Dev blog: The Goo must flow: Everything about Refineries and Moon mining

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I did not say this, but has anybody else noticed that the “refinery” is a bit like the old POS?

One per moon. Check. Deployable structure. Check. Mines moon goo. Check. Allows ships to enter and refit etc. Check.

It is almost as if they took something away with the left hand and gave it back with the right.

It is amazing, when you think about it. For over a year we have been promised a Great New Thing. Now we get it, with explosions and all the cool music in the (very brief) promo video.

But try to explain to an old player just returning what has changed with moon mining. Things are called different names, but they smell just as sweet.

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You are right that several things are the same, but, the need to go out in mining ships vs one player passively collecting stuff from a silo - is huge.

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Gotta luv CCP’s attempt at not manipulating the markets with this release.

BPO’s released on the day old moon mining ceases - At least a week to build the first of the medium refineries (4 and a half days if you do it from a BPO), 10 days for the first large refinery.
Roughly 2 weeks before any moon mining commences under the new release. Well planned CCP.

Expect all T2 build items to sky rocket in price - And thank CCP for their foresight in picking the best way to push prices up so the rich elitists who’ve controlled moon goo for years can get 1 last final - Pass go and collect and collect and collect.

These BPO’s should have been released weeks ago so people could prepare for the changes. Not as has happened, all moon mining is halted because the infrastructure is unavailable.

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Are you SURE that’s exactly what happened?

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I hope the concept of ‘Permanency’ is put back onto the drawing board.

Scanning all of the moons took ‘an afternoon’.

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its total bullchit how ccp just releases these BPO’s with no time to research and get them ready… you must be seriously desperate for cash ccp… why don’t you go ahead and kick that plex sale in overdrive…

its also bullchit how you stopped all POS moon functions and forced everyone over to the new system… what ever happened to "we will never stop services or functions of existing things until its replacement is in place and fully functional…

well its not… you just caused a spike in t2 prices and a huge gap in reactions cooking up the freaking moon goo. this will have ripple effects across the market.

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Yes, building an ARK cost 3b more than 3 days ago when you use moon material to build capital parts.

This release should better called “How I kill EVE Online”

Micro Corp can’t run any more structure to do reaction. Now this very expensive and risky.

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Looking at the Athanor in Sing. With a T2 Ore Grading Proc applied the base refine rate is displayed as 54% (which is what it used to be in citadels with the T2 rig on). Is this a bug, or is the Max a Athanor can get to 54%?

I would have thought it should be base+ath+rig (50+2+3) = 55.

Is it that SIng is out of date and Tranq is right? Would be good to know for sure before applying a rig and only then figuring out that the Athanor plus T2 rig is ‘not’ the same as Tatana plus T1 rig.

Thanks

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nothing!?

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Lookit, the way this will work in practice is as follows:

Nulsec corp sets up moon refinery in backwater of nullsec. They dock up if hostiles come into system, and log off if they hang around. If the system is empty, they emerge to mine the goo.

Then they are like “I am playing a mining sim?”, and go off to play Civ 6. (they don’t do this because they love the nul bear life: fer real)

The idea that mining fleets will generate content is far fetched because it ignores the reality of risk aversion as a way of life.

I’m not blaming folks who dock up. When the goons maraud through our pocket like a plague of deranged swine, we dock. Or we die. They don’t mess around. The folks, the scouts, the big alliances have hunting miners are very skilled pilots and will absolutely catch you if you don’t stay aligned and ready to warp out.

The point is, Eve is a dangerous game because the enemy is always very experienced and knows more than you do, as an industrialist. So the only counter is to learn to get out of the way, and quick.

This is why honourbru space ship combat has to be structured, like Alliance tournament, or dueling. Otherwise it doesn’t happen. You just have a lot of hunters and prey evolving an arms race of tactics. The hunter wants surprise, the prey wants early warning. Just as with lions chasing zebra, there is an awful lot of walking around and fruitless chases before a Zebra goes down.

If you check out a lot of the most popular streams, you will find that many of the good fights are pretty much staged. Not to deceive anyone, but rather folks who like the streams come for a fight and so it is much like a duel. Being from the same group of players, honourbru principles like no ECM and no blobbing with cynos is generally observed. When that doesn’t happen, you risk watching hours and hours of nothing, with the highlight being a 30 to 1 blob with logi and ECM that creates the opposite of exciting entertainment. If you’ve one blob with logi and ECM killing a single roaming ship, you’ve seen them all.

