Okay. So i’m going to try to lay this out as best I can. No TL;DR, i highly suggest you read through it all. @CCP_Rattati
I think most people will agree the state of mining and the economy was ludicrous with 2016-2019 rorquals (Even after several rounds of nerfs that the community was BEGGING CCP for but literally took YEARS to change a few percentages, this is important, we’ll come back to that).
Rorquals being nerfed is GOOD. Rorquals being basically useless IS NOT. Compression in it’s current state is beyond tedium, it’s basically punishment. You want to tell me that after spending 10 hours on your weekend mining this R16 goo so you can fuel your corp structures and maybe make a bil profit this month from this moon till you can mine it again next month, you now also have to sign up for a week’s worth of full-time shifts just to compress a fraction of that goo? at loss if you’re not perfectly skilled of course. That is beyond absurd punishment, downright sadistic if i’m given the liberty of a slight exaggeration perhaps.
Or is it though. When rorquals were buffed, during the skill injector era, some people injected 20 at a time and made absurd amounts of wealth that they held on to to this day, some trained one, I personally didn’t mine at the time, but i used to. I eventually got on the train after the second round of nerfs in 2018 i think it was and it was alright income, nothing too fancy, but decent for the price. But i would notice that if i wasn’t mining gneiss or high value moon goo, i’d be doing better spinning an ishtar. THAT is not good.
I used to mine pre rorq buffs with an offgrid rorq booster and 10 mackinaws in nullsec, i built capitals from the ore i mined, even built a super out of a pos (3 years into the game iirc that felt like a massive achievement). It wasn’t THE BEST income, but it was good income and it scaled well and it felt rewarding, the effort of getting more alts setup, industry backbone etc worked. Rorquals broke that mechanism fairly heavily.
In an effort to “unbrake” the mechanism we got scarcity, and the revamped industry changes for BS/Faction/Capitals. Scarcity is done and over behind us and there’s no rewinding that (I Hope, i’ll come back to that). And now the rorqual as the uber mining platform is dead and won’t be coming back. But. the industry changes meant to stem the absurd growth and ease of capital production because of rorquals, are still a thing. And I would argue, they have no right being in their current state, at all.
So here’s my suggestion. Undo the industry changes. It is ABSURD for T1 battleships to require the insane amounts of PI and reactions that they do. Faction ships making them require PI but no reactions is i believe a fair trade as they’re more ‘specialized’ and PI kind of fits into that theme doesn’t it? You’re adding hardware to a ship to make it do extra cool stuff.
Now for capitals. Capitals under no circumstance should cost 7 bil and 3 weeks of tedium + several freighters worth of PI, and reactions to build. It is flat out absurd. So here’s my idea, an idea that is both feasible for the small guy to get into, but will still somewhat limit the explosion of capitals for bigger ones too, ESPECIALLY now that the rorqual as a mining platform is done with. In addition, this will restore value to the highsec moons you just killed but i’ll get back to that.
Capitals should, in my opinion, require 20-30% of their material requirement in R4, R8, and a tiny bit of R16 reactions. Supercapitals should require ONLY level 4 PI + R32 and R64 reactions maybe, not too much, i don’t know to be honest. For capitals at least, here’s why, these material are mostly abudnant everywhere in eve, but not immediatly accessible, they are so abundant in fact they are in many cases not worth mining. This gives them value and strategic necessity, while allowing any group whether it be high, low, null, npc null, (maybe even wormholes if they import the R8 and R16), to build, their own, capitals from scratch with material that is obtainable, abundant, but not immediately extractable.
Adding a battleship sized barge/exhumer too is I think a very good idea that adds more progression to mining ships while giving additional extraction amounts to those willing to risk it. Perhaps give them a bastion like module that buffs their tank a tiny bit to survive rat spawns for example, but 33% more range and a 50% cycle amount / rate, w/e, maybe it should be something like, 1/2 what a rorqual used to be in terms of mining, but it’s not based on drones.
Anyways, BS, faction, and capital industry as they are now are too absurdly complex, I build T2 ■■■■ i’m okay with complexity, but the level baked into these seemingly core products is just flat out absurd and unacceptable, not to mention extremely expensive. + That is an insane amount of factors that affect the price/availability of these ships, and as I alluded to earlier, CCP is PATHETICALLY slow at iterating on anything. The way i laid out how I would like to see advanced industry gives them some levers, rewards players, doesn’t punish them, and is simple enough to be doable as a dedicated individual or as a well organized group of ‘just starting out’ individuals.
I was hoping for a return of the mining style pre rorquals, where building a capital felt like an achievement because of the effort that went into it. Now it is just tedium and mostly consists of setting up a buy order from jita and paying out the A** for shipping.
Which bringsm e back to my final point… UNDO THE ORE DISTRIBUTION BULLS*IT. Tweak the levels if you want, even if it’s half of what it was pre scarcity and double the respawn times, i think that’s still reasonable, ESPECIALLY WHEN THE PROBLEM (The rorqual) IS NO LONGER A FACTOR. Mining, proliferation, or any of that WAS NEVER a problem prior rorquals, the belts weren’t the problem. Rorquals were.
Now rorquals are gone, and belts are still PATHETICALLY worthless. AS in, I will make more and feel like i did more if i run level four missions on an alpha. That is simply not an acceptable state for one of the most foundational activities in this entire game.
If you reached this far, thanks for giving it a read.
