Map of military development indices in Tribute.

I mentioned in passing in the last article about ratting that some systems are better for it than others. All 0.0 systems in EVE are characterized by “development indices” on three axes: military, industrial, and strategic. The first two indices directly effect how well you can farm in the system. The higher the military index, the more cosmic anomalies will spawn in the system. The higher the industrial index, the more high value mining sites will spawn.

You can’t just pay to upgrade the development indices in your systems, though. You have to actively raise the development level in the system by farming. Each NPC pirate you kill in a system raises its military development level slightly. If you have enough people killing enough pirates, you can level up the quality of that system for that kind of farming. You have to work to keep it up, though — over time, the development level will fade.

There are two big implications of this system. The first is that a 0.0 system can now support many more simultaneous farmers than it used to. If you only have an average of 2-3 people online over the course of the day, they won’t be able to maintain a well developed military system. The development level will decay faster than they can kill rats to increase it. This encourages people to clump up. Better to max out the development level in one system than spread out across a bunch of systems with poor development levels.

There’s a subtle tradeoff here, though. Every system your alliance owns costs quite a bit of ISK: 180M ISK/month just to own it, plus a bunch of other costs to upgrade it. So you don’t want to have a bunch of systems you’re not actively making money from. And since everyone is clumping up in fewer systems now, all those extra systems you own are burning a big hole in your wallet.

The solution? The farming metaphor shows up again: serfdom! With all these expensive (and fertile) fields, it makes a lot of sense for the owners of the space to install serfs. Serfs pay a monthly fee back to the alliance that owns the territory (a fee substantially higher than the upkeep costs for that system) and moves in its own farmers. This makes sense for the serfs because they get a system that they can efficiently farm. It makes sense for the alliance because they don’t have enough pilots of their own to farm the systems effectively. As with feudal serfs, these space-serfs tend to have some similar obligations to their lord. If the area comes under attack, they’re generally expected to take up arms and help with the defense. They tend not to be as large or well organized as the major alliances that own space, but every ship counts. These serf-corporations are usually referred to as “renters” or “pets” (although pets often has a slightly different connotation).

The other big implication is for long-term warfare. Because un-farmed systems lose their development levels, a concerted campaign of disruption and harassment can scare away all the farmers. If this is sustained, the development level of the effected systems will fall, harming the incomes of all the pilots based there. This can be a super effective tactic for smaller groups trying to weaken larger groups without resorting to all-out combat. Star Fraction, a long-lived major alliance announced just such an operation:

Therefore, Operation Black Lustrum, in which the Star Fraction will wage war against the economic and industrial base of our targets. … In particular, the development indices pertaining to military and industrial activity serve as keen and acute indicators of the economic health of a territory and the alliance that administers it.

There’s a longer overview article about how this campaign is progressing that describes a bit more about how this works. So far, it looks like this kind of guerilla warfare is pretty damn effective at decreasing development levels and choking off income streams. The North is thankfully clear of these kinds of tactics so far, but it may just be a matter of time before our farming gets shut down in favor of serious combat.

His core complaint is that STO is fundamentally not a massively multiplayer game. The descriptive quip he uses (which it sounds like he’s pulled from the forums, or other player responses) is “moderately multiplayer”; players nominally exist in the same world but have very little interaction with each other. I haven’t played STO myself, but from what friends of mine have said this definitely rings true. This isn’t necessarily bad, though. We’re seeing a significant broadening of the “massively multiplayer” category. We’re seeing a lot more deviation from the World of Warcraft style design. Worlds like Guild Wars are somewhat less multiplayer than WoW; outside of cities, the world is entirely instanced. You can even skip the leveling process entirely and just start with a top level character for use in player versus player combat that looks a lot more like Halo or Counterstrike in format than WoW.

Coming from the other end of this multiplayer-ness continuum, we also see games like Sony’s new MAG, where teams of 128 players are common. MAG even has a lot of the character progression mechanics we expect to see in MMOs. As you play more, more possible combat roles unlock for you, you move higher up the command chain, your character begins to look more powerful, and so on. At that scale, MAG is essentially a scaled-up version of battlegrounds in WoW (which never have more than 40 players on a team). All that seems to be missing is a coherent world to live in between matches.