Cruising for fights is actually a job, in Eve. Like, a proper real life occupation. You start a stream and try to get dank subs from the legions of folks who enjoy the complex mechanics of eve combat. But it takes so long to find fights worth showing the folks on youtube that you need to be getting paid, or RL says you fail at everything.

But folks are willing to do this job, to devote themselves to the streaming life, because, bottom line here, a good fight in eve is an AMAZING experience. The adrenaline, the fast pace of critical decisions and errors by both sides, the hidden cap war… When you do get a good fight, Eve is the best game around, by far.

The killer is that it can take you a week and a hundred bucks worth of ships to find one.

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I don’t deny that finding a near equal-terms fight is a rare thing and all the more memorable for it. Lions vs Zebras is far from that and may be all EVE gains in the PvP department by this change, with occasional flare ups when rorquals and capitals get involved. But I don’t think it can compare to the rare jump frieghter and Rorqual accidents during moongoo retrieval ops under the old system.

My comment is to observe that we went from a mechanic that put very few ships at risk to one that puts many more out there. Even if only 5% of anything before or after is getting “involved” with PvP due to good practices, more ships involved means more stuff getting built and blown up.

Separately, the work involved now with collecting moon materials can’t help but spread the wealth a little farther beyond the small circle which profitted the most, previously. That’s also part of the huge change; and the act of re-establishing the moon mining industry with new structures currently under way, is giving a lot of players something to do for the next few months.

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Yes, I agree with that. Station based income is a bit weird, but then again there are economic market gamers who never leave station. Ideally there would be three distinct play styles: pure PVE for folks who dfon’t like stress, structured PVP for the time poor who sort of like a bit of stress. And then the rest of the game, as it stands more or less (lose local in null perhaps) for those who love stress.

As for the moon goo, we’ve just scanned our pocket and it is worse than it was before. And it wasn’t good before.

I don’t trust CCP Fozzie when he said the moon goo will be reasonably distributed. His eyes do that shifty thing they do when he talks about it.

I guess CCP will always have their big institutional level clients who buy bulk plex, and those big deal folks want something special. Moon goo monopolies have always been promoted as strategic ground in the game, but as we saw with new pirate capital releases, who gets what is seldom random or “fair”.

But it is their game and only they know how the revenue shapes up, and if the goons didn’t get special treatment they’d cry like bairns.

So, thanks for allocating more suck moons to the little guy, Fozzie. :+1:

At least he rolled the wormholers and got them all hot and bothered for nuthin. That was worthy.

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Just a suggestion here @CCP_Phantom… do you think that maybe somewhere in the Eve Update or release notes or any of the other half dozen bits of documentation that I have read through today, in order to try and find out why I could not scan any moons in my home system, it might have been nice to have posted the information about Hi Sec and WH space not getting the minerals in the moons? It would have saved me most of today, saved me buying a refinery at the current over inflated prices and lugging it 32 jumps to my home system from Jita where I am now stuck not being able to use it or for that matter sell it??? Having placed it on the market it is not browsable. If can only be found if you search for it. So now I have to lug it back the 32 jumps to Jita in order to place it up for sale there whilst all the time the price plummets. Such a fun day.

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Separately, the work involved now with collecting moon materials can’t help but spread the wealth a little farther beyond the small circle which profitted the most, previously.

Exactly who was it you see as “the small circle which profited the most”
Was it those line members who got SRP for losses due to their alliance having moon income?
Was it those who had space to live in due to their alliance being able to pay sov bills and upgrades due to moon income?
Was it those who were able to buy supers and titans at discount prices due to moon income?
Maybe it was those who have Keepstars and other structures to live in, many of which were paid for with moon goo.

I mean shite, why the fuk did we let those alliance leaders of ours dedicate the time to collect and manage moon goo (no easy task when you have a network of moons to maintain) so we as line members could reap the benefits of being a part of something bigger than us.

Sure moon mining was a little too passive but what we have now is possibly the most tedious grindfest since the introduction of FozzieSov and magic wands.
The primary income from moons will not change - Alliances will still get their bit, those putting in the effort to mine the crap may make a little more than they would simply mining an enormous. Probably not as Rorquals can’t pull moon goo.
The losers are likely those who got the type of benefits I mentioned above - Alliances will now rely on line members to provide more of their income so things like structures can be provided where previously they were paid for out of alliance income, they will now be “crowd funded”.
The miner who puts in the effort to mine goo will be able to pay for the nice things those who don’t mine like to have.

Moon mining may well provide a little bottom up income - Which will be absorbed by the “up” so the line members have somewhere to live and play.

