Hello again,
Sorry I didn’t get back to you right at the start of the week. I’ve been chasing this around trying to get more details and discuss the changes internally. The feedback, observations and Naverin’s chart have been really useful for me in these discussions so thank you for that.
I’ve clarified the way this change was intended to function:
At downtime some percentage of ice belts will spawn (in those systems with icebelts). Once mined out, these icebelts will then respawn after some time in another system that can also contain icebelts. You can think of it as being similar to how anomalies respawn, except it would be limited to ice systems.
However, this doesn’t seem to be what you guys are reporting as actually happening in game where ice systems are either ‘on’ or ‘off’ for the day. I’ve flagged this to the team and they are looking into it now - thank you for helping me to identify the issue. Should the intended functionality here be achieved, it will mean your ice belt system will have a chance throughout the day to get a belt spawn whereas right now if they don’t start the day with one it seems they simply will not get one. It would also mean that if you mine out an ice belt you can no longer count on getting a new one after 4 hours. In any case, the total volume of available ice in space will likely stay at a reduced rate, it will just be spread out a bit more evenly throughout the day. The team is monitoring these volumes and prices and can adjust availability as needed based on market response.
I’ll keep you all updated as the situation progresses - I will also update the patch notes to better reflect the actual situation once this has been settled.