it’s pretty obvious when you think about it. large null blocs already field their rorqs under a supercap umbrella. when the tackle land, a cyno gets lit by one rorq, it’s then just a question of the rorqs staying alive long enough for the backup to arrive. a pithy reduction in the PANIC module won’t change that.
the nerf to tank is considerable, around ~40% with a T2 indy core, the quicker backup can arrive, the less of a problem this is if one of the saviour fleet is a shield FAX.
Now, consider smaller groups that don’t have the advantage of a huge capital rescue fleet ready to jump in (granted many of those caps are probably ratting carriers/supers. That hit to tank will really help the aggressors blap said rorq before the backup fleet can form. I mine in a wormhole. Getting tackled means sending out a ping and hoping there’s enough people available to logon and come try and save my sorry ass.
In J-Space, simply undocking a Minokawa and trying to warp it in to the Rorq is just begging to be stop bubbled 100km off the Rorq and unable to assist in any way. You’d need a ping on-grid to warp to out of line of the bubble. Given the relative size of the ships involved, this is a risky process. you might think you have a clean line to the cloaky Buzzard providing the warp-in, only to get caught in the stop bubble on landing.
0.0 mining fleets that usually mine out the Colossal anomalies also have the advantage that those rocks are very, very large. You only have to reposition the Rorq every couple of hours. Running a two-week extraction cycle on my Athanors gives me a maximum rock size of around 150k-m^3, or ~3x Indy Core cycles (15 minutes, up to 20 minutes if I cycle back into Indy Core for a fourth time).
Then I have a choice, reposition the Rorq or have my horrifically expensive drones boating 7+km to the next nearest rock. Repositioning takes time and having those hideously expensive and frustratingly slow drones vulnerable in space for that much time is increasing the risk that they can get webbed/booshed off before I can collect them. Moving the ship means re-launching the Wetu, leaving me again at risk of losing said drones if I get jumped right as I land at a new rock and before my Wetu can online.
The drone size penalty means I WILL lose at least one Drone if I lose the ship.
Now, combine all that with a minimum 20% nerf to yield and you’re looking at having an ISK10b+ ship that cost around 6m SP in skills that affect no other hull onfield for what will be around 80m-100m/hour yield at current prices. My fit has a paper yield of ~170m^3/s, slow drone travel times cut that down drastically, even when sitting right on top of the rock.
Would YOU take that kind of risk for those kinds of rewards?
I won’t, and I know many other smaller operators that won’t.
Hence I’m selling my Rorq and praying that CCP will take pity on us poor schleps who will have suffered three significant nerfs in a row and gives us the option of taking an SP refund on Rorqual Only skills.
I just think it’s kinda dishonest to go trying to claim Horde in any way lacks the manpower to make their space safe. If you guys can’t secure your space, that’s not a manpower issue, it’s a commitment issue.
As for small groups like IA… yeah, it’s more dangerous for them to go using the expensive toys. That remains true no matter if you’re talking rorqs or supercaps, even before these changes. Were the extra 3 minutes going to save that rorqual if the people who own it still don’t have supercapital or titan cover to rescue it with?
Are they going to suddenly acquire that defensive capability during those 3 minutes? Was the increased tank allowing them to muster more people than they have?
If the issue is that this change widens the gap… yes, it does. There’s no change that could have been implemented that wouldn’t, though. Even your suggestions would only widen the gap. Reducing anomaly spawn rates means the little guy has less ore available in the window when they can play, but the big groups, who have people on 23.75/7, still collect the ore as fast as it comes up.
The ‘one anom per system, scheduled by ihub’ means the little guy, who, as you’ve pointed out, can’t actually defend their mining fleet, can’t mine at all, because all it takes is a cloaky-camper to watch for when the anom spawns, and then enemies know when to start prepping the hot-drop. So those little guys, with their limited window of activity, wind up getting dropped if they mine, and effectively camped out of their own activity window if they don’t.
Reducing anom/rock size, as you point out, wouldn’t actually do anything.
But this is already true.
And the super caps are becoming worse which makes it harder for those large blocs to defend with said supercap umbrella.
And no they can’t ‘just add more’, because if they could they would already have added more, because more titans is always better. There is a limit to that kind of scaling.
So I don’t see how these changes suddenly make the problem. They may not solve the N+1 problem, but they aren’t really changing the balance of power between large & small null groups.