You don’t need sov to hold a moon - If you have a few nice moons in your pocket and one of the elitist (blob everything) groups wants them - Good luck stopping them taking what they want.

“Fixing” moon mining (to spread the wealth) isn’t going to “fix” anything as long as the alliances with huge rental networks are able to rake in trillions of isk each month. When Fozziesov was in the works it was stated it would create room for more groups to live and thrive in nulsec - And it did, as long as they are prepared to pay rent for the privilege.

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Spot on.

I begin to suspect that there is a real problem with jaded employees at CCP imagining that customers of CCP are also working for the benefits they receive.

Perhaps there needs to be a serious discussion on the meaning of the words “play” and “work”.

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CCP please provide information about T2 prices and your vision how they will progress on… lets say 6 month forward

I am very afraid that these moon goo changes will result in dramatic price rise and all players will suffer from yet another stupid Friday-like decision by a bunch of “tallanted” fozzies devs

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Goo is rising. Looks like you were right

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It’s a change that was purely made in order to benefit large Null Alliances (Goons) who can +1 with Rorquals easily and in relative safety. I’m gonna be the I-told-you-so-asshole… It was obvious from the first posts, many people believed CCP that this would be good for “the small guy”, while it was clear that they’d never get a foothold on this. Aside from logical aspects regarding mechanics, it was interesting to see how much certain guys from GSF posted in the discussion threads. They put a curious amount of work in there.

I guess we shouldn’t underestimate the convincing power of Goons :slight_smile: However they do it, be it good wording or real money, somehow they manage to convince someone to make decisions in their favor and their favor alone.

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Rorqs operate optimally in the largest anoms, they certainly don’t in a moon field, its less of an advantage to have a rorq, and afaik they don’t dock at cheap citadels placed on remote moons - ie they’d have to field a tatara or a fortizar nearby to dock, and they’d lose the cover of their super umbrella to field them remotely.

IMO this change didn’t make much to the occupants of delve - they were already mining all the things, it did however make a big difference to the occupants of syndicate, since we
(1) can fix or mineral distribution issues with moon choices and
(2) now control our local resources because they are useless to people that don’t live here and
(3) can generally find things to do for more people per system, thus reducing the yawning gap in performance of a sov system vs an npc system in terms of the scale of organisation it can support.

ie its conceivable again that an alliance of power could arise by living and growing in npc null, in a way it really hasn’t been since the introduction of ihub generated anomolies.

This is wrong. My reading of the killboards says that everyone and his dog tried to field athanors and small pvp groups had a field day killing them. What is not at all prominent on killboards for athanors is pl or goons or other usual suspects. What is even more clear is the total absense of some sort of structured regional takeover of moon control by a large entity.

IMO few large entities probably would have had the capital to drop all the required athanors beyond the best moons in their own space, which means everyone that had the capital to buy a single unit had and probably still has the opportunity to find a reasonable moon and drop it.

GRR hat goon, with no evidence of your accusations beyond the most populous alliance having posters.

Fairly sure that moon mining was something that originated in CCP, and the genesis of the idea goes back a long time, ie they were originally kicking around ring mining as a way to break the cartels and move some of the income to the regular miner.

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Care to explain how a Rorq doesn’t rock in the moonfield created by a properly rigged Athanor? You do know that there is this thing called tethering which provides a lot of safety to any friendly ship near the structure, wether it is able to dock or not - right?

Anyhow:

Interesting point. I’m actually happy that while Lowsec was fked over, there are other small-ish enteties who find their playstyle buffed :slight_smile:

Not really sure how what you’ve cited relates to what you reply. On the contrary: the amount of small-group Athanor kills just proves that the small-time industrial has less of a chance to successfully anchor an Athanor than a POS before, because people will find it in time, it is much harder to defend and much less of a grind if found in the first 24 hours. So, the issue of the foothold is simple: the new mechanics offer no advantage for “the small guy” who wants to get out there and do moon mining. Upfront investment: higher now. Risk to be found and end up on Zkill: higher now. Workload: higher now. Exposure: higher now. Without saying that this is bad, it surely isn’t something the average small guy profits from. It is more likely that others get bored shooting Athanors and just let it be after a while. That’s EVE in 2017. Make things possible by making them so boring for so many people, that in the end someone will be able to do it without intervention. Lel.

Yeah you are right, that was a bit stupid :smiley:

Anyhow, I’m curious how Syndicate develops and I guess in a year or so it will be interesting to look at metrics for different kinds of space with possible relation to the moon goo changes.