The point of limiting rorquals in a belt is to spread them out. It’s not stopping you from using it, but it’s saying that you have to make better use of the available systems, and if the alliance/coalition has too many rorqs for the available systems then they need to take more space and defend it appropriately. It would also make it fit in more with the “Mining command role” - one boosting rorq leading a fleet of subcaps, making them significantly more effective while still being able to mine a decent amount itself. I like the boosting buff, I dislike the excavator size nerf - it punishes the good players who use their wetus properly. And there are plenty of bad rorq pilots out there, with bad skills/fits/tank, who won’t be affected by this because all they do is cyno up and get a super umbrella dropped on them.
First of all let me start by stating I like most of these balance changes and its general direction. But the Excavator volume change is moderately nerfing excavator booshing. As the boosher population is not that large I don’t know how many of you would care. But the overwhelmingly positive feedback to my exposition of this skill-based, emergent, high end, and valuable playstyle encourages me to at least make the issue known. It would be understandable if CCP/CSM lacked some relevant info here as there are no drone boosher among their ranks. Now I hope to at least make this info available for their use.
So the change increases the volume from 750 to 1100. Its justification is that Rorquals will be able to put less drones inside a wetu (3 instead of 5). In itself this is a good aim. About 300 Rorquals die each month. Assuming half of them had meets the two conditions of having excavators and successfully stashing them in a wetu, the change will make it so that about 300 extra drones are lost in killmails and 120 of them are dropped as loot from these killmails. In practice, maybe less.
What we booshers will have to do to adapt will be giving up hyperspatial rigs to increase cargo space, which gets our booshers’ warp speed from 8.37 to 5.5 AU/S. Those in the business knows every second counts. The nerf will make it so that after appearing in the local, the booshers will be on target plenty of seconds later, and their general roaming speed is slowed down. There is pretty much no better fitting workaround without giving hyperspatials up.
Here is the part you’re gonna have to “trust me dude I’m the expert”. I more or less know who is in the booshing business. These days about 500 to 700 drones are stolen each month (my part of it is only about 200 these days, and I am not the most active boosher). And this number will only grow with more people getting interested in the business. I also am in a good position to guesstimate how much the warp speed changes will slow that down. I’d say it’d be a 30% slowdown. So I anticipate about 150 to 210 less drones would be stolen per month.
Here is a further dimension of this change. Remember, stolen drones belong to the people in safest spaces with most Rorquals stacked on top of each other, because those are the most natural booshing grounds. Their Rorquals die only in the smallest of amounts, and their drones are the only current achilles heel that manages to circumvent the huge supercap umbrellas that protect them. Booshing creates a risk factor in safest of nullsec regions. Meanwhile, the wetu change will hurt the Rorquals who actually die. Which means it will hurt small alliance Rorquals, or wormhole Rorquals more, giving them another reason to move to umbrella space.
I would probably still support the change if it didn’t change nerf drone booshing. If it’s a matter of choice between booshing effectiveness and 300 drones dying in already-obtained killmails (the change does nothing for more Rorquals to die), then I’d choose booshing effectiveness over these changes, not because of my personal interest, but given CCP’s own stated goals.
Meanwhile, there is also a more nuanced workaround to keep both the desirable effects. I know CCP likes simpler solutions, but I think effects on the ecosystem meta is more important than having elegant numbers. If they changed the drone volume to 1020 m3, and buffed the command destroyer base cargo from 380-450 to 500+ each (a change that’s not relevant to the rest of the meta around these ships I believe), then the current hyperspatial fits would still be able to barely fit a single excavator into the cargo, and the wetu would still support 3 drones instead of 5.
Some good sub-capital changes!
Yet, I’m still hoping to see some tweaks to Marauder bonuses (namely outdated tractor bonus) and meaningful roles for least used ships in EVE: Primae and Echelon.
Maybe something like adding ore\ice compression ability to Primae instead of useless commodity bay?
I’m stunned, these are great changes! Well done CCP. Well done indeed. 
Still going through it all, but right now, some thoughts…
My money’s on Killah and Sort.
Personally, at very large scales fights are either ‘250 faxes locked and cycled before the DD volleys all hit, so it lived’ or ‘the DD volleys hit. Target vaporized immediately’. Remote reps in that situation are all-or-nothing.
