They Metered the Road and Locked the Gate
There is a particular feeling EVE Online gives you when the map is working, and it is the feeling of somewhere being far away. Not inconvenient. Far. You look at where your fleet is and where the fight is, and the gap between those two facts is the actual problem you have to solve tonight.
Null-sec lost that feeling a while ago. Distance became an administrative detail. You clicked, you arrived, and the only real question was whether the road you were about to use belonged to someone friendly.
On the 17th of July, CCP published a dev blog saying it would like the distance back.
Eight years of free roads
The road in question is the Ansiblex Jump Gate, which arrived with the Onslaught expansion on the 13th of November 2018. You anchor two of them up to five light years apart and link them. Anything under the mass limit then crosses the gap without a jump drive of its own, and without picking up jump fatigue.
They replaced the old starbase jump bridges, they burned liquid ozone as fuel, and the owner could charge a toll for the privilege, per the EVE University wiki.
Null-sec then did what people always do when you hand them a road-building tool. It built roads. Not one bridge here and another there, but networks, threaded across coalition space and shared out among the alliances inside them. The two ends of a linked pair do not have to belong to the same alliance, and the access lists are configured separately. A coalition could stitch its members' bridges into one continuous highway system, and did.
Eight years of that, and the practical size of New Eden collapsed. If you can be anywhere in your sphere of influence inside a few minutes, then your sphere of influence has no inside and outside. It is one room with a lot of stars painted on the walls.
CCP has stood on this exact spot before
This is not a new problem, and it is not a new fix. In November 2014, the Phoebe release capped capital jump ranges and introduced jump fatigue, a stacking cooldown that punished you for jumping repeatedly over long distances.
CCP's stated reasoning then was almost word for word the reasoning it is using now: ease of movement had shrunk New Eden, and the game was worse for it.
So how did that go? CCP answered that itself, in this month's blog. On Phoebe, it wrote: "It did put some tension on Projection but didn't solve for it." It also called the mechanic overly punishing.
That is an unusually honest thing for a studio to publish about its own twelve-year-old design, and it is why this proposal looks the way it does. CCP is not reaching for jump fatigue again. It got burned by the blunt instrument and went looking for a dial instead.
Worth remembering too that in July 2019 CCP switched off local chat across null-sec, ran the experiment for 66 days, and switched it back on. This is a studio with a real appetite for adding friction and a mixed record on keeping it.
A battery, not a ban
Here is the part I actually like.
The Ansiblex is not being deleted or fatigued. It is being given a capacitor. Every jump through the gate drains it, bigger ships drain more, and it recharges over time exactly the way a ship's capacitor does.
CCP published the numbers on the 21st of July: a total pool of 1,250 TJ, refilling at roughly 200 TJ an hour.
The per-ship costs are small at the bottom and steep at the top. A capsule costs 1, a frigate 4, a cruiser 10, a battleship 16.5, a marauder 19. Nothing there stops a scout. It is the fleet that empties the tank.
Then comes the clever bit. The cost is multiplied by distance, but not the distance between the two gates. It is the distance from your alliance's sovereignty capital system. Inside five light years of home the multiplier is zero, then it climbs through 2x, 6x and 9x, and past twenty light years it is 15x.
Read that again, because it is not a travel nerf. It is a shape. It says your territory is allowed to have a centre and a periphery, that the periphery is supposed to cost you something, and that sprawl is priced by how far you have sprawled. To stop anyone gaming it, moving your capital carries a 90-day cooldown.
CCP is also stripping out the liquid ozone requirement and the tolling mechanic entirely. The cost of a bridge stops being a consumable you can stockpile and becomes a clock you have to wait on.
You cannot buy your way past a recharge timer, and that is the whole point of choosing a battery over a fuel tank. I have watched a lot of systems try to discourage a behaviour by making it expensive, and most of them fail, because anything you can pay for stops being a constraint the moment somebody is rich enough. Time is the one currency nobody has more of than anyone else.
The change nobody is arguing about enough
Underneath the capacitor, in a much shorter paragraph, sits the change that I think matters more. Ansiblex access control lists are becoming alliance-only. No more coalition-wide bridge networks.
