I joined the game after athanors and tataras made control towers obsolete for the purposes of getting stuff out of moons. Athanors make so much sense to me. They’re like NPC stations, except you own them and you can lose stuff if you forget to pay the fuel bill.
In contrast, the short time I lived out a POS for… reasons (it wasn’t to extract the moon goo) it was pretty confusing for me. Ship and inventory management was all “huh?’ I don’t know how I could do it long term and would be quite sad if Refineries were taken out of the game since I wouldn’t know what to do in a POS. I know people did in the past, and I don’t know how they did it.
But while I don’t want them to come back, they conceptionally sound very cool. I have seen screenshots of people fighting over the control towers in the days before I joined the game and it sounds like people had a blast trying to control those moons. Also the devs made so many cool things using POS mechanics like this dumb little siphon unit to steal stuff. I think it would be cool had the devs never introduced athanors and I think I would be happier in that universe. That said, I’m used to the way things work now and I don’t want them to say “Hey we’re going to scrap refineries and make people get moon goo the old way.”
How long did this form of moon mining last? If it lasted for 13+ years without runaway inflation, I disagree with you thinking “it should never be that way.” Most forms of “too easy or too passive and profitable” would lead to runaway inflation (if it produces ISK) or just a crash in prices (if it makes something needed to be an input somewhere else) and I agree that would be bad. If the old system was the original method of moon mining and lasted a long time, I don’t think it breaks the philosophy of the game. Now if the original system lasted 3 months and then they said “Oh whoops, need to nerf” I guess you could make the argument it was too easy. I don’t want them to go back since living out an athanor is so much more convenient than trying to do inventory management and this system keeps the demand for barge pilots.
Look up when Citadels came out, that’s about when they phased out the POS mining, but I don’t remember exactly when. I’d long stopped mining at that point.
POS moon mining was the status quo for most of Eve, and one of the leading causes of the blue donut developing in nullsec. The large nullblocs had monopoly over most of the R64s, and only another large bloc would be able to shake that foundation, but doing so would weaken that bloc and make them vulnerable to one of the other blocs. Remember, this was the time when you could jump a fleet of supers across the galaxy in a few minutes, supers paid for by POS moon mining. Any attempt to take a R64 was guaranteed to be met with swift response from the owner’s supers.
I firmly believe that if POS mining was never a thing, there wouldn’t be near as many supers as there are in the game. If it had always been an activity that could be interrupted, like it is today, then that certainly would have made an impact on the political landscape as the game matured, potentially limiting opportunities to build them.
Yes, there was a lot of crying about losing POS mining. No one wanted to actually mine for their moon goo.
I’m sorry to ruin your optimism, but it wasn’t a blast, it was an endless soul crushing grind.
On another note, moon goo back then, because of how access rights and corp hangars worked, was not available to regular players - only to corp executives. The current mechanics requires a mining fleet and makes moon materials available to all members of the corp.
I wasn’t playing pre-citadels but from what I’ve read/seen, there are perhaps a couple of upsides to POSs as a system which it would be a shame to lose: much more accessible to solos/small groups, and a little more flavourful. Second perhaps only matters if you’ve a roleplay bent, but the galaxy feels a little smaller when everyone is using Upwell Consortium structures whereas previously you’d have starbases built around faction towers.
As a single player back in the day (2010ish) I had a platinum and chromium (?) moon and made hexite.
It was about 1 bill isk per month profit passive. (1 month plex was about 300 million isk at the time)
This particular simple reaction required a small and medium pos and hauling the finished product.
I say we go back to the old way but again I know there’s noobs that like the “new way” and earning less.
They’re still there in the game and still useful. If you live outside highsec, you’ll want one in the system you live in because it’s not always safe to warp to station. Sometimes the station is bubbled and you need a safe place to warp to. They’re on the market as Control Towers and most of the stuff still works, like hangar arrays and POS guns.
Prior to Upwell Structures, everything was done with static, invincible NPC stations, with moon mining and capital ship building being done in POSes. They were rarely ever used as actual bases outside wormholes, and I’d much rather have a citadel in a wormhole.
But, for a new wormhole corp, the Stick Life is a far, far cheaper option than a citadel. A small control tower, corp hangar array, ship maintenance array, and some basic defenses is a couple hundred million isk. A fully decked out large control tower. what used to be known as a Death Star, runs just a bit more than the starting price of a Citadel and core.
