Ok but i think all players can agree to removing the mining drone bonus from the orca. They do not need to reduce EHP or make them more gankable to appease others. They are a fleet command ship with great storage for your fleet.
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With all due respect, no, not all players can agree. Read the thread. They are not overpowered miners, given their yield is so much lower than exhumers, and, as @Nevyn_Auscent and @Anderson_Geten have explained much more eloquently, it is a fallacy to argue that as a class they were not supposed to have any meaningful mining capability.
EDIT to add: and remove which mining drone bonus? The Orca has four drone mining bonuses, two for ore, two for ice. Of each pair of bonuses, one is a role bonus, the other is a skill level based bonus. Do you mean remove all four bonuses?
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Absolutely remove all 4 of them. Mine in barges or exhumers as intended.
It would be nice if they could put them back to their original bonuses and off grid boosting as well but i doubt CCP would revert to that.
only jealous players of brainless gankers do.
I think all players agree that the mining bonus of the orca should be quintupled.
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Mining in Orca’s is intended.
CCP explicitly stated so.
There is no debate that can be had on this topic, claiming it is not intended just means that you are arguing starting from a lie.
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This is a dumb comment.
When I find AFK Orcas (which was every day when I lived in Domain), I would just bump them 200km from the roids, and let them sit there for hours.
That makes about as much sense as removing all damage dealing and related bonuses from the Sleipnir since its a command ship. Nobody would fly it. Of course, I think this is your desire since you later say:
No point in using facts I keep being told there are zero botters in eve and all highsec orcas are 100% active players.
Must be true.
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Right? The gaslighting and convoluted, equivocating arguments and outright lies are ridiculous.
Trying to argue that Orca mining is more APM than mining with barges because “you have to constantly reset drones” and therefore AFK Orca mining is a myth and it “never happens, ever” - lmao.
Trying to obfuscate and draw blurry lines between “AFK” and “low APM” and other specious, disingenuous “we can’t say for sure when a hill becomes a mountain, therefore AFK Orca mining don’t real” - lmao.
I just tested it to make sure: Each drone (T2 drones, no rigs, max skills) pulls 2,041 units of Vedlspar per cycle. Cycle time is 60 seconds. So if you find a few Veldspar rocks with 40k units (and that’s not “rare” lmao), each drone will take 19 minutes - not factoring travel time - to eat each rock. If you find rocks with 100kish units (also not rare, I find them everywhere) that’s 45ish minutes…
“It’s not AFK! It’s just very low APM! Yet still higher than barges!” - lmao GTFO.
“The yield is really crappy when you’re doing it AFK!” - First, no. It’s not. If you assign drones to big rocks, it won’t affect the yield very much. And second of all, people who do this AFK aren’t doing it for maximum yield - they’re doing it for any yield, period. Being docked while you shower is 0m3/m. Having an Orca in the belt, even if it chews the rocks 10 minutes into your shower, is a number greater than 0m3.
AFK Orca mining is not rare. You can’t lie to me - I mine and I make content out of miners. I encounter AFK Orcas on a daily basis when I’m in Domain. Find an Orca in a belt, bump him out of drone range, his drones begin to orbit upon return. He slowboats back to the belt (rock set on “approach”)… 30 minutes later I’m passing through, check: still sitting on a rock at 0, drones still orbiting. Tooootaaallllyyy not AFK mining, lmao.
This isn’t a daily occurrence. This is multiple times a day. Before ABCs were removed from moons there were literally massive 20+ man fleets of Orcas exhibiting the same behavior on moons in the area. Caldari space was even worse.
Folks can lie and gaslight people on the forums but CCP knows the score. And so do I.
20-40 is “just a few”… lmao.
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Especially from you and your ilk.
Since no-one is saying these things you are claiming are gaslighting, as Koko was literally creating a strawman that hasn’t been claimed. (p.s. Gaslighting is something totally different and using it here is highly disrespectful)
There is no blurry line, there is a very clear cut line. AFK is when you go away from the keyboard. That is literally the meaning of the term. Low APM is low APM. These terms have very clear defined meanings, there is no ambiguity and there is no blurryness, the only person trying to bring this in is you in order to lump low APM mining in with AFK… but only low APM mining by Orcas.