That’s my read on how it shakes out, as well. Diminishing Returns means you want bigger reps, not more reps. And we can get bigger reps.
@CCP_Rise: Doesn’t that kind of ignore how until you add more FAX reps, that ‘effectiveness’ line drops from 96% to 71%? So for small gang work, a cloud of T1 light rep bots might actually neuter the effect of the 1 fax your enemy’s able to bring—especially in J-space, where the fax issues have been the trickiest.
Properly fitted a Rorqual gets about the same yield as a boosted hulk… with each Excavator. If you’re not getting that, you aren’t fitting it right.
I’m already working on whether our fleet doctrines need to shift at all, yeah.
No, we think every change is not going to hurt us. Because we’re better at adapting—not because of any particular virtue, mind, just because the economies of scale mean we’ve got more to draw upon.
The diminishing returns are based on the amount repped not the number of repair mods, they explicitly state this in the dev blog
Yeah, I know what it says. And I also know what their graphs show. And if you pay attention to the way those small reps gimp the big reps until ‘more’ faxes show (bringing the number of capital reps from 1 to 16, compared to the 25 small—not Large, not Medium, small, as in, logi-frigate—reps) you’ll notice that the number of reps present clearly plays a huge role as well.
You will also notice that the graph is not a graph of amount rep’d, which would not go down from 25 light reps being added, it is a graph of rep efficiency
Remote assistance Nerf may have unintended consequences as well. Think about Nestors for just a moment.
Now let us follow this logic. So CCP nerf mineral income and isk income, and now you believe that plex prices will drop?
So by you thoughts less of material and isk to buy stuff will not drive plex up even higher, just to line CCP’s pockets?
If so, somebody made a bad choise woting you in.
by this logic plex price should go down with more mining and ratting right?
Even though here in reality you can tell that it is the opposite
Right. And 932 more points (25 x 37.3) is enough to drop a single capital rep from 1858 (100%) to 1319 (71%).
Which is the equivalent of one-half of a second capital rep causing that drop. But the second capital rep doesn’t cause that much of a drop, does it? In fact, adding more big reps spikes the efficiency back up. Think about what that means, because we’re not talking absolute numbers, we’re talking %-efficiency. That means bigger reps == less drop-off per rep.
No not at all, but since CCP are not seeding any minerals into the game, and they are nerfing the yield, you do agree that that means you got less stuff to buy for you isk made otherways. Called inflation right?
So how long will it take for CCP to intruduce ships in the plex store???
Then why did you make a point out of it? 
Your right, but this matters why?
Congrats you managed to tank the enemies efficiency by adding 25 frigate reps, all you have done is made them rep harder congrats 1319+932 > 1858
Until ccp actually gives us the math they are using, or a side by side of drop off for fax vs cruiser there is no way to be sure because that 25 small rep graph is terrible
But I can say with 99% certainty that you won’t get bigger reps == less drop-off per rep
We’ll be watching closely to see how these changes impact the mining landscape in nullsec and the distribution of mining ships used, and we’ll be ready to make more tweaks if needed to either buff or nerf the Rorqual and encourage a healthy EVE economy.
Translation: We just changed 20 things at once with 20-50% nerfs with no idea how all of this crap is going to come together, we’ll check back in 2-3 years to see how it went. Like last time.
I love the message you’re sending carrier pilots: Run your NSA and die, or don’t run your NSA, and take 50 seconds to lock that cyno frig.
When a carrier is tackled it has one option: die, or die.
I love win-win solutions. Looks like I get to go carrier hunting. 
The price of PLEX is decided by the playerbase, not by CCP. When it’s easier to make unprecedented amounts of ISK, the value of PLEX will rise, obviously. It’s simple supply/demand.
If it’s harder to make ISK, selling PLEX for ISK becomes more desirable when you save 20 hours of grinding instead of 15 for the same amount of ISK, and demand will fall for higher ISK prices therefore it should have a depressing effect on how much PLEX is worth in ISK.
All these changes are well thought out and have been discussed with us for months.
It’s based on the raw HP/S numbers. Nestors will only see noticable nerfs to rep amounts if you’re literally bringing 20+ of them.