even at half the timer, that is risky as hell, orca needs a bastion like timer of 30 seconds otherwise it is toast
How about you spend a little time in a Hulk mining in Null Sec with battleship sized rats before you make stupid changes and tell us they will be better. How about making the Drones something that actually do damage? Give us bonuses to the Drones like the Ishtar or Gila have, big Drone bay and damage/hitpoints boost per level. We need the ability to use both combat drones and mining drones, a 50M3 drone bay simply does not do that. Give us the ability to defend these very expensive mining ships. And the Barges need the same. Make the Ore Holds much bigger, smallest should be 12K/M3 and the largest 20K/M3. Give us the extra high slots to put Drone Links on to make the fight fair, the puny range means Rat BS’s sit out at 50-60K and pound us and our drones cannot react them. Give us the slots and CPU/Power to make the mining fleet able to defend itself, without combat ships needing to sit idly by waiting. IRL if miners were under constant attack the miners would modify their equipment to be able to defend themselves and their expensive equipment.
Stop making miners the easy prey for little gankers and big rats. Give us the tank we need and the gank to stay in the belts and get the job done. Let the little gankers find other prey, or go to the anomalies and make real ISK running the sites. Care Bears with big teeth and claws is what we need to stay in the game. Otherwise these changes will not have the effect you want them to.
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Either group up with other players who can give you shield repairs (Orcas, Porpoises and Rorquals are bonused for those!) to keep your Hulk alive and can supply extra drone damage to kill the battleship rats, or fly another exhumer with bonuses for drones: the Skiff.
Yes, that means lower yield. You cannot have it all.
Were you commenting generally, leavwiz, or was Highsec uppermost in your mind?
If, by some means, hauling vessels were removed from the game, are there not still miners, missioners, explorers, structures to be shot at?
It must be exasperating for CCP to be told by miners/industrialists, that the current gameplay is boring, and not engaging in the least; only to find, when they do seek to make it more involved by providing chin-rubbing options for those players, that no, ‘That’s not what we want - it’s too convoluted, too complex!’
CCP is only partly designing for the current players; they must have an eye to future gamers and their expectations, too. When we’re all too clapped-out to care about the latest changes to EVE, the eager crowd coming up behind us will be champing at the bit to get at it! Good Luck to them!
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If you like your shiny PVP ships with T2 modules, thank the miners, who are also the industrialist who manufacture your shiny bling. I like to make things, collecting resources locally is cost effective and safer, than transporting things from HS to NS. I do not want to mine for hours just to get minerals to sell, Running sites is way more profitable and more fun. You do not have to play like I do, you do not have to like that part of the game, but it has been an important part of the game since the beginning. This is not like FPS games, there are literally thousands of them out there, this is an economy, based on conflict that needs ships and modules to continue the conflict.
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there is a big difference between making a game more interesting or engaging and simply making it more complicated and tedious. Adding a bunch of math and clicks doesnt make people suddenly enjoy hours of mining.
i am sure there are targets to be found in hisec, so the need to provide hauler targets because of the logistics needed to get the basic materials needed to build a cruiser was just another CCP overreach idea to make things “engaging:” by adding a time and risk element to basic production. the fact that haulers are high on the list of gank kills is just a bonus for the gate camps
i have both pvp and indy characters. i do not consider indy ships to be content. my choice, but i find CCP efforts to keep feeding gankers a reason player retention is getting to be difficult. oh well, just my opinion
So about 9 years ago there were 40-45,000 players on every day, all day, even weekends. Now there are from 16-24,000 players. Where are the new players you speak of?
CCP has constantly fought against industrialists for the little gankers they love so dearly. Real players PVP in fleets and love it, I love to defend my territory, and I love to provide ships for the fighting. My skills are just as dear to me as PVP skills are. It takes no skills to kill a hauler or barge with no defenses nor tank. All it takes is someone predisposed to pulling wings off of butterflies just for the thrill of hurting someone else and never being punished. for it.
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Don’t tell me how to fly my ships, nor what ships to fly.
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You can stop right there, Mister.
Do you imagine for one moment that professional gankers go to market for their supplies? Cloud Cuckoo Land!
We have our own industrialists, belting out Catalysts and Talos’ - and all their fittings - fit to bust. It is Big Industry, make no mistake. We are often accused of profiting partially by flying cheap ships, etc., yet the reality is that those ships blow up on a daily basis, and have to be replaced.
How often does the non-ganking Highsec player have to replace his/her ship? It gets expensive but, luckily, we’re a generous bunch, always ready to dip our hands into your pockets…
Miners and industrialists are only essential to EVE because CCP have designed it that way. What you build, must be destroyed in order for you to be able profitably to build and trade again.
