A few days ago, I asked a fairly simple question on r/Eve:
These could be mechanics, balance problems, old systems in need of reworking, new-player issues, economic problems, PvP, PvE, industry, sovereignty, Faction Warfare, whatever.
The only real constraint was that I wanted people to choose three. Not twenty. Not an entire imaginary expansion roadmap. Just three things.
Predictably, some of the responses were jokes. Some wanted Hilmar gone. Others wanted multiboxing restricted, Local removed (would be interesting to remove it in null sec for sure), citadels changed, nullsec shaken up, ships made cheaper, or Fenris to stop spending time on anything that wasn’t EVE.
But buried among those shorter answers were some genuinely thoughtful responses.
Players wrote detailed proposals about resource distribution, sovereignty, PvE, exploration, structures, force projection, industry, small-gang warfare, new-player retention and even how information itself works inside EVE.
I also shared the question privately with a longtime EVE player whose opinion I trust. His answers went in some very different directions—dynamic space weather, huge asteroid belts, mineable comets, shifting resource availability, abandoned structures that could be captured rather than destroyed, and wrecks that salvagers could actually hunt down.
Once I stopped looking at the individual fixes and started looking at why people wanted them, something interesting happened.
The dozens of suggestions started collapsing into three much larger ideas.
1. Make New Eden feel truly alive again
Imagine logging in and discovering that a constellation a few jumps away is suddenly producing better mining yields because of a temporary space-weather effect.
Miners would move toward it. Haulers would follow them. PvP corps would certainly notice all this new activity. Scouts would start checking routes, markets would react, and corporations would have to decide whether relocating ships and equipment was worth the trouble.
None of that requires a scripted quest or a special event fleet. The universe changes, and players respond.
That idea appeared in several different forms in the Reddit discussion. Some players suggested resources that migrate or deplete. Others proposed boom-and-bust systems where the profitability of an area changes over time. One suggested that repeatedly farming a system should eventually exhaust it enough that people have to go elsewhere.
One pushed the idea further with dynamic space weather. One system might receive a mining bonus while another suffers a penalty. Different conditions could affect scanning, capacitor performance, certain weapon systems, warp behaviour or NPC activity.
What matters isn’t whether the bonus is 10% or 15%. What matters is that the universe has changed enough to force a decision.
EVE is enormous, but many activities eventually become somewhat predictable. You learn where a resource appears, find a profitable system, optimize the activity and repeat it.
Optimization is part of EVE, and players should benefit from understanding how New Eden works. But there’s a difference between learning how the universe works and knowing exactly what to expect from it.
Resource distribution could/should become less rigid as well.
Rather than thinking entirely in terms of highsec having one set of ores, lowsec another and nullsec another, much of New Eden could contain overlapping resources whose quantity, quality and concentration vary dramatically.
Highsec might contain heavily depleted deposits because the empires have been exploiting those systems for centuries. Lowsec could offer richer concentrations because extraction is more dangerous, while nullsec might hold enormous deposits because much of it remains frontier territory.
Those concentrations would not necessarily remain in the same places forever.
Asteroid belts could work differently too. Instead of a handful of rocks conveniently sitting at one permanent warp-in, imagine the belt treated as a vast region of the solar system containing several temporary mining locations. One area might hold a rich deposit, another might have been largely exhausted after heavy use, while a third could appear after a survey or environmental shift.
The belt remains. The useful places inside it change.
Then there are comets.
Imagine thousands of them moving through New Eden. Some contain conventional minerals, others are rich in ice products, and some carry rarer materials.
Suddenly, comet hunting becomes a profession. A player might find one, scan it down, bookmark it, mine it, sell the location, defend it, or steal the opportunity from someone else. PvPers might simply wait for the people who found it first. That is much more interesting to me than adding another static anomaly, because the comet itself is not really the content.
The content is what players do because the comet exists.
2. Give us more ways to affect New Eden — And make power harder to project
EVE contains an astonishing number of objects, structures and systems, but our interactions with many of them eventually collapse into a surprisingly small set of behaviours. We own things, farm them, defend them or destroy them.
What if there were more ways to interfere with the universe without simply reducing everything to hit points?
Several players suggested infrastructure that could be hacked, disabled, stolen from, captured, siphoned or sabotaged without requiring its complete destruction.
That could mean temporarily disabling an installation, interfering with an Ansiblex, siphoning moon output, raiding a supply depot or stealing physical resources before they reach their owner.
Several people independently raised the idea of structures that could be captured rather than simply blown up.
Imagine finding an old Astrahus whose owners disappeared years ago. Instead of treating it as space debris with hit points, another corporation might be able to recover it by hacking its systems, establishing a claim, surviving some kind of takeover period and eventually restoring it to service.
Stored player assets would obviously require careful handling, but the underlying idea is compelling. Something another group built could acquire a second history rather than simply disappearing in an explosion.
Salvaging could become more active in the same way.