I won’t say no-one has tried to make this argument because the thread is large enough I don’t remember every word, but most people have not said this. What has been said is that AFK Orcas are irrelevant because to achieve serious AFK Orca status, they are achieving such low yield that it doesn’t matter.
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Oh look, more specious equivocation but without actually addressing my core points. I should have known better than to click “show hidden response”. Silly me.
And yet you can’t tell me exactly where that line is. Is it 5 minutes? 10? 15? 20? 40?
I already explained why this is irrelevant. Thanks.
AFK is whenever you get up and leave your keyboard.
There is no time at which you become AFK, because it is when a physical action occurs.
So, Yes I can tell you exactly where the line is, you are trying to measure it wrong is all.
You ‘explaining’ something does not make it fact.
AFK Orca’s yield being basically irrelevant means that any solution that deals with them should not impact on active players. To do anything else says that you are not trying to deal with the AFK players but using them as an excuse to hurt the active players.
I mean sure, AFK play is bad. but if they get almost nothing for it, then it’s not ‘we must destroy a section of the game to fix this’ bad. It’s ‘if we can come up with a nice way to reduce/remove the AFK element without impacting anything else, we do that’.
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Oooohhhhhhhhh, so this is the part where suddenly you want to be super precise and very overly technical and literal (aka, purposefully being obtuse and missing the point) after being vague and blurry and failing to distinguish just how low APM an activity has to be before it’s considered AFK. lmao
Disingenuous 101.
This is just a rewording of that same bad argument: “I have to reset my drones every [20] minutes therefore it’s not AFK, it’s very low APM, in fact it’s so low it’s less than 1 action every minute.”
lmao.
At any rate, once again you’re nattering irrelevancy: CCP has stated on numerous occasions that they want to reduce/remove “low attention gameplay”. So sorry. 
Hey bud.
Saying something doesn’t make it a fact.
As I already explained (which you absolutely failed to refute), the “low yield” argument is specious and just… well, wrong. A player who goes AFK while each drones chews on a 100k unit rock is going to get the same yield as someone who’s sitting there staring at their computer while their drones chew on 100k unit rocks. The only time the yield would be less is if the AFK player does not return in time to reset the drones (at this point you’re going to nag about “durhUDurHDur that’s not AFK that’s just low APM, ddurrhrurrhrur the line is vErY cLeAr”). Just making this statement of yours, as if it were factually true is just… well as I said, disingenuous. You’re just being dishonest. Which is why I put your replies on hidden. I will not be showing them again.
Take care.
No, I’ve never been vague and blurry. I’ve always been very clear. It doesn’t matter how high or low APM an activity is. It’s not AFK till they actually get up and are now ‘Away From Keyboard’. It’s a very literal meaning.
So if you want to now change the argument and bring up CCP talking about low attention gameplay… Then stop talking about ‘AFK players’. Because you are the one who keeps talking about AFK.
Oh now we suddenly have 100k rocks in highsec do we? Talk about moving goalposts. Before it was 15k rocks.
And well, no I’m not. Because if they get up and walk away they are AFK. But since these 100k rocks are imaginary, so is the ore these orcas get.
And totally ignoring the bit where I am agreeing that AFK ‘play’ is bad.
The difference is you are prepared to ruin a whole lot of active players games, in order to hurt these basically irrelevant AFK players. I am not.
This is the point I agree with, there has to be a solution that increases the APM to a point where “AFK” mining is not an issue, but also leaves the Orcas close enough to their current state to still be a viable mining ship.
I still think the better solution is to make a drone ore drop off bay that is sized around 5000 m3 and leave all the ships bonuses the same. At max skill, a drone has a yield of about 300m3 so you would have 16 drone cycles to fill, that your typical 5 drones deployed for 3 minutes with a little extra. You could last longer between cycles if you have lower skills, but you would still be limited to a 5000m3 AFK window, which is the same as a venture, but less than any barge.
