I haven’t played the game in a while and decided to come back a few days ago. Mining was one of my main activities, why? Because it was relaxing, with a clear progression path and required some calculations and planning that ultimately rewarded you with efficiency. All of these seemed to be removed or gotten a lot worse with these new changes, specifically the residue mechanic.
I know mining required some touch because it wasn’t very interactive but why put RNG to the activity? And why link this RNG with tedious gameplay? With the residue now you have to constantly babysit the asteroids and survey the field and move around all the time with no precisely very maneuverable ships… you have to watch over for a mechanic you can’t predict. Before residue you could get an idea of exactly how many cycles you needed to finish an asteroid and then planning the next one and so on, you could make mining this nice activity that rewarded you for being efficient with your time and planning, but now it just comes down to coin flips… you can’t even put 2 lasers on the same rock because one could completely invalidate the other other one with its residue.
Also the fact that tier 1 modules have no residue compared to tier 2 makes absolutely no sense to me. It feels like I trained my skills and bought new modules to make the activity more boring and tedious instead of more engaging and efficient.
Who benefited with this change? Whales that can buy the most expensive modules with 0% residue and can afford to mine under an umbrella, and new players who are stuck with tier 1 modules and that eventually will hit the same problems I have with this “mechanic”.
I don’t usually give feedback on anything and just roll with the changes, even if I don’t agree with it. But this completely ruins an activity I enjoyed and wanted to write it out in the small case it could change anything.
I think they introduced residue in to make it harder for bot’s so that they get less isk when mining which makes every hour of mining you do worth more because bot’s arent flooding the market decreasing prices. Not 100% sure on this thou obv.
The original rationale was to introduce tradeoffs to mining instead of just “max yield” or “max tank”. You can optimize for extracting as much from a rock as possible, just slower (ex: R64 moon rocks), or guzzle everything at fastest speed without care of getting everything from a rock (ex: veldspar). Or pay very high prices for rarer equipment.
This allowed offensive mining crystals to be introduced (type C). The type A and B crystals are the less/more residue respectively, IIRC. If you want absolute guarantee of 0 residue and are dead set on optimizing it, then your tradeoff is to go cheaper (T1) or expensive (T2) with their own considerations.
Your planning is rewarded, as is everyone else’s, just there’s a richer and more expressive mining ecosystem now than before.
This was done so groups would not ban newer players from mining moons.
Residue is a non-issue. Does it require an adjustment to pre-patch tactics? Yes
Does it destroy mining or make it unprofitable? Of Course not.
What it does provide is choices.
Want ALL the ore? Go T1 and spend more time.
Want most of the ore a little faster T2 with A crystals.
Want ore as fast as possible and ready to move to a different belt/ site when you blow through the current one? T2 with B crystals.
Want to quickly destroy a belt / site and dont want the ore yourself? Type C crystals.
Yes the bully in Jr High gave me choices too. I could have a bloody nose or I could turnover my Hostess Cupcakes. The first “choice” CCP offered was sell your mining fleet or mine the new way. I believe the goal was to erect barriers to entry by introducing unnecessary complexity to frustrate casual miners like the dreaded “AFK solo Orca”. Many a poster here swore that they had seen dozens of AFK Orca pilots in every system they traveled. It was really strange, many dozens of non-miners had detailed knowledge of every ore spawn and clairvoyant to every ship therein. Amazing.
The OP question was directed to mining “residue” For some unknown reason CCP went full RL physics and decided that a mining process would result in less than 100% capture of the mined product. Never mind that tractor beams ala strip miners are pulling in the mining product. When I pull a wreck in with a tractor beam 100% of the wreck is pulled in. But mining is different yes-sir. Non-miners were yelling “death… death… death… death”. Followed by “well you know the Orca is a command ship…” . Just don’t look at the Drake NI Battlecruiser with command bursts, 7 turrets and 5 mids, etc.
So, for some dang reason mining had to be messed with. And since the reason lacked true substantiation and clarity, so did the outcome. Belts were made to spawn substantially more rocks, but that was revoked for regular ore, at least in high sec. Ice belts spawns were increased along with moon ore too.
In the end, we have to buy more consumables; use a bastion module; a compression module and the ore cargo holds were expanded. I mine more product because the belts are bigger and my fleet is going full Hulk mode in time. Oh and every ship produces a dust cloud if they are near an active ore field.
There is a lot to unpack here, so I will try my best to get it all. I apologize for the incoming wall of text, no TL;DR.
