At the time of the introduction of Equus the majority of privateers were still sitting idle at various spacestations, Neverdie had already added generic fuses to a large number of rocktropia mobs but other planet partners had not followed that aproach yet (it shouldnt have been necessary if space hunting had been developed further, but atleast it helped to bring warp costs down over time). The availability of warp drives had much improved over the previous 3 years but was still an issue to look out for.
In the case of ToS we were still carefully maintaining a balance of the number of vips we took to maintain our lvl of warp drive stock for running schedule and not risk to inflate fuse prices.
Mindarks introduction of unlimited warp capable luxury interceptors for light travelers, was addressing regular player demands of more warp availability at all times while (likely) trying to limit the passenger base for equus and maintain the cargo customer base as well as full equipped hunters for privateers/motherships.
These new ships were not impacting the generic fuse market as the number of warps they could perform was not impacting the ingame economy at all - in hindsight i am actually not sure if mindark was fully aware how much warp potential they actually were adding through the sales of those equus which were moving players without generating direct added value to the economy (through mu on loot/ores).
It seemed more like a way to raise quick money for the already announced next step of introducing the
cargo missions which were to 'make up' for the loss privateeer and mothership owners would have due to the unlimited warp competition at a time when many old time privateer owners were still hanging on to their ships not investing in upgrades and watching space development which was always promised for the next year in the respective
state of the universe.
The indirect consequence of introducing equus for sure was a further delay in potential si upgrades for the bigger ships, especially with the stackable goods transport logout issue not being fixed and more and more ship providers just skipping the upgrade process apart from the basics - for the large ship vip providers who didnt have the advantage of toplvl structural integrity it basically was a finance decision to run their ships on as little an investment as possible to further compete with equus which already early on were found to compete on the cargo transport segment due to the deepstacking issue of antigrav containers.
Various bugs made it possible to remain unlootable while traveling equus, for example the thorifoid helmets and predamageing tactics used by some hunters to remain at low health so getting killed by another player that player wouldnt have done the majority damage and couldnt claim the loot - while this tactic became common knowledge others remained less known and shall remain in support case only hoping they get their attention in time.
One of the more recent issues however i have voiced in public is the change from lootable to unlootable space in large areas of space while leaving warp gatepoints at their old locations practically 'placing' the majority of gatepoints in non-lootable and therefor removing any incentive to anyone for ever placing a warp mine at these locations.
These locations were developed and introduced specifically with warp mines, warp drive lvls, captain levels in mind (assumptious on my part but there would simply be no other reason to design warp the way it was done for any other reason) and to put them in unlootable space is undermining not only the whole concept of warp drives I-V, Warp mines I-V and the captain profession but also giving equus and firebird ships the safety aspect of privateers and motherships for free which has an even greater impact as long as deepstackability of antigrav containers remains a possibility in space.