I’m returning after a few years off and am a little confused.
Huge swaths of nullsec only have Ark and Bist anomalies, which are worthless. Oh, and there’s often a token “small asteroid cluster” which also only has Ark and Bist. Which are worthless.
I would be supremely annoyed if I was jumping through all the hoops to maintain nullsec sov and have nothing of any worth in the belts.
Spodumain appears to be randomly appearing and disappearing in specific systems?
What were these changes intended to accomplish, and have they?
The reason for this was to fix CCP’s mistake with Rorquals raking in ungodly amounts of minerals and to make every space worth living in and fighting for. That is why ores are now split between all security bands so that no one security area can be self-sustaining.
Moon mining still exists. Ore anomalies from Ihub upgrades still work well with 1 Rorq as booster and lots of barges and exhumers. Standard asteroid belts are a thing of the past because CCP doesn’t like dynamic environments that replenish over time and on their own without CCP manually controlling that (more manual control was one of the goals with this change, too. Nothing good has happened in that regard ever since.) and instead of get random ore anoms spammed EVERYWHERE.
Of cause they went to bully null, while high and low and wh-land were buffed or left unmodified?
According to CCP, having less resources would cause the miners to fight each other over the available resources. Instead, miners unsubscribed. Then CCP thought they could inspire ratters to fight each other by nerfing the combat anomaly spawn rate and removing belt rats from SOV-land, again leading to subscriptions being canceled. They also removed ice m^3 from the rocks, made ice a regular respawning anom in the “ice systems” instead of ice respawning at a random system in the constellation, arguing that the reduction of ice availability would cause pvp and the lack of ice products for fuel block manufacture would cause fuel prices to skyrocket, making citadel and POS ownership unpayable to non-megacorps, but instead they only got more susbscriptions canceled.
Last winter they backpedalled and introduced massive ehp and mining yield buffs to all barges and exhumers, as well as sizing up the rocks, introducing “residue” which according to CCP makes mining more interactive, along with a Type C mining laser which primarily exists to quickly deplete rocks w/o having to jetcan the ore you didn’t want to anyways, namely Arkonor and Bistot.
They also swapped the mining module cycle time bonuses for yield bonuses and added larger holds, which allows players to use more alts, as the longer cycle times imply less alt-tab madness. I don’t know whether it resulted in miners multi-boxing more accounts or not, though they increased subscription fees for single account players (multiboxers get a subsidy and don’t have to pay the increased prices) which hints that the barge multibox quality of life changes were not good enough to cause people to subscribe more alts.
I don’t understand how residue adds anything to the game at all. You lose some random amount of the mass of the asteroid you’re mining, how does that provide fun?
I guess Athanors and moon mining can make up for some of the ore removals, but it also smacks of CCP wanting more timers to start more fights, which is the opposite of what miners want.
I feel like CCP doesn’t think at all about what the players actually want, they just implement systems that they think are cool in their own heads.
It was often this way, but it wasn’t always this way.
The intention is to provide a little more choice and strategy for how you want to obtain ore. When you see a rock in space and want it in your hold, your choices are:
T1: slow to fill your hold, but you’ll eventually get all the rock in your hold
T2 + type A crystals: fast to fill your hold, and you’ll get almost all the rock, but not all.
T2 + Type B crystals: very fast to fill your hold, and you’ll get most of the rock, but not all of it.
T2 + Type C crystals: barely fills your hold, and you’ll barely get any of the rock. But the rock disappears quickly. The „PvP crystal“ to prevent others from getting it.
Faction gear: very fast to fill your hold, and you’ll get all the rock. The min/max-er’s dream, but a shiny lossmail in the waiting.
So even when you progress to the „end game“ you can still use type C to burn through the Ark/Bist to get Indy ADMs up and switch to T1/faction for the zero-waste limited high end moon ore availability and type B for mercx.
Supply of ice was increased by 400%. There is 4 times the amount of ice available at 34% reside. The trade off for residue is greatly increased mining yield. Ice materials are so grossly oversupplied still it is absolutely ridiculous and mining it is an extremely low income activity.