So what is it that actually makes a game an MMO, if what are nominally MMOs are looking less like what we’re used to, and non-MMOs are looking more than more like MMOs? Should we fault STO for not looking like the MMOs we expect? I don’t think the moderately-multiplayer place on the continuum that STO occupies is necessarily doomed to be un-fun. STO’s real sin is that having few opportunities for player interaction is just un-Star Trek. The world of Star Trek is one that’s very strongly focused on the interpersonal dynamics of the people involved, not relentless combat. A game that required people to work together to achieve common goals – or even just to peacefully coexist on a ship – would be a much better fit with the fiction of the world. EVE offers some of the social part of this vision, but it’s a cold, harsh, and deadly world. But I don’t think it would be at all unreasonable to imagine an STO where players served on ships together, worked towards industrial or combat goals that benefited their faction in different ways, and had some of the utopian flavor of the Trek universe. That’s the real tragedy, I think – Cryptic blew their chance to make a game that was more than thin Star Trek skin onto a game design that it just doesn’t fit.

A pod - the last barrier between you and explosive decompression.

After the structure of the world itself, perhaps the most important decision a virtual world designer makes is about the nature of death. How death happens, and the consequences for the dead form the foundation of most of the mechanics in the world.

In most virtual worlds, death is pretty inconsequential. When you die in World of Warcraft, you reappear in the nearest graveyard in non-corporeal form and can either pay money to resurrect instantly, or you can run back to your body (conveniently shown on your map) to resurrect there for free. So death is just a time penalty. You’re forced to do something menial and time consuming (running back to your body) to encourage you not to do risky things that might lead to death. So in World of Warcraft (and in most worlds) this penalty is just a matter of minutes.

In EVE, death is a very different matter. Ships in EVE are a sort of russian doll setup. The ship contains the pod which contains the actual player’s body. So death happens in two phases. As your ship takes damage, your shields get worn down first, then your armor, and then finally the structure of the ship itself. When your ship explodes, it’s gone. Forever. Some of the modules you’ve equipped on the ship will be left behind, but you won’t be around to pick them up. They’re there mostly as spoils for the winners of the battle. This loss hurts a lot – you can see in my visualization of ship prices, you’re losing much, much more than a few minutes of work. Even the smallest ships will take more time to earn the money to pay for than it would take you to run back to your body in World of Warcraft. There is some consolation, though. Most of the time you’re flying a ship that is well insured, so you’re only losing like 40% of the ship price instead of 100%, but T2 ships can’t really be insured, so they really hurt to lose.

When your ship explodes, you’re left in your pod. Your pod has very little health, and will explode pretty much as soon as someone looks at you the wrong way. If your pod gets blown up, you lose that particular clone. All pilots have a bunch of clones, so losing one isn’t too costly. What can hurt is implants. You can install expensive items inside the head of a clone to give it special abilities. These implants do things like increase the speed at which you learn new skills, or confer combat benefits of various kinds. These can be quite expensive. In some cases, they cost substantially more than the ship itself. Managing to kill someone’s pod (known as “podding”) is usually tricky, but you have a chance of costing them quite a bit of money, so people really enjoy pulling it off. There’s also a tiny chance that the person who’s pod you’re blowing up hasn’t been keeping it “up to date.” This is kind of obscure, but every so often you have to pay to get a nicer clone — your character is older and has more skills, so needs a more expensive clone to hold them all. If you forget to do that and get podded, you can easily lose a month or more of training. This is quite rare, though, and such a stiff penalty that people tend to remember to stay up to date.

This is all a long way to say that in EVE, death hurts. It can be brutal and fast and it stings. For me, at least, my ship’s you’re-about-to-explode alarms really get my heart pumping. So why play a game where death is so awful? Paradoxically, it makes the rest of the game way more meaningful. When death matters, people will do a lot more to avoid it. More than anything, death is what pushes pilots together. Death is less scary (and less likely) when you face it in groups. It has geopolitical implications, too. If death didn’t cost money, the entire infrastructure of war wouldn’t make sense. Losing a war is expensive for the pilots in your fleets, and makes it hard to sustain serious losses for a long time. To assuage the financial implications, most alliances have a reimbursement program to keep their pilots flying (and losing) ships as much as possible. Still, alliances that go on long losing streaks tend to start shedding members because they’re a) not having fun anymore, and b) getting quite poor. If death was just a matter of five or ten minutes work, war would be nothing but an attendance competition.