I can’t speak for CCP’s inter workings, but looking at another historical change I feel I have a grasp on what they intended to do. Back in the day, you could get 100% refining without maxing your skills. This effectively meant that maxing the skills was worthless. CCP then came in and added more minerals to all ore, but also reduced the maximum refining efficiency so that you could never get 100%. When you compared the pre-patch refine yield with the post-patch refine yield (at the same skill level) you effectively got the same amount of minerals. What this then allowed was for maxing your skills, getting an implant, refining at structures, and refining in lower sec space to increase your refining yield. Making it more profitable to do the above things.
This is similar to the residue change in its original form. Originally, T1 gear got 100% residue. This meant that for every m3 you mined, the same volume would disappear. Effectively you could mine half the available ore. Combined this with doubling the available ore everywhere and you are back to square one. But if you trained into T2 lasers and crystals, you could decrease (or vastly increase with Type C) your waste. This meant that more skills meant higher yield and more available ore. Then people started crying “Think about the children (rookies)” and CCP changed the T1 residue to 0 (even though Miner II’s take a few hours to train into and crystal skill requirements were vastly reduced. Now it is more like “Slow and Steady” vs. “Quick and Dirty”.
Right now, an Orca with a T2 Indy Core mines about the same as it did before New Dawn, albeit with an added fuel cost. Add in the compression module and you can now run longer before needing to dock up. I truly think that the issue was not “AFK solo Orcas” that were the issue, but rather massive fleets of Orcas. At the time, they got decent yield with low interaction requirements so people could run up several alts to increase overall yield. If you look at the Heavy Water requirements to use the Industrial Core, the biggest issue is fuel volume. A full load of Heavy Water can let an Orca run for several hours, but if you are running several Orcas, the overall volume adds up fast. To the point where a large Orca fleet would need a freighter running daily to the market to get more fuel. In the end, the Orca is still a solid mining hull, both solo and in a fleet of barges.
I am not sure what you mean by revoked, but if you are talking about the shape of belts reverting back to the pre-New Dawn crescent moon, they still contain twice the ore they once did.
Drakes aren’t exactly command ships, don’t have 5 mids unless your consider the prop mod so obligatory that the 6th mid does basically not exist any more as it’s occupied by the prop mod (it’s not so clear whether drakes take AB, MWD, or both, though), and Drakes can’t take turrets at all.
The reason orca trolls were running afk orca fleets was not to get some ore, but to show off they would get away with it. Some people with just as many alts as the mining fleet soloers would bring Talos fleets and show the trolls they would not get away it, while others brought cynabals or ospreys to bump the afk orcas out of the belts. Miners never stopped complaining about “alt abuse” (how many orca alts were afk mining when the user was sleeping?) and being vulnerable to bumping, while suiciders never stopped complaining about orcas being poor content (a barge drops more valuable loot then an orca, is harder to tackle then a whale, and has more chances to send you an embarrasing killmail in return then a whale, too… i.e. a barge is more of a “gf” then a whale)
CCP “fixed” that by introducing the crab mod for the orca, which makes it alot less vulnerable to bumping, as well as nerfing procurers to be just as much of sitting ducks as whales are, when it comes to attempting to tackle them.
They also made orca wrecking more rewarding by introducing new modules to install on whales that are expensive and have a chance to drop… before the patch, the only expensive item on orcas was the rigs, and those don’t drop. The drone yield nerf, that is reverted by cycling a crab module, is a motivation for orca users to install the crab mod even when they’re solo-mining with the whale
If the ore in the whale (or porp) is compressed, a “good killmail” can buy back the whole concorded battlecruiser fleet. Before the patch you were lucky if an orca dropped enough value to replace a single blaster dessie.
This.
The orca yield was and is high only on paper. If you have 5 alts, using all of them in Covetors around your main’s orca will end up clearing an asteroid belt in way less time then you could clear it with 5 additional orcas, as the boosted Covetors reach out 40km with their strips, while the mining drones move so slowly that the orca itself has to go and kiss rocks… and orcas don’t move fast, either (the same goes with people telling that rorqual drones are ventures in terms of yield … non-afk ventures yield a lot more because they move faster, have larger holds, and engage from higher distances)
I totally agree. But there are situations where you can run the Orca for a significantly longer time period between interactions. So if you have your 5 Covetors, you have to be pretty active switching between them and moving (or compressing) ore. That same fleet of 5 in Orcas could be way less interactive. If you base your fleet size on interaction time, you could easily run a massive fleet of Orcas. Therefore, your 5 Covetors might mine the same as 10 Orcas, but my theoretical 30 Orca fleet would still out mine you.
its pretty simple . if you have better skills and use better equipment your leave fewer rocks on the field.
yah it was done to help the lower skilled players still be able to be in the mining fleet but still makes no sense. just another clumsly implementation by CCP
the push to use the ORE miners is yet another way of making miners juicy targets. the idea that improving drones for miners suddently turns them into combat ships is utter nonsense.
attackers just come in at range and you die anyway
No, not really. When a new account is created, Mining 4 can be skilled into within 18 hours, assuming it was an alpha account. Mining 4 will unlock the T2 Miner to put on the Venture you get as part of the Tutorial quest.
