Currently with skills there’s a residue probability of 37% using tech ii mining crystal A’s. This is over 1/3 waste. Pretty horrendous when you consider ORE strip miners have 0% and require far less training to use. They’re just terribly expensive and extremely slow. This is a terrible combination when you have 16 miners on grid (like a corp mining op) and are at constant risk of getting BLOP’d or hit with a flycatcher resulting in your fleet getting destroyed.
Fast highly skilled miners reduce this risk considerably using tech ii gear.
I propose an additional skill for each type of ore called [ore type] residue recovery where it reduces the residue (37% chance) by 20% per level til it’s at 0 and requires [ore type] processing 4 to unlock the skillbook. This would be a nice skill-point sink with a worthwhile result.
Highly skilled miners using tech ii gear shouldn’t have such a large amount of waste.
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@Kalixa_Hihro I support your idea.
You’re right, that residue business is about some real bs.
Instead of hampering and bothering their players at every possible turn, how about CCP fix their game for a change? Can they code anything else but bs nerfs and bs mechanics?
The whole thing was to make you have choices when mining. Which to pick? The roids were doubled in size so you still end up mining the same amount, residue or not.
If you don’t want residue you could take a look at the ORE miners. They’re expensive but can be worth it if the ore you gather is too valuable to waste and you don’t want to mine with T1 equipment.
I don’t think your idea is a good one; residue was added for a good reason (a second attribute to take into account for miners to make mining optimisation less one-dimensional with ‘yield’ as only attribute) which means removing residue with a new skill defeats the purpose.
What I do think would be a nice idea is if CCP adds a new mining foreman charge that reduces residue a bit.
We’ve got yield-improving charges, why no residue-improving charges?
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Ore strip miners are slow as hell. in nullsec every minute you are on grid increases the likelihood you will lose your fleet. You get interrupted constantly and if you slip up once and notice someone in system 10 seconds after they get there because you are compressing or something, you lose your entire fleet when it’s a flycatcher or 3.
With ore strip miners that’s close to a billion per barge. With tech ii it’s 330m or so. It’s gonna happen once in a while and I like to be profitable lol.
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Yes, I don’t like ore strip miners either, they’re too expensive for my taste.
I prefer instead to use type B when the ore isn’t limited in volume for high yield, or type A crystals when it is a rarer ore, for lower yield but better efficiency.
Isn’t it nice that miners have choice now in their equipment and can adapt their tools to circumstances?
If there was a skill to reduce all residue to 0 we’d always use type B no matter the scenario. That would be rather boring.
EVE always is about player choices and the answer about ‘which X is the best?’ is usually met with ‘it depends’, which is a good thing. Variation, optimisation and no single general best option is what creates a fun game.
Residue creates that variation for mining, because before residue there was only a single metric for mining ships to optimise: yield. Higher yield was always better, now it isn’t. I think that was a good change.
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