I’m sorry, but it’s not like you’re feeding your family. You want tons of ISK? Then that is going to take more people working together. You don’t want to put that time and energy in, then don’t. You’re not actually compelled to maintain the same level of profitability.
The really dumb thing is CCP changed alot of this stuff 6-7 years ago, and we said youll wreck the game, we go ignored then they changed it again and again, now their attempting to change it back to what it was 6-7 years ago to a lesser degree. They will never listen to us because its not good for their wallets to do so. They introduce skill injectors into the game and then wonder why so many supers and rorq pilots suddenly appear and over produce, all the while filling the bank account and then say oh this is killing the game and start nerfing the normal players. While the offenders just buy more accounts and skill injectors and off we go again.
4 Likes
While there are a lot of changes listed here, and the exact values are still under immense scrutiny, I would like to voice a concern about the direction of these changes, as I’ve seen others do over the past few days.
A C Type mining crystal is being billed as an offensive weapon because it has a low-yield, high-waste outcome.
A meta miner for a new player must necessarily be considered, proportionally, by the same standard. Overlooked in the many of the reviews I’ve seen, the worst waste from a non-C-Type-Crystal scenario doesn’t come from drones, it actually comes from a meta miner that a typical new player will use as they skill into a T2 miner for their Venture.
Say it’s 2022 and Joe wants to give a new game a try. He doesn’t know anybody in Eve, but everything he hears sounds interesting. Plus, it just broke a Guinness World Record during some new update, why not give it a try?
He’s not really sure about the game though, especially with all the recent negative press out there, so he signs up for an alpha account. He doesn’t seem to be missing out on anything in the beginning, it just takes longer to train into skills. After running through the career missions, he realises that there’s a lot more to the game than he thought, and he wants to try to train up his skills before hitting the Blood-Stained Stars arc people keep telling him to run. What to do?
It’s almost impossible to find these weird exploration signatures the missions talked about, and he doesn’t want to go too far into space because all his shiny new assets are in his home station’s hangar. (Remember those days, when your asset screen was only three stations long?) So why not give mining a try?
He does a little research into mining tools, and figures the best he can use is meta miner. Miner II’s take two days to train into? Wow, that’s a long time to not be training PvP skills for a small benefit… but he’ll stick it in the queue after a couple shield skills get trained up. Oh! Hey! His Venture can fit drones, too, let’s add those to the training queue as well…
Maybe next Joe notices the corporation he got shunted into has a mining subdivision. We’ll call it Knewbie And Sundry Mining Alliance, or KASMA for short (disclaimer, this is not intended to represent any person or collective in the game, any and all similarities are entirely coincidental). They get him into a belt with a porpoise offering boosts and teach him how to set his drones, how to stay in boost range and how to avoid getting ganked. He gets ganked once anyways when people go afk and a rare faction rat spawn focuses him, but they give him a new Venture out of the fleet hangar and have him back up and running in no time. He salvages the meta miners from his wreck, refits in the fleet hangar (so cool!!) and is once again chilling quite happily in the belt as his lasers pew-pew the rock into dust.
Soon, the fleet packs up and heads to a moon that’s about to pop. Someone asks if he’s ever seen a moon pop before, to which Joe replies in the negative, and they tell him to come along. He gets fleet warped to the popping point (almost getting lost along the way, because he was waiting for the fleet to jump him through the first gate) and he gets to see the moon pop. He loves it!
The next five minutes are spent reading all the ore types, pulling out a calculator and checking the yields against the estimated price in the handy dandy little tooltip, then checking that against whatever he can buy it for in the local region. Wow, that’s worth a lot more than mining scordite! Finally, just as he’s ready to crack into his first moon rock, the FC casually asks to see his fit. Another couple minutes later, he finally gets talked through dragging it into the chat box and fires up his lasers on the rock.
Fairly quickly, though, the FC tells him he’s not allowed to mine here, he’ll have to stick with belts for now - his miners aren’t advanced enough to let him mine on the ore. Joe scratches his head in confusion and says it’s getting put in his hold just fine. Is this a bug? The FC explains - his modules create too much waste. For every piece he mines, two more are lost to space. Moon ore is too valuable to lose in that sort of quantity, so Joe’s going to have to go back to the belts for now - but he can stay in fleet, of course.