CCP's diagnosis of the problem is clearly stated and, I think, correct: small groups currently survive by attaching themselves to large groups, and that dynamic is what produces mega-scale organisations. It wants new and smaller groups to be able to compete, and it says that today they cannot.
Now hold that diagnosis next to the remedy. The shared road network was one of the things you got in exchange for joining a coalition. Take coalition sharing away, and the roads do not disperse. They concentrate in whoever holds the alliance tag with the most gates on it.
A poster on the official forums, Gerard_Amatin, laid out the mechanism more precisely than CCP has answered it. If bridge access follows the alliance ticker rather than the coalition, then anyone choosing which alliance to join now weighs road coverage in that decision, and the largest alliance always has the most road.
The change does not reduce the incentive to be part of something enormous. It sharpens it, and it points it at a single ticker instead of a loose federation.
Wilhelm Arcturus, who has been writing about this game longer than most people have played it, makes the same case from the other end: the small alliances that stage out of a coalition's shared network do not become independent when you take it away. They become easier to kill.
I went looking for CCP's response to that argument and could not find one. Not in either blog, not in the pages of the feedback thread I read.
The strongest objection to this proposal accepts CCP's diagnosis completely, and disputes only whether this particular lever moves in the stated direction. As far as I can tell it has gone unanswered rather than defeated.
The best case for it, which is better than I expected
I do not want to pretend the other side is stupid, because it is not.
The sharpest argument for the whole package came from a wormhole player on the forums, and it reframed the thing for me: travel time is a shield. Nobody assembles thirty people to go and murder a ten-person mining operation if reaching it costs three quarters of an hour.
Friction protects small groups by making them not worth the trip. That is a defence of your own real estate you cannot buy any other way, and everything CCP is proposing manufactures more of it.
The second argument is harder to dismiss than it looks. A twenty-person alliance sitting inside a ten thousand person coalition is not a small group in any sense CCP is trying to protect. It has the coalition's roads, the coalition's fleets and the coalition's intel.
Calling it small is a bookkeeping trick. If the alliance-only rule forces anyone to be honest about which of those two things they are, that is not collateral damage, it is the feature.
I still land where I landed. The metering is right, and the access list is a bet that people meet scarcity by spreading out, which is not what people do with scarcity.
Two months, and every number written in pencil
None of this is final, and both blogs say so out loud. The changes are aimed at the September 2026 Major Update, the numbers are explicitly provisional, and CCP has committed to at least a month's warning before the final figures go live, so alliances can reorganise.
The first blog also notes that CSM20 asked for clarity on the goals, which is what prompted the post. That is a council asking a question, not a council signing off on a design, and the difference matters when the feedback thread runs past twenty pages.
One thing struck me while I was reading around all this. As far as I can tell, nobody has ever published a measurement of how much of null-sec the bridge networks actually cover. Not CCP, not the map sites, not the community analysts.
We are two months out from restructuring a road system whose extent nobody has counted. I find that funny rather than damning, and very in keeping with a game where the players have always known the map better than the tools do.
Make it far again
What I want out of this is simple, and it has nothing to do with balance. I want somewhere to be far away again. I want the gap between where I am and where the fight is to be a problem worth thinking about, because that gap is where all the interesting decisions in this game have always lived.
The battery does that. Charging for the shortcut instead of demolishing it is the right instinct, because a shortcut that has been load-bearing for eight years cannot simply be pulled out from under the people standing on it. You can, though, make them ask whether this particular trip is worth the charge, and asking that question is most of what strategy is.
The lock on the gate is the part I would take back. When you ration something people have been sharing, they do not learn to need less of it. They go and stand closer to whoever controls the supply.
CCP has correctly identified that null-sec is one enormous room, and half of its plan makes the room bigger. The other half quietly hands the biggest tenant a better key.
I hope I am wrong about that half. I will be flying through it either way, watching a capacitor bar refill and thinking about how far it is to the next fight, which honestly sounds like the game working.
