choice over in China did not matter as they 100% supported Edencom and didn’t allow trigs to gain a single system. CCP couldn’t let this happen and forced parity between TQ and Serenity. Another example are the 4 new gates. They were predetermined to be built and players could not at all prevent that from happening. CCP even went so far and introduced special event rules against emergent player behavior in the event sites (dragging NPCs off of the warpin, for example).
CCP should put abundant rare ores in Uedema and let’s see how it will turn out.
Let’s just hope @Sargon_Of_Amerish has trained for more DPS
Thanks mate for giving me that giddy feeling again.
Well, unlike some others, I never said Amarr is exactly doing great—just better than the OP seemed to think. There’s definitely room for growth.
As to the graph, what it shows is that the Fall of Niarja had an impact, but that Scarcity and industry changes played a role in sustaining the downturn. Also, in the last three years, volume in Amarr has been steadily climbing and is currently recovering to pre-Niarja levels. Whether that trend line continues upward is yet to be seen.
I think we have to factor habit and perception into the equation. Before Niarja fell, people were used to making the 9j trip to Jita and trading there. After the fall, I think many continued to trade in Jita, despite the longer distance, simply because that’s what they’d always done and couldn’t see an alternative. In the immediate aftermath, we see a big spike in volume, which was probably a mass sell-off as traders abandoned Amarr and moved all orders to Jita. The two-year downward trend that followed bottomed out in the summer of 2022.
I expect what we’re seeing with the growth trend since is that older players are slowly changing their trading habits and new players are rolling Amarr and never had easy access to Jita (so they don’t have a bias toward that market).
If I had to guess, aggressive interdiction in e.g., Ahbazon and Uedama is probably the strongest cause for the uptick in Amarr. If that’s true, it suggests that severing HS routes entirely would further improve Amarr (and the other markets) out of pure necessity. Either that, or everyone would just move to Caldari space, but I don’t think that very likely (and less so if CCP combines the HS disconnection with new resources unique to each empire).