Obviously, this is a hypothetical situation. It’s not meant to display accurately the numbers, but the mentality of the change. I ask you to read it and respond with that in mind.
This is a sandbox MMO, but it still has things new players shouldn’t do - as with any game, there’s always a clear divide between activities for new players and for veterans. Mining is no exception. However, should new players’ inefficiency be measurable by the same ruler as an actively hostile player?
Should the statistic by which we propose to measure whether a player earns a PvP timer (amount wasted) be the same way we define a new player? Instead of merely allowing experience to bring personal gain, the proposed changes define efficiency by a double standard - what you make for yourself, and what you cost others.
The waste mechanics are logical as a way to temper the degree of saturation proposed by the increased amount of ore. Saturation ultimately drives prices down, which is detrimental to miners who lack a way to significantly increase their efficiency. Whether the increased field quantities and subsequent waste mechanics are the best way to bring about an age of prosperity isn’t really up for debate at this point - it is CCP’s decision, and for the purposes of this post I will treat it as such.
The penalties to the command ships are a way to return them to their role - the incentive to play that role is still not entirely clear, unfortunately; can an orca siphon minerals from the “waste” it produces while compressing? Can it siphon ore from the waste amount that the miners it boosts create? Or is it strictly for usage in an organized fleet that collects all the ore and then pays out per person once they tally they profits, such that boosting strangers is a thing of the past?
To get back to Joe, should he be viewed as a liability, instead of an inefficiency? I don’t think so. The key to keeping new players is helping them enjoy the game. While it can be difficult to find the right mix of Risk V Reward to keep the game engaging and balanced, there is one thing an MMO obviously should not do. It shouldn’t encourage current players to resent new ones. It shouldn’t make new players mechanically disadvantageous to vets.
Eve is a game which, to this point, has eschewed large-scale linear progression. Every ship and module has a role; even meta gear is useful under certain circumstances, for its pricetag and fitting/capacitor profile. You wouldn’t go anom ratting with a Tristan or Algos in nullsec; but you also wouldn’t run anoms with a Kronos in hisec. There are certain times to use both.
If changes are coming, I would prefer to see them made in this vein - slotting lower tier ships for more basic activities, and higher tier ships for more rewarding ones. With the shift from ore types to ore categories (e.g. Veldspar, Scordite and Pyroxeres all being ranked as “common”), there are opportunities for this - perhaps a Venture gets a waste modifier/probabiity bonus when mining certain ore types.
Perhaps we can move the waste modifier itself to the ore and grade the waste probability of different tiers of miners a little less drastically. In this sense, the waste modifier could define the overall presence of the ore in the asteroid, and the probability modifier could define how much of it you are going to get. The “waste” here is both the ore that you don’t get, and the other bits of rock that you don’t want.
To use panning for gold as an analogy, the size of holes in the sieve you use determines what you hold onto and what you don’t. Mining lasers are a little more refined than sieves, so you aren’t going to grab chunks of quartz while you’re panning, but ultimately their calibration (probability modifier) determines how fine-grained of an ore you’ll catch and how tiny something is going to be before it slips into space; it determines, to put it plainly, the percentage of ore you’ll actually get.
But that can change depending on the rock - maybe this one just has a thick central vein of Veldspar, and that one has lots of speckles of Bistot running through it. In this sense, a less refined laser could be more efficient at mining Veldspar than a highly refined one (allowing the classes of crystal to also play a more clearly defined role in calibration).
There are a lot of changes and fine-tuning ahead. No matter the end result, I urge CCP to see a mindset shift returning new players from being “harmful” to merely “inefficient”.
EDITED to better flesh out the last suggestion, I didn’t have time irl to fully 'splain it before I posted originally
3 Likes
It’s even easier to be even more B2W with the tiniest amount of tech skill. Imagine if you were to pull the same tactic you just mentioned, and could run 5-10+ accounts at once.
it would probably help the DEVS to know how people actually mine.