Imagine old wreck fields being detectable with combat probes. You might find traces of a battle, launch probes, track the wreckage down and piece together what happened before salvaging what remains. Perhaps some of that salvage produces alloys or industrial materials that feed back into manufacturing.
Another player’s activity has left a physical footprint in New Eden, and you have discovered it after the fact.
This matters especially for smaller groups. A six-person frigate or destroyer gang does not necessarily need to capture sovereignty to matter. Give them targets they can hunt down, infrastructure they can disable, goods they can steal, logistics they can disrupt and resources they can siphon. Small groups do not have to overthrow an empire. They should be able to make the empire notice them.
This is also where questions about scale begin to converge.
Multiboxing came up repeatedly in the thread, particularly when one person is operating enough characters to function like a fleet or small industrial organization. Blue donuts came up. Huge null blocs came up. Citadel proliferation, asset safety and accumulated wealth all appeared too.
These are not identical problems, but they share something: scale compounds advantage.
That does not mean the answer is automatically to ban multiboxing, cap alliances or dismantle large organizations. Players will organize around hard limits if cooperation remains worthwhile. EVE has taught that lesson repeatedly. The better question is what increasing scale should cost. And interestingly, Fenris appears to be moving in that direction already.
Later this week, on September 22, the Force Projection Revamp arrives as part of the Cradle of War major update.
The Ansiblex changes are particularly relevant. Jump bridges will operate from limited capacitor reserves, different ship types will consume different amounts of that capacitor, and moving forces farther from an alliance’s capital system becomes progressively more expensive.
Coalition members will no longer simply use another alliance’s Ansiblex network either. Access will be restricted to the alliance that owns it.
None of that makes large nullsec alliances impossible. Nor should it.
Instead, geography starts imposing a cost on power.
Large organizations will still be able to control enormous territories, but moving a massive fleet rapidly from one edge of that territory to another should require more thought. Distance should matter, as should fleet composition, infrastructure and where an alliance chooses to establish its capital.
That’s a positive direction.
One of the recurring frustrations in the discussion wasn’t simply that large alliances exist. It was that scale can become too easy to apply.
Fenris has described the Force Projection Revamp as an initial step rather than the end of the work.
Good, keep going.
The larger the territory, the harder every corner of it should be to defend. Not because the game imposes an arbitrary membership cap, but because distance, logistics, activity and local presence begin to matter again.
History’s great empires faced the same problem. Rome could expand across enormous distances, but every new province also had to be governed, supplied and defended. The British Empire faced its own version of that challenge centuries later. Expansion brought power and resources, but it also created longer supply lines, distant territories and more places where that power had to be maintained.
New Eden should work on a similar principle. Let alliances build enormous empires if they can. But the larger those empires become, the more difficult they should be to manage. Their borders should become harder to defend, their logistics more complicated, and projecting force from the centre to the edges should require real effort.
You can build the empire, but you should also have to manage the empire you built.
3. Make it easier to participate without making EVE easier
This is probably the most delicate one because friction is part of what makes EVE work. Distance, loss, preparation, training and logistics all carry consequences in EVE. Remove any one of those in pursuit of convenience and eventually you’re no longer improving EVE. You’re removing pieces of what makes it distinctly EVE.
But not every inconvenience creates meaningful gameplay.
Several responses circled around what I’d call time-to-content. One player wanted easier ways to find relatively quick fights. Another argued that ordinary ships should be affordable enough that people don’t spend more time replacing them than flying them. Others questioned reinforcement timers, where attacking certain structures or objectives can trigger an invulnerable period, forcing everyone to return later to continue the fight. What started as tonight’s encounter can become an appointment several days later.
And that’s where the distinction between making EVE easier and making EVE easier to participate in becomes important.
Suppose I have an hour tonight and want to get into a small-gang fight.
Making EVE easier would mean removing danger, reimbursing my losses, teleporting me into combat and making sure the fight is fair. That’s not what I want.
What I do want is for EVE to be easier to participate in. Give me better tools to discover where fights are happening, help me find active skirmishes, keep common PvP ships reasonably replaceable, and reduce some of the unnecessary steps between I want to go do this and I’m actually doing it.
I’ve often wondered whether EVE could borrow just a little from the skirmish systems used by games like World of Tanks or World of Warships without actually turning EVE into an arena game. If I log in with 30 minutes to play, perhaps the game could point me toward active fighting a jump or two away, or show me where skirmishes are developing so I can decide whether to head there. If I’m about to log off, maybe it could help me identify an active area where I might want to stage a ship for the next time I log back in.
The important distinction is that the game wouldn’t create the fight for me or teleport me into it. It would simply do a better job of showing me where opportunities for a fight already exist.
Once I undock, everything that makes EVE EVE remains. I still have to travel there. The fight doesn’t have to be fair. The situation might have completely changed by the time I arrive. I can still make a terrible decision, jump into the wrong gate camp, get baited or lose my ship.
That’s EVE.