This is a poor solution as it simply creates mindless clicking. It doesn’t actually add any thought or skill to the process, which therefore the more mindless clicking you load on a player the more likely they are to bot.
1 super drone rather than 5 drones has no real impact on an active player as an alternative, but stops them spreading across 5 rocks, which means their max AFK is limited to what one rock contains, without adding any more mindless clicks to the active players workload.
Having to use drones (all drones be they Orca or Barge) on a rock that already is being mined by lasers/strips is another interesting thought that has come out of this thread. I think that has downsides of less understandable complexity, but it would make decent lore sense and isn’t a bad idea to add player attention needed without pointless clicking.
You can of course combine both of these drone change ideas at once.
So AFK mining is bad, and active mining is bad? What is barge mining, specifically hulk/covetor, but mindless clicking as you move ore every couple of cycles and switch lasers as necessary?
I haven’t mined in an Orca since scarcity started, so it might be currently changed, but I used to go to the shops while my Orca drones were mining moons.
It may be low yield, but anything more than 0 is better than not even being logged in; and it was as AFK as you can get. Needed to be back ideally before the ore hold filled, so I could transfer to other holds to make room, but I wasn’t even home while mining.
However, mining is absolutely an intended function of the Orca and it’s fine in my view.
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Nice strawman, need some cows to help you with all that straw?
That’s already changed, since moons don’t drop standard ore, and the moon ore chunks in high are tiny and worthless. And well… going AFK in low or null has it’s own built in solutions already.
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Yeah definitely. Out buying my dinner while mining was a strictly highsec only activity.
But nothing better than a test. Just going to login and probably get my alts Orca killed by trigs or something, but I’ll see how long I can go as a semi-AFK/low APM/low attention/AFK/etc. activity.
EDIT:
Setup and mining with 5 drones split:
Let’s see how long I can go between needing to do anything at all. I’m not sitting at the same desk currently, just mining away AFK while working on my main computer across the room.
Solo Orca:
| Time | Clicks | Total Clicks |
|---|---|---|
| 00:00 | 8 | |
| 20:06 | 2 | 10 |
| 27:58 | 2 | 12 |
| 30:57 | 2 | 14 |
| 37:26 | 2 | 16 |
| 46:49 | 2 | 18 |
| 57:09 | 2 | 20 |
Ok, so 1 hour that included initial setup was 20 total clicks in an Orca with T2 mining drones for a total m^3 mined of 63K:
My alt’s skills might be crap, so obviously that might not be a max yield possible for reasonably close asteroids.
Next, to do the same in an exhumer.
Solo Skiff:
| Time | Clicks | Total Clicks |
|---|---|---|
| 00:00 | 7 | |
| 12:14 | 2 | 9 |
| 13:20 | 5 | 14 |
| 15:20 | 7 | 21 |
| 19:40 | 2 | 23 |
| 24:04 | 3 | 26 |
| 25:39 | 3 | 29 |
| 29:09 | 4 | 33 |
| 30:15 | 5 | 38 |
| 32:02 | 7 | 45 |
| 36:46 | 3 | 48 |
| 39:25 | 3 | 51 |
| 44:14 | 4 | 55 |
| 45:05 | 5 | 60 |
| 46:36 | 7 | 67 |
| 56:37 | 4 | 71 |
| 57:38 | 5 | 76 |
| 58:54 | 7 | 83 |
So after about the same time, 4 loads to station and just under 3K additional for about the same yield as the Orca:
Some general observations:
- Orca isn’t as totally AFKable as it used to be before scarcity
- Skiff (and by extension barges and exhumers) take about 2-4 times more attention than the Orca
- Yield for a solo Orca and a solo Skiff is approximately the same
It certainly isn’t true, at least from what I can see, even allowing for differences between tests, that the Orca requires more clicks than a barge/exhumer; and that’s perfectly fine. The Orca is fine as is.
The above may have absolutely no value, but that’s ok, at least testing rather than just talking, gives some perspective on things some people post.
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