Skills cost/benefit, mining and "under-mining of skills"

[Fidd]

It is axiomatic that an increase in attained skills, should result in a benefit, and that there is a reasonable relationship between time/effort expended skilling up, and the degree of that benefit. Earlier today I counted circa 43 consecutive mining cycles with no critical hit, and absolutely no relationship between the amount gained through crit hits and that lost in residue, despite having all relevant skills at 5. The wording of “Mining Exploitation” and “Mining Precision” is a little ambiguous, as it could be per turret, or, an overall chance on a pair of lasers. Either way, assuming it starts at 1%, then it’s reasonable to interpret that the 25% increase in chance is likely to be a minimum 25% or 1 in 4 cycles at the most disadvantageous interpretation. Thus over 40 cycles one might reasonably expect around 10 crit hits. Seeing around 43 pass without result caused me to watch further cycles even more closely. Around 1 in 20 or so seems to be roughly average. This is not by any yardstick a fair or reasonable effect for the 2M or so skill-points expended. I fully understand that initial implementation requires caution, but this cost/benefit is wholly illusory, effectively a scam.

Mining is currently suffering other issues: I believe that it is reasonable to expect that the more specialised and more skill-intensive a game feature is, the better it should perform, relative to items that are more general and less specific. In mining terms, the most effective mining method should therefore be type A chrystals and a deep core miner II’s, NOT Ore Miners that can simply be bought with far fewer skills required. The advantage of using Ore miners to bypass having to skill up is reasonable, however, extended range, m3 or efficiency ought not, imho, exceed or equal that of miners who’ve taken the long route to get there.

What to do about Ore miners?

There are a number of ways this could be handled.

1. Limit them to High Sec only.
2. Limit them to Low and Null sec only.
3. Reduce their effectiveness in all respects below that of a similar mining laser dedicated for use against particular ores.
4. Buy-back program and get rid of them completely.
5. Leave them as they are, but increase mining Chrystal effectiveness ABOVE the effectiveness/range etc values of the Ore miner

Any one of those measures would help re-establish the relationship between skills attained and performance gained.

T1 Mining drones are a lower tech level than T2. We are now in the absurd situation where use of T2 ones gives higher residues, in no way compensated by increase of effectiveness by skilling up to use T2. A common theme is developing here, if you skill-up, you get rogered, if you can afford to pay for exotic drones, you can again largely bypass the need to skill-up. This is getting to the point where the skilling paradigm is being seriously “undermined” by catering to the Ritalin-munchers who lack the patience to skill-up. At which point, why exactly should anyone bother to skill up when the effects are so easily by-passed? More to the point, why in God’s name would anyone purchase SP etc?

Friends who have played - and left - the game have all made this last point, one way or another. Care should be taken, I think, that players good-will in this regard is not abused, and that means returning advance in skills to reflect in a fair and reasonable fashion, the performance of their character. If such care is not taken, eventually that goodwill may cease?

I’d be really interested to read the minimum and maximum intervals between crit hits. It’s possible my 43 was just a mad outlier. or I missed several ones. But I do not believe I did.

[Andlaust]

@Fidd

Earlier today I counted circa 43 consecutive mining cycles with no critical hit

Congratulations!!!

You figured out that mechanics based off of Random Number Generators are indeed Random!

[Fidd]

The odds of that occurring are pretty staggering, and the subsequent counts appear to reinforce the point that the actual performance is well below what the skill blurb seems to indicate. Were this a single count of 43, rather than a pattern that’s become so noticeable that I started counting the intervals, would seem to suggest whatever system they’re using to generate “random” numbers is not working well, and decidedly NOT as per the description best I can tell. Thankyou for the rimshot though!

[Andlaust]

@Fidd

odds

Just because you have a 50/50 chance for heads when flipping a coin doesn’t mean that if you flip it 100 times you get 50 heads and 50 tails.

Once again, RNG is R.

[QuakeGod]

RNGeezus is indeed fickle, no matter how much you pray to it…

[Gerard_Amatin]

@Fidd

Earlier today I counted circa 43 consecutive mining cycles with no critical hit,

With the skill at level 5 you have increased the default crit chance by 50%, from 1% to 1.5%. Or from one in 100 to one in 67.

Without other sources of crit, the chance of not critting for 43 cycles in a row is ((100-1.5)/100)^43 = 0.52. Or in other words 52%.

Your observation is like flipping a coin and calling it strange that it fell on heads instead of tails.

It’s not a rare occurrence what happened to you.