New Eden, with systems sized (and colored) based on the number of pilots in system in the last 24 hours.

More than any other MMO company, CCP has tried to turn the challenges of single-sharded-ness into game mechanics. EVE has never been a world where you go to experience the “content” of a beautifully designed and imagined world. In EVE, the content is the players, and players seek each other out to have new experiences and tell new stories.

These design decisions create a very different kind of world than he franchise model of World of Warcraft. First of all, it means you can automatically play with all your friends. There’s no negotiation of which particular version of the world you want to meet up in, and no having to pick between your high school friends and college friends, who play in different places.

There are global implications for single-sharding, too. You’re playing with people from around the world. In my most recent fleet op, I could easily hear Australian, Indian, British, Eastern European, and many varieties of American accents. There are parts of the EVE world that are known to not speak English; Russian is probably the most dominant non-English language. Time zones are also really important. In a single-sharded world, there are always people playing, and war is a 24 hour affair. Most corporations try to have players in all the major time zone blocks (EU / US / AUS, traditionally), so if something bad happens, there are people around to deal with it.

Number of simultaneously connected users by hour (GMT)

The nature of news and celebrity in EVE is also quite different as a result of single-sharding. Famous players and organizations are famous throughout EVE, not just in their small shard. When there are big political events like GoonSwarm disbanding, they’re more than just stories for most players – they have a big impact on a huge number of players. In contrast, news in World of Warcraft is primarily about changes to the world itself, not things that players in the world actually did. Indeed, there are few things players can do to change their shard in a meaningful way. Even if there were, there are many fewer people would care about what had changed.

Although this model has lots of exciting implications, it’s hardly all sunshine and puppies. Instancing and sharding tend to provide a more consistent and structured experience for people. We’ve talked recently about the clash between so-called carebears and pirates. In a sharded model, you could easily separate those populations onto different servers where the rules about when you can attack people are different. World of Warcraft distinguishes its shard as “Player versus Player” (PvP) or “Player versus Environment” (PvE). If you want to be protected from other players, just pick a PvE shard and you’ll be able to do quests to your hearts content.

Same goes for instancing; if you’re in a dungeon in World of Warcraft, you’re completely insulated from the outside world. Only the players you’ve explicitly invited can be there. In EVE, being in a mission area provides only slight protection. There are lots of ways for unfriendly players to cause trouble for you in your mission.

This is no accident. The richness of EVE’s world depends on the interplay between all these different kinds of players and play styles. The complicated social relationship between pirates and miners and 0.0 pilots is part of what makes EVE so wonderful. The culture is rich and huge and you can engage with it from a variety of different perspectives as your character ages. But a lot of this wouldn’t be possible with a sharded model. I think it’s a property of good game design that the mechanics fit together in complimentary ways. EVE’s choice of single-sharding is a great example of that – it has a big impact on how all the rest of the game mechanics work, from mining, production, and mission running to 0.0 alliance warfare.

Hopefully this diagram will answer some of those questions. It’s a really huge image, and I suggest you view it first at a high level to get a sense of the scale, and then zoom in and check out each individual ship. If you want to buy a copy of your own, or tinker with the source graphics yourself, you can find details here.

I’ve also tried to explain a bit about what all those different kinds of ships are for. Hopefully this will be a good reference for when I talk more about blowing up enemy ships, and what the economic implications are for players.

The Ships of EVE Online / Click through for full size, zoomable version.

There are a lot of assumptions behind this image. It’s actually quite hard to get definitive ship price values, both because prices fluctuate and vary substantially by where in the universe you buy something, and because there is no one way to equip a ship. This makes my values hardly exact, and I’ve tried to use the complete lack of significant figures to show how fuzzy they are. In the end, the values are basically the market value for each hull at Jita, plus the price of the fittings off the TGRADS killboard. I felt like this was as accurate as I could reasonably get, without doing a really deep survey of average fittings and fitting costs, or a close look at the contract market for fitted ships.

Producing this image has been a much larger project than I expected when I started. I’ve leaned a lot on my house-mate Jon Chambers for editorial and graphical advice. I’ve also made extensive use of Davik Rendar’s wonderful renders of EVE ships from the side.