I have to say this would be a plus. Make the barge pilots have something to do. I think it might have been better to change it so that 1/4 of the stuff ended up in the corp hanged and the rest was chucked out to space in the form of rocks so miners are actually needed. That said, we’re here now and I don’t want to go back to mechanics I never had to deal with.
How did your group not get wardecced? If the arrays can drop their stuff, then you would be a target.
I think in terms of how good it would have been we have "old way” > new way > rip out the refineries after people use them and tell them to go back to old way. I’ve lived with the current moon mining and an easy inventory management, I don’t want to go back.
I heard of people setting up a control tower for a bit, getting goo, getting kicked out by someone bigger, and then doing the same thing in a different system since apparently it was profitable even while losing 3 fully fitted control towers a year (they had to have batteries or they’d be wacked way more). Did that actually happen? I don’t know. I didn’t play the game back then. Even if I did, only the officers could access corp hangers so I wouldn’t know.
It was in low sec (all moon mining was in null or low sec) as it was a valuable resource so it didn’t need a war but it was good while it lasted.
Some guys with dreads asked nicely if they could have it so I hardened my pos’s and flew the coup. I still made a lot of isk and had a story to tell all these years later.
Your Moon Miner was in a POS surrounded by automated guns and a hard shield similar to what Structures have now. The moon goo was contained inside the moon miner and only accessible by the owner of the POS. Taking that ore to the assembler was done with jump freighters when systems were empty.
There other than emptying the extractor every so often, there was no player participation in moon mining back then. As long as the POS stayed online, it would continue to endlessly print ISK for the owner. Coalitions and large Alliances had QRF fleets where leaders had personal phone numbers of people to call if a R64 got attacked, and they could respond with multiple capitals and supercapitals to defend it in a matter of minutes.
Just to be clear, general mining itself wasn’t safer than it is now. Hot Droppers had far less restrictions on their travel back then, so I’d argue it’s a bit safer now, but then we also have filaments that could randomly bring someone to your door. Moon mining, if done with the backing of a large group, was absolutely safe though.
The old days of POS mining is similar to the metenox they introduced , a basically passive income stream . just make sure it has fuel and it keeps running . personally , i hate the fact that they brought in the metenox . being a fan of mining , it was nice to constantly have something to mine that was worth something . now there is very few oportunities to get out and mine and enjoy it
Ive lived through both systems and now the reintegration of new and old in the metenox. Ultimately the change was because of the OTEC cartel and players, mostly line members, who were aware of the mining, the wealth generated and the jealousy it was only for execs and higher ups personal isk printing funds for the most part. Ultimately after the OTEC cartel failure to monopolize prices of certain moon goo it was changed to citadels.
It was super easy, even lower levels could set up a small gallente tower and mine lower ends if they wanted to, few did though. Now I think the cost and nature of metenox will hinder smaller players and then the only way will again be to “herd cats” into mining the goo for you and taking a cut of the profits. I also wonder if metenox spam will proliferate like tower spam was in some systems before, but I figure fuel costs will mitigate some of it and set a lower limit for what can be mined profitably.
The reason inflation never got out of hand was that there was always a certain upper limit to moon goo produced per hour, day, month, year. Even at 100% goo production, aka, every moon was plugged full of of control towers and mined, only X amount was available to the manufacturing arms, jita, etc. That limit was capped by CCP when it was created so literally no more than that can be produced at any given time. So ultimately youd have less than 100% utilization due to cost, war, supply issues, etc and therefore no “inflation” as there was nothing beyond this theoretical 100% to be mined in the first place.
It wasnt the inflation that was curbed but who gained from it and profited from it that changed.
I also hate these drills. I think giving miners something to do was really positive of the POSes. What they should have done (with pure speculation on my part since I never sued the old system) was have 1/4 of the goo come in arrays like before and the tower just chucks out the rest in minable ore on gird. To me the new drills are kind of the worse of both worlds, they don’t seem to have the old dynamic, and yet they give nothing for lower ranked miners.
Well, like it or not, it was probably needed because of the lack of manually mined materials. If it was a choice between having material shortages and adding Metenox, I think they’ve made the right choice.
I thought it was fun dismantling automated defenses with a fleet design of our own, and have this tug-of-war over moon ownership with other lowsec entities. We even had some fun tricking a guy (who was an unpleasant player) by having his Director lower the POS shields for us. Alas, with the requirement to mine actively everyone lost interest pretty much overnight. In the long run a whole slew of systems was owned by one PERSON. The one willing to mine.
When I played in null (some years later) and figured out people collectively mine these things out in 30 minutes I was glad I left this activity for the cycle-watchers.
