For many of us who have played Eve for a while, 0.0 represents the “end game” as it were. Higher end resources for mining, the highest bounty NPC rats, highest level exploration sites, as well as the draw of owning and fighting for your own space draws just about everyone into its reaches.

In the recent past, CCP has made quite a few changes that have influenced 0.0. Three in particular are considered to be the most outstanding: The development of Super capital ships like the Titan and Supercarriers, The change to how a system’s soverignty is determined, and the addition of Anomalies.

The development of Super Capital ships has always been a source of contention since they were first introduced. Titans originally had an Area of Effect weapon for their Doomsday device, which could eliminate most ships from the Battleship range on down (unless you set up your tank to specifically handle that particular Titan’s damage type). This was changed to a single death beam later on.. which some say helped the propogation of Blob type warfare. The Supercarriers as well started as a fairly weak ship and in the process of balancing them have, by most accounts, been made too effective. Both ships were supposed to be very expensive, very rare additions, only available to the largest of alliances. But that has not been the case, with the former Northern Coalition, the Drone Russian Federation, and Pandemic Legion (and even smaller entities) able to field entire fleets of supercapitals. Unfortunately, those fleets tend to be invincible unless you happen to have a much larger supercapital fleet to use.

The next major aspect affected how Soverignty was determined. Prior to Dominion, a system’s soverignty was determined by who had the larger number of Control Towers (often called “POSes”) in that particular system. It wasn’t a well liked system because an alliance often had to spend billions of isk, and hours upon hours just to fuel the hundreds of control towers under their control. It also was a major pain to take a system over because POSes have a large number of hitpoints that a fleet has to chew through, then you must wait 24 hours for the control tower to come out of their reinforced mode, so that you could destroy them. To make this task happen quickly, alliances would form massive fleets to sweep through system after system. So, CCP developed a new system, the one we currently have. Sadly, the new system is much more complicated and because of the steps an invading alliance must take AND the massive hitpoints of each of the sovreignty structures that an invading alliance needs to take down, has force alliances to build even more massive fleets to be effective in both attacking and defending sovreign territory. This was the exact opposite intent of CCP, which had hoped to give smaller alliances a better way to gain a 0.0 foothold and keep it.

The third point was actually hailed as a smart move by CCP, which allowed for anomalies to be upgraded in controlled systems, so long as you purchased said upgrades. One point that most new players don’t realize is that not all 0.0 space is considered equal and regions like Pure Blind and Providence, for example, weren’t very profitable to individual players, much less alliances. At least they weren’t until this changed happened, which allowed all 0.0 alliances to increase their coffers dramatically. This was a particular boon to the weaker alliances who were unable to acquire the highly valuable moons which supported the larger, more powerful alliances. However, more money in the system allowed for a large influx of bigger and better ships to be used in sov invasions and defense. The ease of this new money brought in more and more players into 0.0, which in turn brought more money into corporations, who in turn, bought more supercapital ships.

So why all the preface information? Because 0.0 has become the exact opposite of the original intent that CCP planned, and since it really is the central driver for entire game, they felt it necessary to retool it. What makes yesterday’s devblog significant is that prior to it, CCP tended to tweak a little here, tweak a little there but had no real cohesive plan.. the changes tended to be arbitrary, based on their own visions of how the game worked.. which often didn’t mesh with the reality of the game itself. Yesterday’s Devblog from CCP Greyscale is essentially a fundemental change to the entire process, and while it is just a general overview, it differs from the usual “feel/guess” mindset that the devblogs relating to 0.0 have previously been.

Look at the devblog here: http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=944
And also look at the comments here as well (and notice that CCP Greyscale is clearly spending a lot of time reviewing the submissions): http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp…ID=1560795

Will this be a new dawn for Eve Online? It may very well be.