Maybe we need to look at the Orca itself. Does it need to be changed to corp mates only instead of to all fleet mates?
For those that have never mined and don’t know what an Orca brings to the fleet, it’s not a mining ship. It’s an industrial mining ship. It costs more than an Athanor and thus it’s a massive investment.
It sports a massive mining hold, a ship’s maintenance bay, a fleet cargo hold, and it provides fleet buffs and compression to the whole fleet.
The fleet buffs grant bonuses to Yield, Range, and three different kinds of shield buffs. You can only have up to 3 of these command buffs active at once though. It’s the compression that’s really coveted by the fleet. It is responsible for all of the added profit.
Without compression, you’re not mining for hours. You’re running back to a station every 5 to ten minutes (depending on ship) to dump the ore or ice. You then have to haul all of it to a station to sell it as uncompressed ore or ice which is a loss since compressed sells for more- easier for the buyer to carry. So unless you’ve a massive ore hauler, you’re going to need multiple trips to sell all of the ore/ice which severely cuts into your ISK per hour. Simply mining and then looking at your spoils in the station isn’t enough. You have to factor in your trip(s) to Jita (or wherever you’re selling). That’s the true ISK per hour- time spent mining, emptying your hold, and trips to the station.
With Compression, this is all made so much simpler. Trips to the station are drastically reduced, it can easily be hauled away in way fewer trips, and the sell amount is higher since it’s now compressed.
So many be issue is not mining. Solution: Make the Orca Corp-mates only. No outsiders. Would that be acceptable? Anyone who spends the money required to buy one of these deserves all of these perks. It costs up to 3 billion ISK! 2 billion for the hull and up to 1 billion for the fit. That’s a huge investment and I would hate to see mining nerfed just because someone is profiting off that investment. Especially since it costs more than an Athanor. An Athanor provides way more profit and is much more complicated to destroy.
Granted, you can buy extra mods for the Athanor and up the cost of the fit by several billion, but that’s pretty insane and not recommended.
Why? Solo miners earn little enough already, at least sitting in fleet with an orca and his barges gives you the opportunity to socialise in fleet chat instead of just putting on some anime on the second monitor.
Mostly my complaints are that mining is much too passive, not the specifics of how much they earn. I’m very much in favour of diminishing returns for multiboxing though, in general and for mining specifically, and that can be achieved both by buffing solo mining or by nerfing multibox/bot mining.
And of course all AFK activity is poshlost, total bot aspirancy mortification is paramount imperative noema.
I multi-box and I can assure you that if my Orca/Hulk duo was nerfed, I’d straight up quit the game. Piloting an Orca to provide those fleet buffs without the added income of the Hulk after I paid 3 billion ISK would be a nightmare. No ship in my fleet should profit from my 3 billion ISK investment if I’m not profiting too.
If you want an Orca to be really worth soloing, then ask CCP to add in two High Spots for strip miners.
I’m fine with multiboxing up to like three or four clients, I just want one player running two clients to be less efficient than two players running one client. Encouraging multiplayer activities to actually be done by multiple players can only be good for the game.
Are we calling 3b a lot now? It isn’t, it only seems that way to you because you’re a miner, and mining is so incredibly tedious you have to delude yourself into thinking you’re not wasting your time doing it.
I’d rather orcas use drones. It’s the little brother of the Rorq, drones suit it. I don’t think orca should be able to mine as well as a barge, its primary purpose is to boost a corporation’s mining fleet, but it should probably mine better than it does at the moment.
Besides, boost ships are meant to be used in fleets. Many players (or one player with many accounts, but as I said I want diminishing returns there), not just you and your hulk+orca.
Have you actually done any math on this? I’m pretty sure just mining in two Mackinaws and flying back to a station regularly to offload ore would be more profitable than a single hulk and an orca for that single hulk.
Go to zkillboard and look up a few of the dead Orca fits. You have to sacrifice all of your tank with drone augments before the drones become viable. Those Orca fits are way too easily destroyed. And again…. this ship was expensive and I will protect my investment.
