Yet isn’t better, but actually worse for your profit as it is slower than the frigates for noncombat exploration.
Unlike barges which I assume will mine faster than frigates.
The only way barge gas huffing can exist without invalidating frigate gas huffing is if the yield of barges is comparable to that of the frigates, which I doubt will happen.
Some of it, I think, is that they really do think they’ve got a handle on things. Some of it is that not everyone is against any of these changes, and just that little bit of ‘no, it’ll be ok’ is enough to let them think ‘we’ve done all this work on this stuff already, let’s see if it works, and adjust what needs adjusting later’. Remember, CCP’s spent a lot of years focusing on ‘we can tweak some numbers’ and ‘we’ll just twist some knobs’ ways to address problems. It’s hard to shake yourself out of that to admit that no, you need to stop twisting knobs and rebuild the whole damned radio.
As for the players proposing better ideas and solutions… the players have suggested lots of ideas… which ones are actually better? Which ones don’t take things into account? Filtering through all that is a mountain of work, and it takes time that CCP’s probably figuring could be better spent working on improving their existing plans.
Only in that it warps slower. And it’s a lot more survivable if you do get into trouble.
Really? Got ways to fit those barges with covops cloaks or get them into frigate wormholes?
The advantage the frigates have is their ability to escape. The Prospect cloaks. The Venture’s got built-in warp stability. They’re both a lot more agile and faster than any barge. The Endurance… is an ice miner, don’t put a gas harvester on it. 
That’s the trade-off you get for the presumably-increased yield: if you get caught, you aren’t getting away. Especially not with CCP making the barges slower and less agile.
It is not a problem. How can you even agree with his opinion that it is a problem if he doesn’t have the knowledge to come to that conclusion in the first place?
And for that career the Prospect is the best ship because it is mobile, it is versatile and it can go into all kinds of areas of space without issues especially because gas is not a static resource and you need to move a lot.
If you really think that, then you are as unknowledgable as CCP in that regard. Gas clouds, at least in K-space, are huge and will be even bigger after this update. With a higgs rig you can cruise through the cloud and stay aligned to your safe structure or safe spot all the time. If anything, barges are even more survivable and harder to catch because of all these changes to them.
The only way I can envision this working is if PI plants and process are enabled on moons, making gantry-gangsterism a lunacy but perhaps expanding the range of astronomical launches. That should set the thin atmosphere for -
The second condition, that being of operative Industrial stations given the capacity to yank minerals and the MI plants that were merrily operating upon them into space.
Giving a brief window for plunder, piracy and storage facility hacking, before fracture reduces the value of life to biomass.
Plenty of conflict conditions and industry infrastructure up for destruction in that scenario. Yet contemplating the coding of all that makes my head ache.
And to add the align time is double on the Skiff to what it was, this is nonsense.
If barges can huff gas that means people, you know those zillion members of a specific alliance, can easily switch between huffing gas or mining ore without having to train skills for it. It’s more efficient, you see, than having them all have to train some backwater specialised T2 venture for it. And efficiency is key, remember 
My miner can fly barges, exhumers and expedition frigates. There already are plenty of opportunities to use barges and exhumers, I’d like there to be well paid opportunities for expedition frigates as well, like there are now in the form of gas mining.
‘Mining at a slower rate but on the other side of the frigate hole’ doesn’t seem like a particularly valuable or broad niche for this ship class.
We need gameplay where mining frigates can shine.
You know, if you’re going to try to twist my statements into being all about what’s best for goonswarm, you should at least be competent about it.
There aren’t a lot of gas pockets in our space, and the number of gas huffers we have might as well not exist. I, on the other hand, used to do a bunch of gas-huffing in j-space before I came out to null, in a 12-man corp. The same one I’m back in now, in fact. So my perspective on gas mining isn’t exactly goon-centric.