Holy ■■■■ with these changes, probably half of all players will be very dissatisfied and half of them leave eve forever.
good job ccp keep it up and you can shut down the servers.
Yes, when forming a subcap response fleet, every second matters. Jackdaws to counter a bomber gang? Ping for a Titan Bridge, Ping for subcaps, get people into fleet, into comms, make sure you have enough Logi, undock, ping out and back to zero on the titan, bridge, engage the hostiles and kill enough of them to reduce dps on the rorqual before it dies. A minute can be a very long time.
This doesn’t screw up moons mining ops, so there’s no precedent to expect the same from a similar style of ore anom. It at least might be less harmful to smaller groups than the proposed changes.
Fewer than half of all players live in space where they can use capitals at all. Maybe you should reconsider those numbers.
yes, this is all already true. These changes will simply blow the Risk side of the ISK:Risk equation out to levels that are simply unacceptable to many.
J-Space rorq mining is already incredibly marginal ISK:Risk.
In J-space, Rorq mining is not the ‘afk ISK faucet’ many would have you believe. You need to really pay attention and shift the Rorqual three or four times an hour.
If I’m paying THAT much attention, I might as well go the hole hog, bust out the tinkersneks and run a couple of Garrisons for much higher ISK/Hour with much, MUCH lower risk. I could lose all four of my tinkersneks and be able to replace them for less than the cost of my Rorq’s drones alone (let alone the rest of the fit and hull). Add to that the fact that skills required for tinkersneks are also useful on many, many other hulls.
This is the third significant nerf to Rorquals ever since CCP got them out of the PoS shields and into the belts. Frankly, they just aren’t worth the risk anymore, this next nerf will cement that for many smaller mining operations.
The larger null blocs will benefit massively from these changes, while smaller null blocs, lowsec groups and WH groups getting the rough end of the pineapple.
Well, I’m gonna be busting out the Prospect Huff Fleets more often. I can knock over an Instrumental in ~30-40 minutes which yields considerably more ISK/hour while only putting around 200m at risk. With a boosh dessy giving links, I really have to screw up to get caught, unlike being tied down by a 5 minute Indy Core cycle.
CCPLEASE: Give us an SP refund if we choose to take it. 6m SP is a lot tied up in just ONE ship.
Anyway, it annoys a lot of players who have long learned for the capital.
it would only be fair if all skillpunkte should be redistributed
Yep. Every second matters. But no, you’re not running off a bomber gang in those extra three minutes if you weren’t running them off beforehand.
And really, the bombers don’t need to kill your rorq. They’re bombers. They opened up by decloaking and dropping 6 bombs to take out all the drones.
If there’s enough bombers to seriously threaten the rorq, there’s enough bombers to seriously threaten the size jackdaw fleet you’re going to field in those 3 minutes. To get a big enough jackdaw fleet in motion, even in seven minutes, you need to have 100+ people already online and not busy, because you’re not going to get more than maybe a third of them in the fleet.
That fleet also has to exist and the rorqual be in it inside the first minute, because otherwise, the cyno inhibitor’s up, and now you’ve got to burn a cyno there, too. So: either you’ve got numbers online and available, which means you will get there in time, even in the 3-minute shorter window (because the Rorq doesn’t PANIC right away, but he needs to get the cyno up pretty much right away), or you don’t save the Rorqual.
The smaller the group, the more important a pre-existing standing defense fleet is. And, because smaller groups are usually less organized and don’t necessarily have the personnel to run that standing fleet, the less likely they are to actually have one.
This doesn’t screw up moon mining ops, where you don’t know how long it’s going to be before the chunk becomes an ore field, and the number of days is variable. Give the hunters a target that’s the same time, every day? Yeah, they’ll hit that. They’ll hit that hard.
Ok. Fair point on the isk/risk. But CCP have said they want to drop the isk side.
So that part is obviously intended.
The question then comes is it a bad thing if some people decide rorqs are too risky and go back to barges for producing ore.
And where the risk of a rorq can be reduced while also achieving ccps goal of easier to kill and easier to hurt by killing excavators.
Smaller groups aren’t necessarily less organised than the big null blocs, we’re just smaller.
The usual Goon Standing fleet has more people (actual beating hearts, not alts) in it than my entire J-Space corp can hope to muster. I don’t say this as any kind of whinge, simply as a statement of fact.