@Fidd

The wording of “Mining Exploitation” and “Mining Precision” is a little ambiguous, as it could be per turret, or, an overall chance on a pair of lasers. Either way, assuming it starts at 1%, then it’s reasonable to interpret that the 25% increase in chance is likely to be a minimum 25% or 1 in 4 cycles at the most disadvantageous interpretation.

It is true that the mechanics behind critical hits in games aren’t always immediately clear on first sight.

This is why you likely are not the first player with these questions. Other players too have wondered “how do crits work” and some wrote down their findings. A quick google search could give the answer, or just a search on the forums too can also explain the details, like in this thread by me:

Mining Critical Hits Explained

The upcoming Catalyst Expansion brings to us “Mining Critical Hits”. What are those? Well, the test server was up, so I took a look. (Also take a look at my other Catalyst thread about the yield of the new mining ships). Crit skills Currently all ore and ice mining equipment has a base 1% chance at obtaining 200% bonus crit yield. (Numbers subject to change). This can be improved with two skills, Mining Bonanza Exploitation for 5% crit yield per skill level [image] and Mining Precision f…

@Fidd

Either way, assuming it starts at 1%, then it’s reasonable to interpret that the 25% increase in chance is likely to be a minimum 25% or 1 in 4 cycles at the most disadvantageous interpretation.

If it starts at 1%, assuming that a 25% increase goes from 1% to 25% is a pretty bold assumption. That would mean that a mere 25% increased crit chance boosts your yield by 75% (if crit yield is 200%), or that the crit chance bonus of the Venture Consortium Issue of 50% crit chance more than doubles your yield as Venture pilot.

For a game that’s all about a 5% increase here, a 10% there from modules and skills, your assumption is like an order of magnitude off. That might be a hint that the assumption is wrong.

@Fidd

Thus over 40 cycles one might reasonably expect around 10 crit hits.

A reasonable assumption based on your earlier assumption, but that first one was likely wrong.

@Fidd

This is not by any yardstick a fair or reasonable effect for the 2M or so skill-points expended.

You can stack crit bonuses of various sources, which gets massively boosted by those two skills. With good bonuses, links and skills you can increase your yield by up to 25% from crits. Or that was when I did the math initially before abyssal miner stats were released, with abyssal rolls it can be even more. And this extra yield isn’t taken from the rocks, so it also increases the amount of valuable ore you can mine by 25%.

I think it is very well worth the skill points used.

[Gerard_Amatin]

@Fidd

Mining is currently suffering other issues: I believe that it is reasonable to expect that the more specialised and more skill-intensive a game feature is, the better it should perform, relative to items that are more general and less specific. In mining terms, the most effective mining method should therefore be type A chrystals and a deep core miner II’s, NOT Ore Miners that can simply be bought with far fewer skills required. The advantage of using Ore miners to bypass having to skill up is reasonable, however, extended range, m3 or efficiency ought not, imho, exceed or equal that of miners who’ve taken the long route to get there.

What to do about Ore miners?

I completely agree on this point.

Players should have a reason to train T2 mining skills even for efficient mining scenarios.

Right now this is not the case and I think that’s a major flaw. People use T1 or ORE for efficient mining, because even the ‘efficient’ type A crystals simply aren’t efficient enough when you care about efficiency.

I had a different solution for this problem. It’s bit math heavy, but the simple version is this:

Mining links should have a stronger effect on Type A crystals than on type B.
Strong mining links should even negate all type A residue.

That should give T2 strip miners an equally efficient option as ORE miners but much cheaper for well-skilled miners.

Reddit - The heart of the internet

[Fidd]

Many many thanks indeed for a clear explanation, which I hope others may find equally useful. I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks Ore miners are over-powered and somewhat illogical. Perhaps there was a shortage of ore being mined at some point and they added it to boost the amount of ore coming into the economy? Seems a common theme? Hence crits and new “1-800-ROID” dial-a-mineral in null-sec?

Nice to meet you btw, that was my first post in here so I’m bound to get the wrong end of the stick a bit also being fairly new to the game.

Cheers,

[Syzygium]

@Gerard_Amatin

Players should have a reason to train T2 mining skills even for efficient mining scenarios.

It is a general design flaw all over the modules that there is no consistent scheme attached to the performance of T2 vs Faction items.

Sometimes Faction is straight up better: Damage Mods for example. Damage Controls. Coatings, Membranes… Sometimes Faction is equally strong but just easier to fit. Sometimes faction is worse, but less cap hungry. Sometimes faction is less performant, but more durable… Sometimes it’s equally strong, but you can overheat it longer…
Exceptions over exceptions over exceptions and at the very best some completely arbitrary rules. Many of the modules are even completely redundant with different names but identical stats.