Ok, but at the same time, you’re rejecting the gameplay they were actually designed to shine in. There’s really no logic behind the idea that frigates, even T2 frigates, should outperform larger ships that fill the same type of role. The larger ships, after all, have more space to dedicate to the task. Weld 8 Ventures together, and you’ve got the same size as a single Procurer. The proc, obviously, doesn’t get as much of a yield as 8 ventures, but it should definitely get more than 1 does.
Then take into account the skill training required. Sure, the Prospect needs Electronics Upgrade V, but let’s be honest here: so does everything else. You always need to max out your fitting skills. But the Prospect doesn’t need Science IV, Mining IV, or Astrogeology III. And it’s cheaper. So if you need to put in less effort and less money to use it, why should it outperform the larger ship?
Clearly T2 exploration frigates are faster and more agile (and therefore in a lot of situations better) at their purpose than any of the cruiser variants. And other frigates, such as interceptors, have their role too in EVE where these small ships are the best at something.
In short, bigger isn’t always better.
Why can there not be a mining activity in which smaller is better? A purpose for expedition frigates?
Gas huffing used to be that purpose. But that will no longer be the case after these changes.
In my opinion bigger shouldn’t always be better, but neither should smaller be better. I just think each ship type should have some role it is the best at. And currently the role of mining frigates as the best gas huffers is taken over by barges,which I think is a shame as it is a loss in diversity of mining activities. You now use barges for ore, ice and gas. And with more yield than frigates.
What will be the purpose of expedition frigates?
Yes, they get from site to site faster. And interceptors are the best ship at… uhm… traveling? I mean, they’re not even the best ship at that anymore, really. Fit an interdiction nullifier onto your Covert Ops Frigate (because they aren’t ‘Exploration Frigates’) and some warp accelerators, and you’re gonna get where you’re going faster. Same w/scouting. For everything else, Assault Frigates outperform Intys. Even tackle: interceptor tackle is just way too fragile.
But the big advantage they all have over larger ships isn’t ‘I outperform at the thing we both do’ it’s ‘I am smaller, faster, and harder to catch/hit’. Which Mining and Expedition Frigates also enjoy.
The mining and expedition frigates will still be viable gas miners. And they’ll be gas miners that can escape if someone comes to kill them. Look at what happens with the maneuverability changes they’re planning to barges. Tackle AFs or bombers will be able to come into system, warp in, warp out, warp back, and orbit almost long enough to get bored before the barge warps out.
They’ll die. Improved tank or no, they’ll die. And the frigates won’t, unless someone is seriously screwing up.
The only big agility changes I saw was that the Covetor swapped places with the Procurer for ‘slowest aligning barge’*, although I cannot tell why they would do that - isn’t the Covetor supposed to be the one with the significantly higher yield at the cost of bad combat stats?
*(And same story for the Exhumers)
OP and development update:
All ships that had the specialized ore hold will now see a Mining Hold where all mine-able resources can be stored. The new Ore, Ice and Gas specialized holds are added to hauling ships as per the original plan.
The mining hold capacity for barges and exhumers is being update as per the following table:
| Ship | Old Capacity | Mining Hold New Capacity |
|---|---|---|
| Covetor | 7,000 | 9,000 |
| Retriever | 22,000 | 27,500 |
| Procurer | 12,000 | 16,000 |
| Hulk | 8,500 | 11,500 |
| Mackinaw | 28,000 | 31,500 |
| Skiff | 15,000 | 18,500 |
After some lengthy conversations we have decided for this release to withdraw ALL changes to Ubiquitous Moon Ores in relation to their refined materials. This means they will retain their current Pyerite and Mexallon quantities and their extraction rate will be doubled as per all other moons.
We still plan to remove all basic minerals from all moons, and we will reevaluate options during or after the compression update.
We still plan to make adjustments to PI as per our plans to reduce manufacturing costs (more on the Winter Outlook blog, coming out soon™) and we are currently considering the reduction of volume for materials of ALL PI tiers.
With December getting near, we once again want to thank for the valuable feedback.
