Thoughts On Anaomalies

While reading the Eve Tribune last night an article on the dev blog about sov changes and upgrades and costs made for an interesting read. Specifically these parts:

Pirate Magnet: adds two additional guaranteed anomalies per level to your solar system

 And:

Now, the initial thought when reading this is that CCP has just added over a billion ISK per month in upkeep costs to all of our systems, and yet these upgrades as listed are never going to add even a billion ISK per month total into the alliance coffers, let alone several billion per system! However, a number of the dev replies buried within the thread do offer at least some reason for optimism compared to the bleak outlook presented by the blog itself. If these facts had been part of the initial blog rather than buried on page 18 onwards of the thread then the reception might have been slightly less rabid. One of the two most important dev posts in that thread is the first one, found on page 18, in which CCP Soundwave says:

Anomalies are a good way of injecting single player content into a certain system. The way it's currently set up is that the site instantly re-spawns when run, meaning it's not three sites per day; it's three sites constantly. Financially, having guaranteed access to NPCs should provide a much more solid stream of income than jumping from belt to belt, hoping that rats have re-spawned. We could have added more belts to systems, but why would we want you to jump around in a growing list of belts when we can just have you jump into a single anomaly and make money?

They were not put in as "OH GOD I STRUCK GOLD" sites. You don't make 0.0 financially inhabitable for thousands by adding extra officer spawns, you do it by providing a constant flow of content that makes a good amount of money, which is what the anomalies do. The distribution of sites is made so that the higher the upgrade, the higher quality anomaly. Financially, the top tier anomalies that will be spawning are much more profitable than mining and ratting currently is, and pretty much on par with level 4s. Added to that, they have a chance of escalation.

So the upgrade gives a number of constantly re-spawning anomalies - with the level of the anomaly being guaranteed based on the development index of the system. Suddenly that sounds a lot more promising, although it will still only keep a few ratters busy at a time per system. He also clarified that these are anomalies not signatures and that you can scan them down very quickly using just the on-board scanner or a single probe.

I've run anomalies before when living in crap space in Syndicate and can verify that they can be more profitable than ratting. If we get the Pirate Magnet to level 4 or 5 and there are a constant supply of 8-10 anomalies in the system at all times, that is a lot of ratting potential, possibly equal to one or two systems of asteroid belts.

Very interesting. I can see how such an upgraded system might support 10-20 ratters easily and a constellation with a few such upgraded systems could house a large corporation.

Maybe CCP has thought this out more than some people think. Time will tell.