Whether you can tether, you can’t dock to unload, you can’t compress goo with the core (it has to be refined to “compress” it), and as far as I understand it, a rorqual doesn’t refine, only compress, and the refinery has to be set to very long drill settings to produce the roids big enough to be worth setting a rorq on and its warp to refinery / warp to new spot or traverse to new roid times are large in moon fields, which reduce its efficiency compared to a colossal.
So if the refinery is remote, its going to need a docking structure other than the athanor or a support character not in a rorq, and the rorq itself is going to be affected by all sorts of minor performance issues which reduce its advantages over cheaper 2 character setups, and then if you are remote, you’ll be away from alliance t2 refining rigs in in tartaras so you’ll start thinking about remote fielding a 600m t1 rig on top of your 2b fitted athanor that has to sit a month+ unnattended in remote space, or looking at pretty big penalties to refining too or doing like 20 jump freighter / rorq trips to return ore to your safe space to refine it.
Or you could just mine colossals between local refinery pops, which I think is the more practical solution. ie goon rorqs are going to be mostly in anomolies in delve imo.
Same benefits that accrue to syndicate accrue to lowsec. You can have ark and bistot from moons and the goo you mine will fill in the rest of the mineral basket. IMO structure of a typical lowsec org changes a bit, some local miners who reship to dogpile targets (much like cas does), and some pvpers who still use alts in karma/horde/renters for income. IMO long term population goes up. The mistake as always will be allowing miners who don’t reship and fight into your orgs.
They are being killed by groups that are feasible for smaller organisations to fight against, who only field gangs and not apex alliance fleets, and not only that, you have no idea how many survivors there are. Hint - lots!
The moons that had significant value benefit above the fuel cost were owned by majors beforehand. So potential lossmail is replacing outright non ownership. its plainly a step forward when indy orgs are trying to grab them!
The uncompressability of moon-goo ore is an issue every kind of setup would have to deal with. On the other hand the non-goo ores of moon belts can well be compressed and since these ores yield a higher amount of minerals than anom ores, I could imagine them being worth the hassle. Regarding the moon-goo ores I would have assumed that even with a Tatara in system, due to long warp times, people would not use their Rorqs to transport these ores from belt to structure, but rather have a Miasmos alt doing the job. There also is a rig that will reduce the radius of the moon belt, although I’m not sure if or how much diminuishes the problems you name for Rorquals in such belts. If you can field X Rorqs into these belts, I’m pretty sure that you don’t even need to move them at all, while still being in decent range to asteroids. So, while Rorquals lose one of their advantages for one component of moon ore, they would still be more effective in general. Wether or not effective enough might just depend on the size of your fleet, the relative safety of the area and so on. Remote moon operations are probably a bad idea with such a setup, but everything that is within the supercap umbrella should be fine. Properly rigged reprocessing structures are just a question of time. If you can safely assume to keep the structures alive for long enough, the investment will pay out. In other words: the larger you are, the the higher the incentive to rig t2. I would not be surprised to find systems in Delve full to the brink with Athanors in a couple of months from now.
Regarding “the small guy”. One thiing that CCP announced was the option for Ninja mining. Well, while this is possible, it is really more of a joke on the one who attempts it. Find an uttanded r64 moon field, bring a small gang of miners, ships that seem to make sense operating in hostile territory. Start mining and realize how little you get for the risk while your ore hold fills up and you have to leave to reprocess somewhere.
Up until now I’ve only heard people complaining about how their lowsec Alliance/Corp income was nerfed and how they are not able to spend enough time mining to compensate for that, even if they are willing to. I think the issue isn’t only a certain stubborness towards the change, but really also the higher risk and lower reward for people when mining in low compared to null. While there are exceptions, the changes made Lowsec group life less appealing for already established groups. Maybe new ones, who don’t have the comparison to how it was before, will be happy to try their luck. After accepting the changes I started to wonder why CCP didn’t at least hold up to their promise of new content for Lowsec or change some of the other Null vs. Low mechanics too.
As you say, Lowsec suddenly has a load of minerals, albeit under less optimal preconditions than null, but how would you ever use them? I still think it may be time to un-bind Supercapital production from Sov Null and give it to NPC Null as well as Lowsec - and hell - why not C6 Wormholes too.
Do we already have any statistics for small groups? I hope in the next Monthly Economic Report we find Data about that and moon mining amount by region.
That’s true, but only due to the changed composition, not due to mechanics. As soon as the dust settles, indy orgs may very well be targeted or coerced into bowing/paying.
its not an issue if you live near the structure. 1 million m3 of moon ore translates to 10% of a blockade runner trip worth of goo and 1.5 kryos loads of minerals, and since i’m not in a rorq, and the structure is close and thus somewhat defensible it can be rigged and have a recycler, all without it particularly mattering that I don’t own, and probably will never own a rorqual or a jump freighter.
If you have a second account not mining, then you are buying 2 omegas for 1 rorqs output, which is no longer so massively out of scale compared to cheaper, non rorq strategies.
The roid sizes themselves are an issue. I did a 2 week pop on a cad moon, and got 1 148k m3 roid for every 3 49k roids, and they are interspersed with the secondary stuff, which will be variable for value (right now nomnomnom, but not always in the future). Again, this is not me suggesting that rorquals are still not going to be the best output, this is me suggesting that the overall benefit of rorqual ownership relative to other strategies is diminished on moons.
which is the key to the rest of the cluster being able to own moons. ie the key balance issue is whether a safer local anomoly is competitive with a remote moon after all the logistics issues are taken into account.
