after observing and monitoring the ice belts in my home region I can only say: the new mechanics are ■■■■. Not the implementation of mechanics itself but the consequences for many players.
For me it looks like ice belts are/were a blind spot for CCP and that’s why they were streamlined with regular ore.
I’ll give you two options how to solve the current consequences and how to solve your original issue:
revert back to the old mechanics and change the respawns from 4h to 4-48 hours
revert back to the old mechanics and change the respawns from 4h to 4-24 hours and double the fuel consumption for service modules
Using downtime as respawn trigger is the worst for ice belts you can choose. To be honest it’s also bad for regular ore, but that’s not the right thread for that.
I’m a casual player and not willing to accept the current mechanics. My main is a little bit older than 2 days and I’ve seen many changes in the game and I always adapted. After the years everything became boring and I stayed for ice mining. Reason is to support my group, I’m part of, so they can run their structures with my fuel blocks. I even started PI - and I hate this ■■■■.
You killed the last interesting opportunity for me.
As EVE is about patience (you can also call it wasting lifetime) I’ll give you the November 2020 to announce/implement a better solution for ice belts. Otherwise I’ll quit my subscriptions and invest my real money and time somewhere else. Easy, eh?
So, I used to do a bit of ice cutting, but I always went to the ice rather than wait for it to respawn. I did a quick scout this affie out of curiosity, looks to me like the spawn rate is 1/3 or 1/4 based on what I would have expected.
I checked the agency and looked at GM , Clear & Blue systems and it seems accurate. As I used to be itinerent anyway then I’d be ok, just lots more travelling.
Hink Yaken, I’m a little bit disappointed by your weak troll-performance
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.
@CCP_Aurora I’d like to point something out. If I recall correctly the redistribution changes went live on 2020.10.13 and you posted your “intended to function” note on 2020.10.28. That’s two weeks between implementation of the change on the production servers and CCP even realizing there is an issue. Major credit to @Naverin for compiling that information but I think there is a problem that need to be called out.
Before this change the only information that CCP provided to us (your customers) was “The spawn probability of all Ice Sites will decrease” in the https://www.eveonline.com/article/qh7pp7/resource-distribution-update notes. That was wildly insufficient for us to even know whether or not this was intended functionality. If you (or someone) had given us a post like the “intended” part of your 2020.10.28 message, but on the day of the release, then we could have told you in a couple days that something was wrong.
In my opinion there’s has been a breakdown in communication. Not you specifically Aurura, but CCP in general is falling flat on informing us of what to expect. CCP is changing a lot of fundamental game rules in a very short period of time and we are sort of struggling to keep up.
Is Eve supposed to be a puzzle game? Are we not supposed to know what’s going on?
Yep, that’s the intention of CCP for at lest a year now. They give players least information possible (even patch notes are released after patch) and give players opportunity to figure out everything.
If you ask me, this is way better than having everything min, maxed two weeks before things go live.
We’ve been told that the intended mechanism is not working and that systems are in either an On or Off state for the day. Its very possible they will not make changes and simply watch the masses try to figure out how to get enough steady miners on ice to fuel infrastructure and production.
What I can say is charting Ice and talking with our nerds and figuring things out was more enjoyable than actually playing namely because my primary system does not spawn ice regularly
These nerfs are absolutely going to affect the supply line. Not every Ice system is good for mining. Pipe systems, hubs, out of the way, regional gate, etc. Plenty of reasons why a system isn’t great for mining. I’m working Internally to Brave to chart our daily ice spawns and give a “SOTI” State of the Ice almost daily about notable icebelt gains and losses and opportunities to get some ice mined and stocked.
Here is my chart to current. What we’re finding is approximately 30-40% spawn rate vs the prenerf every system.
My feedback is this. Since many areas of null might not be accessible by regional neighbors and its possible given my charting that your system will not spawn ice for days weeks, or at all right now… that if possible. Roll back the spawn mechanic and reduce the icebelts composition by your intended reduction. This would allow people without ice to still have some, while still accomplishing the goal of making it more scarce.
Always open to discussion and dialog and I can appreciate everyone trying to do the same. I’m not mad at the changes, I’m going to adapt and figure things out like we always do.
as I like qualified information I would like to add some quality to my whining.