Tbh, CCP should have done a reasonable tiericide of all Faction Items long ago and invent a scheme that applies to ALL faction items and is a) logical and b) easy to understand and remember.

I could probably write one up in less than an hour that would completely remove confusion for new players, balance issues and on top of that even would allow for new tactical options and synergies (aka having Blood Raider Equipment have bonus traits if used on Blood Raider ships, Imperial Navy Equipment if used with Imperial Navy ships etc…). And all that easy to understand, easily explained in the item info, logical and easy to remember.

[Fidd]

The more coins flipped in your example, the closer to equal numbers of head and tails will get. So, flip 2 coins and you might 2 tails. Flip 10,000 coins, and it’ll be pretty close to 5000 tails, and 5000 heads.

An this was my point, a consecutive series of 43 no-crit cycles is a fair sample size unless the native crit % chance is extremely low. I’m not especially mathematics minded, but if you take dice as an example, the chance of a dice been threwn 6 is 1 in 6. Two dice sequentially threwn is 1/6 times 1/6 or 1/36. Three dice consecutively threwn as 6’s has 1/108 chance. And so on. So, if you get 43 consecutive no-crits, it implies a very very low chance of a crit hit over one cycle. If it was a higher chance, then of course the likelihood of the sequence of 43 would be much harder to repeat. After I posted initially I started making further counts of sequential non-crit cycles. Numbers in the late 20’s and early 30’s were not unusual.

What I was driving at is the 2M skill-points in the two skills is a great deal of time/skilling for a very very small increase, and I question if the cost/benefit of skilling this up is worth it in the short term. Far easier and quicker just to buy the relevant survey scanner and get a much larger improvement. And thus we are back to ore-miners and pay to win, not skill to win, as it were. If this was being done more to encourage toon development, then skilling would outweigh the effects of simply purchasing “stuff” than enables players to bypass doing so? It seems arse about face…

[QuakeGod]

@Fidd

then skilling would outweigh the effects of simply purchasing “stuff” than enables players to bypass doing so?

Welcome to Skill Injectors…

[Fidd]

I take your point, however, I think skill-injectors are “fine in moderation”. Their use has to be broadly commensurate with your game experience. What you done want to do is burn through dozens of ‘em and end up with a ship or discipline where you’re highly advanced, but didn’t acquire the necessary experience at lower levels of the game. Used a little - they’re fine. YMMV of course.

[QuakeGod]

It doesn’t matter whether you’re buying ORE mining lasers, or skill injectors to use T2 mining equipment, you’re still “paying to win” either way…

[Adada_Tuesday]

Strip mining ought to be a special type of mining that produces residue. It would mean all residue from Mining Drones II and Miner II etc. Is removed and new Strip Mining drones I and II is introduced. They yield slightly more than Mining Drone I and II but produce residue.

Same thing with Strip Miner I and II, they only yield slightly more than Miner I and II but they produce residue.

The main benefit is progression becomes more streamlined and the choice between residue or not becomes clearer. For example when you upgrade from Miner I to Miner II you get residue today. Sane thing with strip miners, and they dont even have a real T2 version, because if you use T2 strip miner all of a sudden you have to deal with crystals too afaik. I mean mining is such a mess design wise at the moment. Peace.

On topic: crit chance is like 1-2% afaik. And the skill etc. is misleading because it increased the crit chance by 25%. But what is 25% of 1-2%. You know what i mean?

[Derlin_Fishen]

My experience with crits mining was that with three levels of the first skill trained I would get a cut once every forty minutes or so in a Mackinaw. In a mining fleet that boosted my crits to 135% I would get one every 7-10 minutes or so.

[Fidd]

My objection to Ore miners is simply that they perform better than similar lasers requiring a huge skill overhead, and the carriage of usually 6 or more chrystal types, and the knowledge of which to use on what rock. Even though they are very expensive, I therefore reckon them to be significantly overpowered, because they break the usual technical truism that something built to a very specific purpose should out-perform a more general use item which might suffice, but not excel. Ore-miners seem to have been created in response to a deficit of mining in the economy, but should have been items that burn-out, requiring replacement, and ought not have exceeded or equalled chrystal use. IMHO.

I support the “expert” system allowing people to try out skilled specialities before committing to months or years of skilling, however, I don’t think ones of the same class should be repeatable. IE it ought not be a means of out-competing players who have spent the time and trouble to grind up a single character.

It seems me that whilst strip mining does have residue in real-life, they’ve fundamentally got this wrong, because there’s in inverse relationship between mining skill and item used, and the amount of residue. IE a T2 item generates more residue than it’s T1 version. That’s arse about face? Crits would seem to be an attempt to remedy that, but it seems very muddled.