Aye, but even we have rigged structures and ample structures for our population, and again, relative to delve with its massive extant population of colossal anomolies, we gained fixes for far more basic issues with mining, and we had goon, mc, initiative and nc moon poses previously fought over with titans in our area turn into dead sticks.
The viability of ninja mining is proportional to the distance to an NPC station or neutral/friendly citadel, which obviously means sov null is an inferior choice to lowsec or npc null for that strategy, and likewise the edges of sov null with the difficult to trap on regional gate and station next door might also be much more easily ninja’d than deep sov null. To me that feels like deep sov null is an advantage and thats fine.
Yes the shape of optimal lowsec organisation changes. A feisty miner is a desirable addition.
Our ‘holdings’ is 1 sov null system held by castabouts on behalf of CAS pilots, a gap and then a few NPC null systems. We could source supers from the market if we needed them, and we could install the structures to build if we thought we could defend them (we can’t). So if you get to the scale of being able to defend such a structure, you only need your holding to be partially sov null. My moros was built locally.
The stat we’ll get is mining by region, and its gotta be up for all regions imo, but on percentage basis I expect it to be up more everywhere else than delve.
I wonder if the change was a bit too drastic. Going directly from a passive to a 100% active moon income system seems too extreme. It forces small-medium PvP corps (with a certain gameplay ideology…) to have to work with players who often don’t share their gameplay ideals. (Actually hurts the gameplay experience of both groups.) The parties that lose the least with this change are big alliances where they can have near-dedicated mining corps that don’t need to associate with the PvP branch… Even still, I really wonder if the CCP developers did enough research to make sure that there’s enough low and null miners to actually meet demand…
Miners have actually become safer because of the fact that they now get to use the refinery for defense, which makes it much less of a boon to PvP’ers than what CCP said it would be.
I think that the system could be improved by adding a mechanic that adds a low-yield passive option that also adds more PvP content. (I know that may not seem to make sense, but please bare with me…)
I think that CCP should add a specialized/automated mining Drone/Fighter/Excavator that can be turned on by someone with sufficient permissions in the structure. Turning them on would cause semi-expensive (dumb) AI controlled drones to come out of the refinery and mine the asteroids automatically. These drones would show up on the overview and could be attacked by anyone. In essence, the corp would be responsible for protecting these mining drones from being killed by others (who get rewarded with a nice killmail…).
This is actually wrong. Most syndicate belts have jaspet or hedbergite as the best ore, small roids, half eaten to death by thukker mining squads. There are no auto-respawning anoms, because its NPC null.
With the moons, we got access to the goo in our own systems (because historical syndicate moon owners don’t currently want to mine here), and we got massive fixes to our mineral basket issues.
I’m in space for 4 hours a day when one of my moons are up, and close to my friends in fleet (0-2 jumps). I was much further afield when ratting previously, and often couldn’t form up with the rest of our small gangs to respond to pvp opportunities.
Furthermore i’m building t1 hulls with the excess minerals and selling them locally to avoid exporting.
IMO both of those effects beneficial to local area pvp.
Any sense of miner security is a false one, anything but rorquals can be ganked before station has time to target. Even then you can gank the rorqual drones and warp off. The only station defenses for a refinery that are actually effective is the electronic warfare. You can’t easily fight small group vs small group on a refinery and don’t have time to bait tackle but ganks have not been hurt.
I can agree with this. Not to mention the Citadel weapons, while effective at damaging large battleship and above size ships, is for the most part ineffective at applying damage to subcapitals such as Destroyers and Cruisers.
Well, our corp set up athanors in nul sec, on good moons. We had a great plan for T2 capital (JF) production.
So, we set up the athanors. That was cool game play. Lots of nice things to look at. And we were mining quitre a lot of ice, to fuel them and the reactor and the clone and the manufacturing module and the and the and the and the… we mined a lot of ice. A LOT. And we used a lot of PI for the fuel, too.
But out athanors are now running! They were very expensive to build. We have six.
After we set up two, we mined them and found the new ores interesting and fine to look at.
After we set up four, we stopped and had a SERIOUS TALK.
Were we, in fact, paying subscription in order to spends tens of hours a week grinding EXACTLY THE SAME mining mechanics?
We had a long talk. We like Eve. Great game.
We decided that, at this time, Eve has opportunities for enjoyment that better suit a different customer demographic. None of us have logged on in three weeks. We now communicate in other ways. Weirdly, nobody is sorry. We’ve all, in our own ways, had just about enough of CCP.
It’s been great. See ya CCP!
You guys are bitter because you get paid to work and it isn’t fun. So you’ve forgotten that your game has to be fun. The customers are not you. We don’t get paid. We pay.
This entire release was a colossal failure of leadership at CCP. A lot of folks saw this coming. You didn’t need to be a genius.
Uhm that’s… Wow. Really Pestilen_Ratte? Geez my friend. Geez…
We have seen that .5 systems now allow using an Athanor and drill to rupture a moon and - create an asteroid belt? Is this a joke on all of the high-sec dwellers that were complaining about moon mining being low-sec only?
Why would anyone spend a billion ISK (enough to play for 2 weeks) to anchor an Athanor and create an average asteroid belt when there are already average asteroid belts everywhere in high-sec?
Seriously, is this a joke or am I missing something?