“An anonymous source close to ATLAS reports that the “K25 battle saw less than 30 losses in a fight which was [heavily affected by spatial anomalies interfering with our fleet operations].”

The story that a world like EVE tells about itself is that it is a coherent, self-contained, and persistent world that a player’s computer gives them a window into. CCP has done a particularly effective job at constructing this fiction in theEVE Chronicles section of the EVE site. Most of the stories there are about setting the tone of the world, characterizing the races of the world to help new players align with a particular racial identity, and portraying parts of the world that aren’t represented in the game. They also include bits of fiction to explain why pilots have the abilities they do. For example, this article justifies the third-person-ness of the game by introducing “camera drones” into the fiction. You’ll never actually see these in the game, but articles like this serve to define a magic circle: a boundary within which all activities can be understood in terms of the fiction of the game.

The moment when this fiction collides with the reality of the worlds’ technical limitations is jarring.

For 0.0 pilots, the boundaries of the magic circle break down most obviously when the node (a part of a server, basically) powering their system crashes. The frequency of these crashes has generally gone down over time as CCP finds and fixes bugs in the node software, but the latest major expansion pack – Dominion – seems to have dramatically increased the rate of node crashes. Crashes are nearly always the result of lots of people being in one system at the same time. These crashes often short-circuit large fleet battles. (Much more on this issue of lots of players being in the same place here.)

This puts CCP’s reporters in an interesting place. They want to write about the major events in the geopolitical world of EVE, but they’re faced with major events in the world that hinge on node crashes. Instead of ignoring it, they’re bringing node crashes into the fiction of the world as “spatial anomalies.” No one in-game adopts this terminology, though, so you get funny stories like the one at the top where the reporter edits away what was almost certainly a complaint about a node crash.

For players, these immersion-breaking events migrate inside the magic circle in a different way. Node instability has developed substantial strategic significance. When a new fleet is entering a system with an enemy fleet in it, it can take minutes for the new fleet to load the system. During that period, the fleet is quite vulnerable; their ships are visible and attackable, they just can’t fight back. As a result, fleet commanders have developed a range of coping techniques. So in strategic terms, being in-system first is a significant advantage until CCP fixes these server problems. Until then, though, most big fleet fights are probably going to involve me staring at the login screen, hoping the node is back up and my ship is still alive.

Logging back in after a node crash.

I put together a video from an operation I was on early last week. No combat this time, but it shows you a bit about how fleet commanders communicate with their fleets. You’ll see a friendly gatecamp, a failed bombing run exercise, a conversation about the strategic objectives of our mission, and a fleet of bombers cloaking up at a gate.

I really recommend clicking through to YouTube to watch this in decent resolution.

And God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. And God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good.

Like the gods of creation stories, designers of a new virtual world face a fundamental cosmological question: how will the world be organized? What will the natural laws of the world be? How will people move around it and effect other residents of that world? These questions encompass the entire problem of designing a virtual world, but the very first question you have to decide about is how many worlds you’re going to make.

In the beginning, there was only one model, and it’s difficult to describe it because anything else seems so alien: every visitor to a particular virtual world like LambdaMOO was visiting the same version of LambdaMOO and could see any other visitor to LambdaMOO. This seems so obvious as to be confusing; if you plan to meet someone at a local coffee shop, you will end up in the same place.

This model quickly fell apart, though. As virtual worlds gained popularity, it became harder and harder to fit everyone into one world together. So like a coffee shop owner that realizes she could profitably open another location and start a franchise system, virtual world designers developed a new way to organize their universes. Instead of having just one world, virtual worlds started having multiple copies of their world. These copies are typically called “shards” or “realms”.

Unlike a coffee shop, it seems like you could just make a virtual world bigger to fit more people, right? There are no real estate constraints online to hinder expansion. Instead of physical constraints, virtual worlds that want to grow face two related problems. The first is technical. In general, the bigger a virtual crowd gets the more unresponsive the world becomes for everyone. Imagine that every time you move your character, you have to tell everyone else nearby about every step your character takes. If everyone’s moving at the same time, the number of messages for everyone to tell everyone else that they’re moving rises very quickly. So when you have a world with lots of people in it, you’re usually really scared that they all end up in the same place at once because then that area slows to a crawl as it tries to pass messages between everyone in the room.