We exist in an uneasy symbiosis with you. Far better to accept that truth and get on with it than to make of your very existence a virtue which it hardly deserves.
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It’s merely a suggestion.
You complain that the Hulk doesn’t have enough survivability and not enough drone damage to deal with null sec battleship rats by itself - I recommend grouping up or using a Skiff.
“Don’t tell me what tool to use, nor how to use this screwdriver!” - while complaining about how the back side of your screwdriver doesn’t have enough flat area or weight to get the nail into the wall.
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and less skill not to fit at least some some tank right?
I like the idea if the boost helping with waste. Maybe the equipment preservation charge (the least used one) could also lower your waste chance based on skill?
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Continued thinking about it I feel very strongly that splitting up the tradition orehold into ice, gas, and ore is a mistake and uneeded. I hope CCP reconsiders this one.
Unpopular opinion but 0% waste for t1 modules is a mistake. It greatly discourages people from advancing and in group settings will discourage new players from advancing skills. Ironically the same but opposite effect the 100% waste could have caused, but in a more destructive way to the price economy. Please look at around 50% waste as it encourages people to progress to t2 but doesn’t discourage people from removing a bit from the stockpile.
Playing around with stat overrides on pyfa I feel the ideal base setting for all the mineing barge hulls to bring them to modern eve fitting standards is 1800 hp in shield armor hull. 2-4-4 slot layout, and 360 cpu and 500 powergrid. Along with 150 mps top speed, 20mil kg mass, and 0.5 agility.
These cruiser like fitting stats will guarantee a variety of options when it comes to self preservation vs mineing power. Shield tanks can notably reach 45kehp which still leaves them in the very gankable territory, however not trivially. Armor tanks are achievable while having reduced mining amounts but give options to midslots for Pvp support in low and null. The procuer would need to loss raw hp but with its bonuses should end up with around 60kehp and have rather scary dps to boot. These base stats would extend to exumers as well and would be noticeable for their survival. I present this as a optional baseline from a miners and PVPers perspective.
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im gonna go with blowing smoke up our asses.
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I’ve been mining in Hulks for over 10 years, remember when they had 3 strip miners? CCP has never tried to make them better, only “balance” them. Which inevitably means nerf them, They are thinking about taking 2 mid slots from the Proc and skiff to further reduce their tank, and then adding one more to the other 2 barges, giving them exactly 2 mid slots, which is useless. I fly my skiff/Procurer with all shield modules, no AB nor scanner. I have 2 other miners with me and can barely kill 2 BS’s before I go under 50% shields on the one they primary. We fleet up with bonuses, usually Porpoises, As our area is contested and we get neuts thru our systems all the time. It would not kill CCP to make the miners lives a little easier, just one f’n time. Time and again CCP says, “I’m going to make it better,” but the devil is in the details. and they always make mining harder, not easier.
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Why do you think it should be easy to deal with NPC rats in a belt? Going under 50% shields is not an issue, it’s an issue when you die. Shield regenerates.
Two Procurers in one belt can usually deal with most incoming NPC rats in my experience, unless something like a Dreadnought warps in. And if they cannot deal with it, try an Endurance: in my experience those ships can easily survive any NPC rats in a belt even solo, by killing the smaller ones and sig tanking the bigger ones.
That usually is the case. ‘Better’ for the game is not always ‘better’ for the miner. To have a good game, you cannot have it all as player.
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5 medium drones is not at all scary to any but the weakest gankers. How about drone links and drone damage modules? No power nor cpu to fit them, and no slots available either. This is purposefully done by CCP “Developers” they are in fact handicapers. Years ago the destroyers were given double DPS and were the fav way to gank miners in HS. Usually a small gang would show up and pop a few hulks before Concord even bothered to show up. Null is better to mine in, it is much safer. The rest of your comment was very good and thoughtful. However 150 mps top speed, why not 175 mps?
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i think some poor dev be required to spend a week mining 5 hours a day . even though he wont have to train all his skills over a long period of time, even though he went have to earn isk tp pay for his ship. have him run a 3 man fleet with a porpoise and any two mining barges. i guarantee the perspective would change dramatically.
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5 medium drones times the amount of miners in belt can quickly become very scary if the miners decide to group up.
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You just want everything handed to you dontcha? There has to be a balance.
Proc/Skiff = High Tank/High DPS with less mining
Retriever/Mackinaw = High cargo hold with average mining
Covetor/Hulk = Extremely high mining rate
Each one is good at something. If you have safety then yeah, Hulk is by far the best to go, but if you have rats or gankers you are worried about, you be smart and use the mining ship that was geared towards dealing with them. Quit demanding that everything just be 100% safe because you can’t use the same ship for every situation.
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