What I’d like to spend less of my limited playtime doing is trying to find the point where those decisions begin.
EVE’s real magic has never lived in its tutorial. It lives in corporations, fleets, wars, betrayals, expeditions, stupid mistakes and unexpected friendships. The challenge is helping more players reach those experiences without sanding away the consequences that make them memorable.
That doesn’t mean stripping friction out of the game. Au contraire. It means being more deliberate about where that friction lives.
Waiting isn’t automatically depth. Grinding isn’t automatically progression. Travelling isn’t automatically adventure. But uncertainty can create depth. Exposure creates tension. Scarcity creates competition. Distance creates strategic choices. Logistics creates vulnerability. Loss makes success matter.
Those are the kinds of obstacles EVE should preserve—and in some places, deliberately reinforce.
I don’t want EVE compressed into an instant-action lobby game. But I do want the obstacles I encounter during that hour to produce decisions, danger and stories rather than simply delay them.
And then there’s EVE Forever
There was one other suggestion that deserves its own section, partly because it sits outside the three gameplay themes above, and partly because it quickly sparked a conversation of its own.
My buddy, and podcast co-host, Rixx Javix’s number-one priority would be what he calls “EVE Forever”: begin the long-term process of rebuilding and modernizing the technical foundation underneath EVE.
The idea sparked immediate pushback. Something on that scale would take years, not six months. Rixx agreed: his point was that if he had the keys to EVE for six months, he would start the work.
Someone mentioned the ongoing move to Python 3, which Fenris is already doing. Rixx's "EVE Forever" asks a much bigger question: how far should that modernization ultimately go?
This doesn't need to compete with the three directions above. Fenris can continue changing sovereignty, force projection, resources and structures while investing in the technical foundation those systems depend on for years to come.
That's what makes it interesting. We're talking about a 23-year-old MMO we'd like to still be playing decades from now. At some point, maintaining EVE's future means ensuring the technology underneath New Eden is ready for what comes next.
Rixx put it this way:
But the larger question behind it is harder to dismiss: How much of what EVE could become is constrained by what EVE has become?
EVE has been running continuously for more than two decades. That means more than twenty years of systems being added, rewritten, deprecated, connected to other systems, replaced in part, patched and changed again.
Every long-lived software platform accumulates technical history, and eventually that history can become a design constraint.
A game mechanic may look simple from the outside while touching code written fifteen years ago. A seemingly isolated change may depend on several older systems. Developers may know exactly what they would like to build while also knowing that disturbing one piece could affect several others underneath it.
That matters because nearly every ambitious idea in this article depends on the game's underlying architecture being flexible enough to support it.
Dynamic resource geography, environmental effects that propagate across systems, more sophisticated infrastructure interactions, structures changing ownership, expanded salvage mechanics, more reactive sovereignty and more dynamic economies all require the game beneath them to be capable of changing too.
If the technical foundation makes those changes prohibitively difficult, then asking for better mechanics without addressing that foundation eventually becomes a liability.
Fenris changes what it can. Players ask why it doesn't change more. The answer becomes some variation of legacy systems being difficult to modify, and then everyone repeats the same conversation several years later.
Maybe one of the most important investments Fenris could make in EVE's future would be something players barely notice when it finally arrives.
Not a new feature, but a new foundation that lets the next twenty years of features happen more easily than the previous twenty.
So, what would "my" three changes be?
I wouldn't choose three specific game mechanics, but instead I would choose three broad directions:
1. Make New Eden dynamic: Let resources, conditions and opportunities change so players have reasons to leave optimized routines and react to what is happening around them.2. Give us more ways to affect the universe and each other: Add theft, sabotage, capture and discoverable traces of player activity, while making geography and logistics matter to large-scale power.
3. Replace dead friction with meaningful friction: Make it easier for players to reach the parts of EVE where choices begin, but make those choices harder, riskier and less predictable once they get there.
Rixx’s “EVE Forever” idea also adds a deeper consideration: some of the most important work may happen beneath the surface, in the software systems that determine what EVE can become next.
The common thread running through all of this—dynamic resources, distributed power, reduced dead friction—points at a single problem:
EVE has become too "predictable".
Players optimize it into a checklist. They create decision trees. They map the unpredictability out of it. And once that happens, logging in feels like executing a familiar routine instead of asking, “What the hell do I do next?”
I think EVE needs more moments where the universe disrupts those plans.
Where the best resource isn’t where it was yesterday. Where controlling more space creates new problems instead of simply more advantages. Where a small group can interfere with something a much larger group actually cares about. Where experience gives you better tools to deal with uncertainty, but never eliminates that uncertainty completely.
That applies to the new player learning how New Eden works just as much as it does to the veteran who’s been optimizing it for twenty years.
EVE doesn’t need friction simply for friction’s sake. It needs the kind that forces us to adapt, take risks, make decisions and occasionally throw whatever plan we had out the airlock.
So, if anyone at Fenris is reading this: add more of that friction back into New Eden. We can handle it.
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