I’ve seen an awful lot of speculation, misinformation, and so on about the mining changes. Well…here is the reality of what actually happened for one miner…
I log in and find two of the mid slots of my Procurer have been removed. OK, that was all announced beforehand. But hold on. My plan to put steel plates in the one extra low slot provided by the changes is thwarted by the fact that all of a sudden I find it’s going to require 9 days of skills training to upgrade to Hull Upgrades V in order to add 400mm Steel Plates II. I mean…who doesn’t now want their Proc to make up some of the EHP loss resulting from the changes ?
The claims I’ve seen that barges would have significant increase in HP are simply not true. Oh, the basic barge does have more HP. But then, prior to the update any miner with sense was using all 4 mid slots for EHP enhancers. I got my Proc to 61,500 EHP without overheating. After the removal of two mid slots it is at 53,000. Even the addition of 400mm Steel Plates II only brings it up to around 58,000.
That’s the reality. I don’t think it ever quite occurred to CCP that the changes were going to result in people who’d been happily mining in their Procs beforehand…all of a sudden needing 9 days of skills updates. I’m sure others probably have similar stories.
Sure I can fit 400mm Steel Plates 1 and go out and mine…but I’m not exactly being compensated for the 2 mid slot items I no longer use, and neither will I be for buying an item I’ll only use for 9 days. And why would I even want to mine with sub-optimal EHP that is already thousands of EHP less than before ?
My point is more that it must have been obvious people were still going to want the max EHP they could get…but that nobody considered whether this was going to result in additions to skill queue.
Well, yes, but the difference between a Proc with Strip Miner 1 and a Venture is now less, as Strip Miner 1 used to give 1104 m/3 but now gives 1024…whereas a Venture gives 600 in that same period and does not take 15 years to get to warp. As I’m not ’ mining for ISK’…most of the ISK I have is from PLEX and I’m really just topping it up…I may just decide stuff the Procurer.
The ‘getting to warp’ time for the Proc is now ludicrous. It’s like sitting at the gate with a ’ here I am…gankers…and with less EHP ! ’ advert.
That’s still almost double the yield for a cheap t1 ship that insures very well and doesn’t require expensive gear to function. If you’re opting to use the Venture instead of the Procurer (and you can use mining barges), you’re making a severe operational mistake.
Also, the way they set up the new Procurer makes sense, because if it still had 4 mid slots after all these changes, it would literally be competing with BC hulls in the combat role, which would be ridiculous.
I’ll just link this here. Generic T2 tank/yield fits with A II crystals, so not even max yield. They already stated to slash the proc and skiff’s align by about 20%
It depends why people are mining. For me its a mix of risk and ISK. It has to be fun too. Sure, its handy if that fun brings in lots of ISK but I don’t think most solo ore miners are doing it to become millionaires.
Some folks mine because they find it relaxing. They are not all about the isk or ore, they just like the view and the little stuff picked up is a bonus. Really I have met such folks and, at times, am one myself.
Of all the changes in mining the nerf to the proc was the one I fought the most. I am just sorry that I was not successful.
m
p.s. funny thing, though. While there are posts like this I also have been told the gankers are decrying the end of hisec ganking because of all the nerfs to their lifestyle. to quote a very old song ‘Two men say they’re Jesus, one of them must be wrong’.
In a game where you can be violently murdered any time you’re outside of a station, right?
I wonder what your sources are for that. As far as I know, the only way that gankers have responded is by starting to train extra characters.
Ganking will continue as normal (and will even increase with intensity as further ganking nerfs are implemented in order to make up for the loss of efficiency) until such a time that the wall is reached and ganking becomes practically impossible.
Well, you can be. But chances are you won’t be no matter how bad you are at being prepared to deal with gankers.
Because no matter how much noise they make about “EVE being a PvP game”, ship combat is actually a minority activity in EVE.
80%+ of EVE is PvE, and 90% of that goes on all day every day without getting bothered by the few people who desperately need salt in their diet to feel satisfied.
Face it, the PVE’ers are just better and more accomplished at the game than any gank wankers out there.
Some people have hectic lives so when they get behind the pc they just want to chill, have some music in the background and watch a moving wallpaper. And once in a while they bake some cool goodies to then sell that, at a loss, in Jita.
The reason there’s more PvE is that PvP ends up becoming a gambler fallacy type arms race of bigger and bigger ships. The whole dynamic is to spend more to either defend more, attack more, or gain more…but that also increases the potential losses. At least with PvE you have a measure of control over the level of combat. The whole of eve is really just risk vs ISK.