Null Blocs, even medium sized ones, that can’t protect their Rorqs are doing it wrong.
I’ve literally FC’d a fleet that did that exact thing. It’s rare, but does happen. And in my case the cyno inhib has gone up, so we got a couple of cyno ceptors there while the fleet was forming. OP success, by about half the hull HP.
Why not use Caps? Because there was a dread bomb in FDZ4-A waiting for us to commit something worth dropping on.
Moon pop times can be acquired by hacking the athanor with a data analyser. So there’s no “uncertainty” in a moon pop, and a max moon pop gives 56 days to prepare to contest that grid.
Was not paying another dime for the game the GOAL you had when making all these alts? After all the nerfs were to slow the flow of isk, no? So your goal and the reason you are angry is because . . .
I AM curious about this, does not paying another dime mean you are leaving or plexing?
m
look, fine, nerf away.
All I’m begging for here is the chance to re-spend those 6m SP into other skills on the same character without taking hits from both the expense of extractors and diminishing returns on re-injecting.
6m SP. That’s 12 Extractors. Reinjected into a now 60m SP pilot is losing 40% of the SP and will cost, at current prices, around ~5-6b ISK or >1200 PLEX.
At least when Ishtars got nerfed, the skills had applications for other hulls, so they weren’t completely wasted. The Capital Industrial Ships, Industrial Reconfiguration and Invulnerability Core skills affect one, and only one, hull. For any other capital nerf, the skills still apply to multiple hulls, with the sole exception of the actual Racial Titan skills (and some of those even apply to multiple Titans, Gal Titan for both Erebus and Vanquisher for example). Doomsday Operations crosses over seven hulls. XL Hybrid Weapons crosses over four hulls.
The Rorqual of today is not the ship I trained into. The Rorqual of tomorrow is a ship I wouldn’t bother training into.
And you’re in Horde, not a small group like Iron Armada. Again: manpower availability.
Yup. And if you think people are gonna remember to do something every 56 days without rigorous scheduling, you’re on crack. They won’t remember it every week. But every day, 3pm? They’ll remember that. They can afford to forget half a dozen times, and it’s still the same week. Forget ‘every 56 days’ even once, and it’s 3.5 months between targets. And during those 3.5 months… they’ll find someone else to shoot.
I don’t quite think you understand how organized the big blocs get. Lemme give you an example, and I fully admit, this is the extreme example…
Right now, the following organizations exist within the Imperium (not alliance-specific) and are involved in every fleet:
- Skirmish Command/Operations (FC)
- Coordination (keeping track of scheduling, targets, etc - this kicks in even for fun roams, because you gotta make sure you’re not taking a roam out right before something important is gonna go down)
- Recon / Pathfinders / Scouts (three different orgs with overlapping portfolios)
- Linkswarm (Boosters)
- Repswarm (Logistics command and anchoring).
That’s without getting into groups like GSOL, the finance team, fittings & doctrines team, our various special interest groups…
The rorqual of today is far better than the rorqual most people trained into, should they have to spend another 6m SP to get the skills for the now improved rorqual compared to the old rorqual?
Chasing the FOTM is always a gamble, and it’s still a great mining vessel and a very strong booster. It’s just not as crazy OP as it was.
I do hear what you are saying though, just you know there isn’t going to be an SP refund, CCP don’t do that unless the skills are removed even when they change roles dramatically. Hence why I asked about where there is room to move given the various deliberate design changes clearly wanting to increase risk of things blowing up and decrease yield.
You forget me my friend… I’m hurt…
I was in Goons once upon a time. I was also once the Resident Newbie at TMC. I received much good advice from you during that time which has served me well for the last ~4 1/2 years.
No, but I can never be sure how much someone actually sees of the nuts-and-bolts of things. 
Edit: Also - 4 1/2 years… ugh, yeah, it’s almost been that long at TMC/INN. Ugggggh.
@CCP_Falcon Please also BAN mobile depots in Jita 
thanks
Now that, right there, is some complete and utter rubbish.
‘Most’ people trained into Rorqs when they were moved out of the PoS shields and into the belts.
The Rorq of today is not that Rorq.
Before then, very few people had bothered to train into them as they were simply PoS Trash giving system wide links and a compression array 23/7.
Please find a better argument.