Today only 3 ice belts spawned in my home region where 13 systems should contain ice belts. The system, I declared as my home system, again didn’t spawn any ice belt after 6 downtimes.
The 3 mentioned ice belts are in hostile systems. To me the closest one isn’t used by anyone or only for very small amounts. It’s guarenteed suicide mining there.
I took the chance and tried something that I wanted to try for a long time: semi-afk mining in hisec.
For this I fitted an Endurance and mined semi-afk from 0600 to 1200 without boosts etc.
Within this timeframe I managed to mine 280 units of Glacial Mass. It could be a third more if I had spent more focus into this. Compressed, the value is estimated with ca. 54 mio ISK.
In this time I was mining in 3 different ice belts because hordes of around 20 other ships on grid - most of them were Orca’s, then some cheap mining barges. Especially after downtime it became so bad I stopped the experiment.
The current implementation (whether working as intended or not) is breaking the backbone of many structure holders in latest 4 weeks. Looking at the metrics of Naverin and comparing it with the regional maps it even ■■■■■■■ up the sov nullsec more than it might should.
When will we have the old spawn mechanic for ice belts back?
The system Avaux has not had any ice spawn in it since the change. This is ridiculous.
Can’t you guys make it so that they spawn in systems randomly at down time? Or that the ice despawns after, say 12 hours of not being mined?
How so? The old way ice respawned was how they set it up, and this change is how they set it up. The ecosystem has changed, and yes players need to make changes with it.
Personally I am happy, hopefully a lot less damn ice mining bot accounts out there
So you want to tell me that if ice spawns mostly in like 2000+ player alliances space in null/lowsec and we are in a 100-200 players alliance, we have to go and steal the ice from these players? If so i would love to know how? And no don’t want to hear, join the aliance.
@CCP_Aurora Waiting on update please, the ice is still not working as intended… In High sec they are spawning on clock every 4 hours, in null there are no ice spawns for week and more again after the belt is mined out… Instead of fixing bugs in halloween event, please fix this bug already. It’s really painfull to keep the structures feeded.
You got table above clearly showing that spawns are totally random/roaming.
Adapt or die and stop whining. CCP Aurora clearly stated that limited supply and randomized spawns are intended. Crawl out from whatever rock you are siting under, leave comfort zone of your stronghold and go look for that ice.
You claim that something is broken? Show exact data and math. As shown above, this is what will get CCP attention. Saying “there is no more in my backyard every 4 hours. CCP is bad”. Won’t get you anywhere.
Ps. just because it was mentioned as known bug and forwarded to dev team. Doesn’t mean that initial bug is resolved yet. CCP Aurora only said that this not working as intended and they will take look into it. She didn’t confirmed that it was fixed/changed yet. Also I didn’t found any information in following patch notes.
Not sure if you are blind or I am blind or my english is just not really good yet. But these are the last response from CCP_Aurora… well and nothing new after?
And I never left the comfort of my rock and never will. Also never said “no more ice in my backyard every 4 hours” I am just expecting to get somewhat stable flow of ice to atleast fuel structures, if that was random 12-24 hour spawn with 12 hour timer or 24 hour timer to mine it out with less ice in belt, I am fine with it. But no ice at all for weeks? No thank you, CCP screwed up and they know it just don’t want to do anything with it. They are really fast at fixing some bloody harvest halloween event bugs but not this major bug.
That would be tough, but if the ice is spawning randomly, then sometimes it will spawn in your systems. I would also assume in your scenario that the 2000+ player corp/alliance will need ALOT more ice then your corp since they will have more structures/ bigger/better equipped, whatever combo, that demands even more ice per structure.
Maybe your group will have to buy ice or fuel or heavy water, or ??? on the market and smuggle it into your system…
Look I feel for you, but in my time playing eve I used to get frustrated at changes, over time I have just come to accept them for what they are, changes I have no control over and instead of frustrating myself over those changes and complaining, I see what I can do to adjust and see how it shakes out in the long run. It made my gaming time more enjoyable.
The changes effect everyone else in the game in approximately the same way, so you arent the only one struggling with this.
Best of luck and I hope you find a fun and acceptable solution to this challenge you face!
