Except this hurts non AFK miners even more.
Take your numbers of 1000/min. If you afk it’s inefficient due to travel time so lets say 500/min.
Now apply a 10% nerf.
The non AFK pilot looses 100, the AFK pilot looses 50.
So clearly this is a bad solution because it hits pilots who aren’t causing an issue more than it hits those who are.
Lets assume that AFK Orcas are an issue, I still disagree that this is actually an issue on any scale, and therefore don’t think changes need making because of it, but lets just roll with it as an “issue” for this exercise.
What we want is something that won’t impact on non AFK pilots, since we aren’t trying to address the Orcas total production, but the Orcas AFK production, but that will reduce AFK ability.
So, lets put this forward as an idea.
Mining Drones become 25m/25band.
Harvester Drones should get rebalanced to actually fit the progression properly in here, rather than actually being inefficient compared to their bandwidth.
Yield & Cargo space per mining drone *5.
They already have a speed slower than a heavy drone, so we don’t need to change that.
Now they can’t split the drones between as many rocks, so they can’t afk as well which means there is no danger of them being able to leave Orcas mining while at work, like you claimed was an issue, but it’s not going to significantly impact on pilots who aren’t AFK.
It does have two small unintended consequences, that it in theory increases the yield of the Covetor/Hulk since they could fly 2 of the new mining drones worth 10 of the old mining drones, but… since Covetors/Hulks are probably considered amongst the least common of the Barges currently, this may not be a bad thing to slightly increase their max yield if well managed.
And that ventures won’t be able to use mining drones anymore. But again, I don’t think this is a huge issue, since Omega’s move into Barges and we don’t really want Alpha’s to be churning out significant quantities of ore, given we all know that it’s quite easy to bypass CCP’s single alpha account restriction, and having Ventures as a hybrid vessel isn’t a terrible thing.
You keep making a mistake here. Orca’s are not Support vessels, they are Mining AND Support. So they fill the specialised mining role as well.
P.S. No, it’s not covered. There is more to ships than just yield, just like there is more to ships than just tank. You asked for a casual link to why people might use Orcas, which I gave tank as a possible answer, while at the same time saying that there are many reasons people might use a ship. You fixated on the single casual link I gave as a be all & end all to my answer, rather than an example of a casual link that you could make.