Awesome, this makes much more sense!
Good call, good call. Simplifies things greatly and prevents people from using 1 ship to hold 3x the cargo.
That will not affect the ‘mineral hold’ on one of the Gallente haulers, right? Or will minerals be able to go into a ‘mining hold’?
So, the agility multiplier is going up, other than the Procurer. That means getting less agile. The top speed is also coming down. That, paradoxially, means it’ll accelerate into and out of warp slower… which means it’ll get caught more easily. And in the case of procurer, losing the mid-slot means probably losing the MWD, so you can’t just pulse that to cycle into warp quickly.
Short form: barges gon’ die.
A good change.
But I’d again encourage you to not just think in terms of values already entered on the spreadsheet. Eve didn’t become what it is by just reforming the same ball of playdough over and over again. It became what it was by innovation, risk, and providing the player base with more tools and options and seeing what they did with it.
Take a bold step here, add more options/meaningful decisions to the game, not just extra clicking for tedium under the guise of ‘new and improved.’
A good start though. Thank you.
I’m glad to see you have removed some of the stupidity you wanted to introduce with the moon ore changes. But why oh why are you giving differnet ships differnt bays.
Just make a low slot module that can only fit on T1 indy ships and have a script that selects hold type… That way i can fly the hoarder like i have always wanted to for every type of hauling job, not have it sit in ship miant bays cram full of cap booster 3200’s.
You would see way more variety in ship use and people could actually fly the ships with the models they like (and you’d sell more skins for them) rather than being tied into fixed choices by your bay selections.
Hey, thanks for the updates. The combined hold will be much nicer. Good call on punting on the ore changes. There’s going to be a lot of ripples from the changes, so it’s better to make them a few at a time and see how everything reacts to it.
We still plan to make adjustments to PI as per our plans to reduce manufacturing costs (more on the Winter Outlook blog, coming out soon™) and we are currently considering the reduction of volume for materials of ALL PI tiers.
The thing I keep wondering is why are you so onto doing PI for capital components? It’s not just the volume (but partially the volume)… There’s existing mechanics for obtaining the game balance here. Just raise the mineral inputs for cap components, and it’ll have a nice, gentle effect on cap prices without having messy ripples all over the place. I get that a stopgap had to be put in place, but by connecting PI to the process, you’re ruining several levers the devs before you put in place.
Just remove the Core Temperature Regulator/Capital Core Temperature Regulator. Or cut their inputs by 90%. BSs are underused already, so you don’t need to punish them by making them more expensive and complex to build. It’ll give caps a nice reduction in price, without making them as cheap as they were. It’ll eliminate the changes to hauling PI. If you change the m3 of PI, you have to worry about the impact it’ll have on importing and exporting PI. If has a low volume, hisec’s prices will go down because null will be able to produce and export it super cheaply. Lower level PI will get exported to hisec, and this causes a complex mess of having to figure out the reactions. This change should NOT just be done just as a reaction to the complaint of having problems building caps.
You’ve introduced a bunch of changes into a system that just needed balancing, and now you’re seeing all the ripples. Look at the cause of the complaints, and figure out how to address them.
Good:
Bad:
I really hope that taking more time to look at the problems here results in solutions that acknowledge that every single change to this game is going to have MASSIVE ripple effects on just about everything else, and show that those ripple effects have been studied as much as is reasonable before sending them onto the live server to cause havoc.
Core questions that I desparately hope can be answered in the next dev blog:
What are the actual (specific) GOALS of these changes? (more specific than the all encompassing “fix the economy” or “set up eve for it’s third decade!”_
What role are capitals (not just rorquals, ALL capitals) supposed to have in regards to costs, capabilities, and roles? How do they currently measure up to those stated expectations?
How does the end of scarcity relate to new players, corps, and alliances having the ability to defend themselves or compete against 20 year old alliances and coalitions that had their economies, capitals, etc in place BEFORE the past two years of changes were put into play?