The second problem is one of design: how do you keep people from all going to the same places at the same times? You have to give people lots of places to go that are interesting and lots of places to do things that everyone needs to do, like go shopping, so they never fill up too much.

A game like World of Warcraft sort of punts on the second issue. You can get away with having a laggy, unresponsive world for things like shopping because it’s not a particular immersive experience anyway. Plus, players get smart at regulating their visits to busy places like that to avoid heavy traffic. The first problem is harder to deal with. If there’s a really important mission that everyone wants to do, how do you handle 1000 people who want to do that mission at the same time?

The traditional answer to this problem is to do the franchising trick again. In this context, it’s known as “instancing.” If I want to go do a popular mission with some friends, the world creates a copy of the mission area that’s just for us. These areas typically have a fixed number of people who can be in them, which solves the messaging problem from earlier; if you can set a ceiling for the number of people who can simultaneously participate in something, you can just design experiences for a number of people you know you can easily handle.

Instancing solves another problem, too – griefing. When doing a high stakes, high risk task, there are lots of opportunities for a malicious player to ruin other people’s chances. Instancing separates these tasks from the rest of the world. You choose who comes with you into the instance, so you’re largely safe from unfriendly players.

Almost all modern worlds use shards or realms to split up their player base, and almost all modern worlds use some form of instancing. Some worlds, like Guild Wars, are nearly entirely instanced, and the only shared spaces are towns. Perhaps the only other world that doesn’t use shards is Second Life, although they set hard limits on the number of people in an area, too, so essentially they have the same problem, they just choose to avoid it.

EVE doesn’t use realms or shards at all, and uses only a lightweight form of limited instancing for missions (which don’t play nearly as central a role as they do in other worlds). The result is that when you look at the EVE login screen and it says 35,000 logged in pilots, that’s 35,000 people you can talk to, shoot at, and team up with. If you want to put 1000 people in a system together, you can. It’s laggy, but this kind of flexibility has a major impact on the kind of world EVE has become.

This article is continued in a second, more EVE-specific, part.

“Space,” it says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space”

In no virtual world is this quote more true than in EVE. EVE is big. Really big.

Unlike real space, EVE-space is organized into discrete systems. Each system contains planets, moons, asteroid belts, stations, and gates. You move between systems using these gates. Each gate connects to exactly one other system, and if you nestle up close to it you can select the gate and press “jump”. A few seconds later and you’ll pop out on the other side. Then you “warp” to the next gate in your path, hit “jump” when you get there, and you’re on your way.

Clusters of systems are known as constellations (~5-10ish systems) and sets of 5 or so constellations make up a region. New Eden, the galaxy of EVE, has 67 regions.

All of these systems are laid out in 3d, making EVE’s map a sort of terrifying beast. And that’s before you start visualizing live data on it, a topic we’ll talk about later.

The other way to think about the galaxy’s scale is by how long it would take you to move across it. Its max diameter is maybe 100 jumps, i.e. if you charted a path from one corner to the other, you would have to jump 100 times, passing through 100 different systems along the way. Depending on how fast your ship is, this would easily take a few hours. In reality, you’d almost certainly never make it all the way, because most of the galaxy is a very unfriendly place.

Each system in EVE has a “security status” ranging from 0.0 to 1.0. There are 3 distinct ranges on this scale: 1.0-0.5, 0.4-0.1, and 0.0.