Supply of moon ore was doubled. This was when all moon good types were seriously oversupplied and about 5 years after moon goo supplies were doubled following the change to actively mining moons. With crystals there are varying degrees of residue where more residue provides more yield over time. The trade off for better yield per hour was greater waste. There wasnt enough waste and all grades of moon goo crashed, R32 notably suffered, at times most of the R32 were worth less than R16 and even now, sperrylite is worth more than 3 of the 4 R32 and carnotite and cinnabar are worth nominally more than R16. Recently moon yields were reduced by 25% to help the glut, but even residue + that 25% reduction was nowhere near enough.
All standard ores (including mercoxit) are still desperately over supplied. This is also in addition to the mineral requirements of anything bigger than a cruiser being drastically reduced.
The point of residue was to give a choice between mining at 100% efficiency, or mine at some efficiency less than 100% that at greater yield per hour. Vastly more materials were added to the game than the worst case scenario of residue (tech II B type crystals) could have removed. They probably should have reduced the resource density of the rocks in addition to adding residue to encourage more crystal usage and the oversupply wouldn’t be so bad, but there would still be an over supply. They did that with mercoxit and it only somewhat worked as morphite has crashed to about 40k isk.
It is very simple:
Unless you are mining R64 or (to a much lesser degree) R32, there is absolutely zero reason to not use tech II mining equipment to improve your yield. All minable materials are abundant, and you aren’t gaining anything by mining it at perfect efficiency with drastically reduced yield. If the field runs out, you can just go mining more of it somewhere else.
If you want to mine something that is of ubiquitous supply at a slow rate without residue, then use Tech I mining equipment and you will mine at the exact same speed as you did before when everything one would have mined, was worth more.
When you mentioned flying through systems and not seeing anything to mine - I am not sure if you meant the belts or the anoms. Nearly all mining is now done in anomalies. Belt mining has been dead in nullsec since about 2016 while most of the null belts were removed in the last year. (systems that were good enough to contain mercoxit in belts, still have mercoxit in them now) Anomalies require ADM to spawn anoms. the random anoms that show up in low ADM systems was a compromise by CCP to placate eve players who suddenly forgot how to drill a moon or belt rat to boost ADM
I don’t see why Sperrylite shouldn’t be more expensive then the R32s. The Rxx number is just a number, and the amounts of minerals/materials needed to build something might define a value, but ships and modules have been rebalanced alot of times since the blueprints’ consumptions were designed, causing a shift in popular player demands and therefore a shift in market demands.
Even when you’re mining R64 there’s little reason not to T2 Type B it.
A moon mining operation has limits in manpower, and unless you have sufficient manpower to scoop the ore with T1 strips before it despawns, just use the t2 ones. Of cause with type B scripts if you can’s type A everything with the “human resources” available.
Ore that was only partially scooped is better then ore that wasn’t scooped and despawns.
Seconding this. Unless you are multiboxing 10+ hulks and an orca/rorq and routinely clear out all of your mining anoms within 3-4 jumps of your safety net, there is very little reason to bother with the higher efficiency but slower mining methods.
It isn’t just a number, it is a rarity level. While R16 is rarer than R4 or R8, for all intents and purposes, R16 is ubiquitous in null. There will always be more R16 available to mine even within a single constellation, let alone on the scale of an alliance’s space. This is not the case with R32. While rarity alone doesn’t ensure high prices, there is something wrong when a rare commodity is worth less than an abundant one - and I mean its a video game, the abundance of all these can be adjusted.
If you don’t have the manpower to clear the field, I wholly agree, but its going to be a pretty rare scenario that there isn’t manpower to clear R64 - R64 tends to make most miners come out en masse to mine. At least in sov null. I could definitely see small low sec or NPC null groups having problems clearing an R64 fast enough uninterrupted.
Point was more about the OP looking for something to be salty about and having to make one out of residue when no one was forcing him to when there was absolutely zero justifiably reason not to 99% of the time anyways