SOLO miner mines in whatever he flies, venture to rorqual
Group Miner mines for self while others are doing the same
Group with boosts mining for self while some unselfish player boosts
Group shared mining as a team and sharing results (complicated because of varying times on field and ore types being mined)
Fleet OP all ore goes to a common source, possible distribution to members later
any of these scenerios could involve mining and hauling , mining and depostiing in a jet can or permacan
some may involve using common cans or fleet hangars with rules on how to split results
the challenge is to satisfy the mechanic being used by each of these mining situations. This is one reason the compression box is taking so much flack, how do you manage who owns the ore? Why is one person bearing the burden of fuel and running compression cycles (current rorqual the player depositing the ore can compress instantly and remove his ore)
the main thing is to realize that mining for self use is very different from mining to share with corpmates or alliances. you mechanisms need to consider this
2 Likes
They know when we log in. They know what we fly. They know who we fly with. We are data to them. They know more about what we do than we do. Coz our minds only remember what we want to. ccps data remembers everything.
In short. Some poll on the forum to say what we fly is not going to be as accurate as the data they already have
2 Likes
i believe their data tells them when and how much and in what ships. it doesnt tell them how we mine or how we share. even the mining ledger only paints a limited picture. a poll on ship types would be superfluous to them, a poll on methodolody might be useful
2 Likes
Compact Industrial Core requires Heavy Water to operate. Compact Compressors doesn’t require heavy water to operate , but i think you need to be in Industrial configuration for it to operate.
the way it works you grab your ore from the ore hold and put them inside of your cargo hold, then you grab that ore from the cargo hold and drop them on the compression module , then you reload the compression module , you will see it now have the icon of the ore instead of a blue square with a ? on it. now you click on it to start compressing. just 4 clicks ez pz
Well that only works if folks are honest. Is anyone going to own up to setting drones on a rock an watching Netflix?
While I don’t think the afk thing is nearly as prevalent as some would suggest it definitely exists. And if everyone pretends they don’t then again……. The data becomes flawed
Can you really not load the compression modules from the ore hold?
I’d love to see that change. Reload from the Ore Bay makes so much sense.
1 Like
I dont really care how many accounts you run, but when you take too much advantage ie 5-6 accounts and the same all in rorqs mining thats abit much. And when the company that runs the game purposely adds ways for you too do that ie skill injectors thats the issue. for a new pilot its approx 180 days just to fly a rorq let alone maxing out all skills and then skills for drones etc. along come skill injectors poof, your a full fit rorq pilot in maybe a quarter of that.
Saw an interview earlier and one of the CSM was saying that CCP have said due to the way the holds are coded there is a technical barrier that is preventing that from happening. Essentially if it was an easy tweak they would want to do it. But it sounded like they would need to overhaul how all the bays have been coded which could break other stuff.
The term “currently impossible” was used. Which I don’t buy and am taking to mean “far too much effort that it isn’t practical at this time”
1 Like
This. I really want this too, although I see no reason to exclude highsec. It’s should be a kylo ren red lightsabre style beam with a really annoying and aggressive hornet sound.
If its technically impossible why do it the dumb/hard way instead? its like saying okay its too hard to fuel up your car via the gas tank so youll have to fuel up your tires and well then make a pump that fills the tank from the tires instead.
1 Like
Do you really want me to invent an answer to that question?
And as far as analogies go that one’s kinda stupid
Removing minerals from high sec moons is game breaking for my group of high sec carebears. Our weekly moon mining fleets are a great social event for us, and the minerals are central to our industry activities.
2 Likes
Yeah, I’m not a fan of this either.
1 Like
Okay so your fine with CCP doing it the hard/time consuming way, which pisses people off instead of doing it the proper way. Thats the real problem with the way these guys attempt to fix issues. They nerf normal mining again for all miners just to get back at the few guys that have 5-6 rorq pilots and mine too much. instead of putting in place things to restrict that. Or so they tell us.
1 Like
the reason rorqual compression worked was because the miner could deposit to the fleet hanger, compress instantly and retrieve their personal ore . comms helped keep players from bumping heads in the hanger , the other mechanisms dexcribed above all fail due to the traffic issues and ownership issue
2 Likes
Where have I said I am fine with this? Somebody asked about it. I happen to have seen the question asked to a CSM on talking in stations and relayed what the CSM said as I figured it might be helpful for the person asking about it.
And now I’ve got you jumping down my throat asking why the devs are doing it this way like I have sone direct connection to them.
Wind your neck in and save the attitude for another day. Shooting the messenger isn’t helpful