Unless you can bother spending 18 hours skilling for using improved mining equipment, you’re hardly a miner, and, if it’s your first account (rather then a new alt), you’re most likely not going to mine “valuable” ores before skilling up mining decently, anyways. The valuable Ore mining, for most players, begins when they join a corporation, and corp-mates invite them to attend a mining fleet (including Ice or R4 mining in highsec).
The T1 miner having a higher efficiency then the T2 one is only explainable by CCP wanting you to create more alts. Any new alt can immediately use the T1 miner and a Venture right after birth, so just create a few new alts, remote set up the home station, suicide jump clone to your corp’s null, and help out at the “high efficiency mining op”.
If miners had at least a bit of a spine, they’d just A-II all of the R64, and sell it for it’s mainstream marketplace trade median to their corporations’ industrialists, rather then selling it for 90% or even 80% Jita buy price and paying “moon mining tax”.
Public Highsec Mining Fleet pays 15M/h for you to mine in a Venture, 25M/hr in a Propsect, and 45M in a barge, isk on your hand, no 90% buyback bs, no mining tax bs. FC loses his orca to suicide gankers? You lose your ship? You still get your isk for the time you mined in the fleet while it was operational. Unless the R64 moon mining, that pays only for stuff that was safely moved into a station, after reducing mining fees and buyback losses doesn’t pay out more then CONCORD umbrella mining, why even bother with it?!
Actually, your statement is more of the same. All through the literature you assert I missed, people claimed to have knowledge that is not knowable. You now claim I missed “all the blog posts and forum threads”. That statement is manifestly false. If I read one post or thread your statement is false. Second, you can’t know what I read. Third I spent innumerable hours hours with the literature; made many dozens of posts and spent at least 12 hours on the test server. I was the Mining Director for a +200 member corp - twas my Eve job to be informed regarding these developments. So the true wacky part is the number of people who brought self conflicting statements (like yours) and lacked knowledge and experience of mining and industry.
I posted in the environment described above taking down other people’s arguments. Many of the arguments claimed to know the unknowable; were self contradictory and/or were factually incorrect. And because I was practically the sole voice of miners and industry, I employed a confrontational and bombastic style as a force multiplier.
I did not undertake the task to be liked and make friends. And, although surely debatable, I firmly believe I changed the outcome.
Lastly, was my first post a polemic? I give you that one.
Back at that time, I challenged people making wild claims to take screen shots and post them. I posted numerous screen shots to back up what I was doing to contrast against their evidence-free claims.
But that is actually not the case. You don’t spend more time. The cycle time on strip miner I and II or Miing Drone I and II is the same. When you factor in residue, tier 1 is always better in all cases. No need to even have higher tier options in game. Makes no sense. This mechanic needs rework.
Nope. Wrong. You don’t understand how the mechanic is working. Read up on it.
The residue is not taken from your yield. It’s taken from the rock after your yield. All it does is reduce the amount of available ore. It doesn’t reduce what you mine.
I think I didn’t explain clearly the idea of this post.
I don’t have a problem with residue as a concept, I like the idea of creating byproducts, it makes it more realistic. I like the mining crystals options too, the more choices the better. My main issue is residue being an RNG element, I don’t like rng elements that don’t provide anything to gameplay. It’s just a coinflip and nothing more in the way it is implemented.
I would like to have more control to such an important element of mining as byproducts are, without forcing me to go back to T1 modules or overspending in modules several times the value of my mining ship, wouldn’t call those really flexible options…
We are in total agreement here.
Since the changes I have found that my yield over time is higher when using “B” crystals and I use those on any rock that is not in short supply or super high value. Honestly that is most things out there. If it sits there un-mined it doesn’t matter what the waste is.
For the high value stuff I use “A” crystals and get about the same m3/hr and a little better total M3 compared to before the change.
I have not, and won’t do the math on it, but it “feels” to me to be a slight improvement over pre-change.
Yield is higher and, even taking residue into account, doubling all asteroid sizes (which happened in the same patch) means that even if you use wasteful type B crystals you get more ore out of an asteroid than before.
So it’s positive for both yield and amount of ore, and also offers more depth to mining in the form of optimization choices (yield versus efficiency). It positive in many ways.