Two Mackinaws won’t work. Mining is way more involved than you think. Two Mackinaws would fill up too quickly which would involve trip after trip after trip……. after trip…… after trip……. to the station to unload. It cuts heavily into profits.
A single Hulk with an Orca on grid is way more than two Mackinaws without an Orca and here’s why-
Just two Mackinaws without an Orca- They both fill up with uncompressed ore in about ten minutes and it takes time to dump it into a station. You have to spend time warping there, dock, undock, and warp back- over and over and over.
When I run an Orca/Hulk duo, I get the enormous mining hold to store compressed ore plus the Orca-buffed yield of the Hulk. I can simply stay on grid and mine for hours until the Orca runs out of fuel.
That’s a 3.4 billion ISK investment when you include the cost of both ships and both fits. Not only that, but all of the skill points I invested in it and I can deliver all of that ore to Jita in one trip. Of course, that 3.4 billion ISK doesn’t take into account the price of mining crystals and Heavy Water. I made an investment several months ago of around 700 million ISK for 4.7 million units of Heavy Water. Now, several months later, I’ve still got 4.3m units. And if you add in the cost of an Athanor?
I think I’ve earned my profits.
In addition, the Orca can also provide protection for the Hulk.
It’s not compared to a mega corp, but I’m not in a mega corp. I won’t be in one. I’ve no desire to be in one. 3B is a lot for a one person corp. Well.. it’s not that much, since I can just spend $25 and PLEX that much, but that’s still my money to spend. Only I get to decide the worth of that money to me. Not you nor anyone else.
Bad idea. Restricting mining links to corpmates does nothing to fix the issues of AFK orcas or whatever the issue you think the orca has. All it does is make alliance mining fleets harder and punishes emergent social interaction.
I could have saved you the trouble, people generally call it out for a bad idea when you come with a bad idea.
Letting miners only be boosted by corp members means players cannot mine with their alliance. Cannot mine with friends. Cannot mine with random other players they’ve met.
In fact, it would mean I cannot even boost my own Hulk.
I find it amusing how CCP thinks. Hey people in high sec are making way to much isk mining lets nerf the ■■■■ out of it let´s introduce scarcity lets remove isogen from high sec.
Also CCP hey in this new upcoming expansion we will introduce a complete new ore that will only be in low sec and null sec that will be worth 10s of billions of isk.
Dear god if hig sec players makes 100mill a day the world will end. But OH lets introduce new ore that will let the alliances with 100s of trillions be able to make 100s of more trillions with their massive rorqual fleets.
Soon they will remove mining altogether from hig sec.
I am not sure who you are refering to… the lonley guy in his venture isn’t any problem and I doubt anyone is going to nerf anything because of his “wealth”.
The “problem” is that you can make hilarious amounts of money in HS by either going to top-end activities (Abyssals, Burnerblitzing) that return like ~400mill/hour, OR massmultibox miners and grind ores and ice with nearly no challenge or risk for hours over hours if you like to. You don’t really believe that the guys farming icebelts every day with their own Orca+Exhumers-Fleet do make “100mill a day”, do you? -_-
I guess people forget how to check zkillboard. Maybe it’s too complex a tool for them to understand. Maybe high sec miners could one day provide a training session on how to understand it.
It’s funny because I’ve outlined all the things we miners have to watch out for even in High Sec so you already know it all and yet you STILL maintain this farce. I find that to be very amusing.
zkillboard mainly says that like 99.99% of all miners are NOT ganked. Like 99.99% of all haulers are NOT ganked. zkillboard simply doesn’t track all those that mine a whole year without ever being killed while doing it. And thats probably the overwhelming majority, judging from traveling around in HS and comparing the miners and haulers I see to the few entries on zKill of each given day.
There are like fifteen gankers still active, and only half of them bother targeting miners. Highsec mining is 99% safe, so the rewards for it should be minimal.
It absolutely says that. Like a picture of a target that has 3 hits on it says “bad shooter” if we know that a 1.000 shots were fired to get that result.
If you don’t understand that simple logic, you are nowhere near to a position to teach anyone anything.
