Ice Mining

Hink Yaken, I’m a little bit disappointed by your weak troll-performance :frowning:
But I’ll feed you now, may be you do it better next time.

Ice, regular ore, moon ore, PI must not be handled the same way. Especially Ice has the lowest real value because of its volume and lots of garbage, depending on what you produce. This “garbage” has also high volume and low real value.
By my observation many lowsec and nullsec ice belts are not mined out because of that. On top downtime is the worst trigger for Ice (and regular ore).

Too abstract? Ok, here, have some examples:

  • you miss some PI mats? no issue, Ninja extract it from hostile systems -> no to low risk
  • you miss minerals? Move to the next system, easy. If you are in sov nullsec no issue at all even with the reduction -> no to low risk, depending on how big your group is. Only adds a new level of annoyance in combination with the ADM
  • moon goo? Risk didn’t change at all. Either you’re lucky or hostile drop stuff on you. Materials are super small in volume. Ninja mining is no issue at all.
  • Ice, well. Good luck ninja mining and hauling several 100k m³ through hostile systems. Net worth? Maybe 50-100 mio ISK after several hours mining.

Again, raw Ice is worthless. It’s the follow-up production (fuel blocks, reactions, etc) that gives a real value to Ice materials. But in relation to the risk which comes up with factors like high volume etc. just not worth it. Still, you need Ice for mobile infrastructure (basic logistics for big groups via jump freighter, move ops, …) and structures (fuel block).

Big groups can easily adapt to these changes. Small groups might be forced joining big groups. That’s not so good and clever as it may sound. If everyone is blue, whom do you kill?

Of course, there are even more factors. That’s why I still suggest a return to the old mechanics of Ice respawn. Make the spawn (4-48h for individual bice belt) and despawn (after 2-5 days) more flexibel -> done. CCP can play around with these parameters for sure.