• 1.0-0.5 (AKA “high sec”, “empire”, yellow-green on the map) is the safest part of the galaxy. There are police ships guarding jump gates between systems, and if anyone attacks you the police will show up promptly to blow them up. Of course, you might be dead by the time they arrive, but at least your attackers paid for their aggression, right? Most EVE players spent most of their time here, running missions, mining asteroids, producing items, etc. There is some player on player combat, but it’s relatively prescribed.
• 0.4-0.1 (AKA “low sec”, red-yellow on the map) is the seedy underbelly of EVE. Pirates are king in low sec. Systems are usually pretty empty of people, and you can make good money living in low sec because there are more valuable asteroids here, and missions pay out more. The trade off is that there’s no police, so pirates make a good business of jumping unsuspecting ships and demanding money not to blow you up. There are also, of course, people hunting the pirates. This is where you go to fight other (potentially unsuspecting) players without the police getting involved. If you kill enough other players, you might not be allowed back into high sec, but otherwise there are few consequences to bad behavior here.
• 0.0 (AKA “null sec”, “zero zero”, red on the map) is where the big alliances play. Unlike the rest of EVE, corporations and alliances can claim “sovereignty” over systems in 0.0. Practically speaking, this lets corporations build a variety of kinds of in-system infrastructure that boost their income, let them build capital ships, etc. Alliances usually have relatively strict rules about who is and isn’t allowed in their space, and there are usually roaming gangs of ships that enforce those rules. Wars between alliances are usually over territory, and battles are fought one system at a time, with alliances expanding and contracting their borders over the span of months and years. More territory means more money, and more money means more ships and equipment for your internet navy. There are no formal consequences to killing anyone in 0.0, although you might cause a diplomatic incident if you kill someone your alliance is friendly with. Huge areas in 0.0 are essentially uninhabited, but running into the wrong people can mean instant death.

These three kinds of space are arranged like a donut. High sec is the squishy center, surrounded by pirate infested low sec, surrounded by the Wild West of 0.0. In the image, the red systems are 0.0, and systems get more green as they become higher security. The player experience in each of these three regions is dramatically different. I’ve spent almost all my time in High Sec so far (check out the figure on the left for a map of where I’ve been), but I’m moving to 0.0 in the next few days, so I’m excited to explore a whole new world, and whole new style of play.

• Ships
• Stuff you equip on a ship to change its abilities (“fittings” or “equipment”)
• Stuff you use to build ships + equipment that goes on ships
• Ammo

Within each of these categories there is quite a bit of structure. There are items for making your ship go faster (afterburners or microwarpdrives), recharge your shields (shield boosters), increase the amount of energy your ship has for using its abilities (capacitor batteries and boosters), and so on. Within each of those categories there are variants on each item type. For each item type (in order of increasing power / effectiveness), there is a Tech 1 version, a bunch of “named” versions, a Tech 2 version, and “faction” versions. (Faction items contain the name of one of the in-game factions in the item name, eg Caldari Navy Cruise Missile Launcher is a faction version of the Cruise Missile Launcher item.)

These items come from different places. Named items and faction items come from the wrecks of computer-controlled ships. Items acquired in this way are called “drops”, and have an associated “drop rate”. For instance, a particular afterburner item might drop .005% of the time you kill a particular ship. This is a vanishingly small number, but there are hundreds of items – the chances you get something valuable aren’t that terrible. These items can also be rewards for missions, or paid for with loyalty-points – think airline frequently flyer miles, except for completing missions for a particular in-game corporation.

Unlike the real world, virtual world economies are pretty much all what are known now as source-sink economies. Economic value is injected into the world at a rate controlled by the game designers, and sucked out of the world at what should be a pretty similar rate. Think of it like a bathtub – if there’s more water flowing in than out, then the amount of money in the world increases. As in the real world, an increasing money supply leads to inflation. Because of this, EVE’s economic overlords have to be careful about how often these valuable items drop.

Vanilla Tech 1 and Tech 2 items come from players. This manufacturing process is detailed (and I’m not that well versed in high-end manufacturing), but it basically works like this. First, you get a blueprint for the item you want to make. The blueprint will specify the materials you need to make the item. To actually make the item, you need to find a production line at a space station that’s not being used. Serious manufacturing oriented players will build their own mini stations dedicated for production. Plug in the blueprint, provide the necessary raw materials, and hit go. Fresh new items will pop out the other side. Building Tech 2 items is more complicated, and I haven’t actually done it yet, so I’m not super fluent on that process, but it’s substantially more skill, capital, and material intensive.

This process sets EVE apart from other MMOs you might have read about or played. Often, items in the world come only from the bodies of computer-controlled enemies. Making the most important and common items (Tech 2 equipment) completely player-generated adds a layer of complexity to the world. Changes in value of the materials to make those items ripple through the supply chain, making substantial amounts of money for people savvy enough to see them coming. It also has big implications for the logistics of players who live in 0.0. It’s essentially impossible to survive off items you find in the world, so major corporations need to either set up their own manufacturing or fly in supplies from high sec space. Either of these choices have their own implications and impact for how wars are fought.