And just to have it outlined before anyone starts acting like I’m defending ‘all rorqs all the time’…
Why Rorquals and Orcas Shouldn’t Be The Default Mining Ships:
Ultimately, there is more to the mining landscape than the economy. There’s the ecosystem… and honestly, I think the ecosystem team’s been focusing on the economy so much, they must think the two are the same thing. And both are complex webs of interaction, to be sure, where small pieces add up into larger moving parts. But the same thing… they’re very much not.
When we look at the economy, we need to balance supply and demand. If Supply outstrips Demand, you end up with stockpiles building up that nobody can sell. If Demand far exceeds supply, then prices rise to the point where people get frustrated, and demand crashes. IRL, there’s a floor on that for necessities. In EVE Online, that can just mean ‘screw it, I’m gonna play something else where I can actually make progress’.
The Hulk, right now, mines in the same neighborhood as the old Rorq’s mining numbers. Not quite as good, mind you, 147m3/s max, compared to the pre-patch Rorq’s 180, but close, and certainly better than the 120m3/s that the Rorq gets now1.
So there really isn’t an argument to be made for ‘they were mining too much’, since Hulks, now, are mining basically the same amount. Only, you know with a lot more clicking. And where you’re seeing ‘active gameplay’… frankly, no. Active gameplay would be doing something engaging. Moving ore into the fleet hangar of the nearby Rorqual, or jetcanning it every 2 cycles, that’s just… drudgework. It’s mindless, and it’s tedious. Frankly, it’s bad gameplay. It’s essentially copy/paste on a spreadsheet, and really, if that was fun, EVE’d be the go-to game for the accountants of the world.
And frankly, maximizing supply (as has been done w/this patch) so that prices can crash… that’s not great economics, but it’s reasonable economics: either lower prices will spur rising demand, and so bring prices back up to an equilibrium point, or people will stop mining when they can’t make any money.
Of course, if the people who mine in EVE because it’s an activity they can enjoy which makes money stop mining because they can no longer make money… some of them will stop playing. What kind of percentage? Who knows, but we clearly can’t rely on CCP to accurately calculate %s, or they wouldn’t have needed to kill the ‘Efficiency’ column.
But that’s the economic concerns. The reason you don’t want Rorqs and Orcas as the default, most-common mining ship in their respective bailiwicks is the same reason CCP should have listened when we warned that the original Rorq changes would result in supercapital proliferation: Elephants.
Right now, the largest healthy-ish terrestrial ecosystem in the world is the African Serengeti. And the Serengeti is dominated by massive herds of herbivores… of prey. Gazelle, antelope, zebra, all the way up to elephants.
Now, elephants are big. They’re visible. And they take a long time and a lot of resources to make. African elephants gestate for 22 months. But elephants aren’t the major driver of the ecosystem, and they’re not the critter with the bigger herds. That’s the Wildebeest. Wildebeest gestate for roughly 8.5 months. So it takes a little less than 3x the time and effort to make an elephant than a wildebeest. But don’t tell the wildebeest cows I said that. They’ve unionized, and they’ll come after me, I’m sure!
Wildebeest also tend to get eaten a lot. They’re basically the Corn Flakes of the Serengeti. If you’re a predator, you probably like gettin’ some un-roast 'beest. Lions, hyenae, wild dogs, leopards, cheetah, and crocs all live well when the herds come through. By comparison, a healthy adult African elephant’s natural predators are…
Yeah, that’s an exhaustive list, I think. Lions and hyenae might try on a sick or weakened adult, and juveniles are always tasty if you can get 'em, but a healthy adult? Even the other megafauna don’t tend to mess w/them.
That’s basically where the Rorq should be. Rorqs should be elephants. The majority of the predators in space shouldn’t really have a reasonable chance of taking a Rorq. If they can, then you should be looking at a fairly large group, one that can organize and coordinate well enough to threaten the elephant. And most of the miners out there should be subcaps. But here’s the thing:
Elephants and Wildebeest both walk everywhere. If elephants could just teleport around, the wildebeest would all be dead. There’d be nothing for them to eat, because the elephants would get all the good stuff.
Now, remove the ability for Rorqs to jump… and you’ll basically kill mining in null and the more dangerous bits of low. Because nobody’s pushing mining fleets through gates in any numbers without an escort group, and nobody’s going to devote hours to just escorting the miners around. Not more than 2-3 times, tops. They’ll get pissed off about wasting their time babysitting, and they’ll stop.
That’s not conjecture, either, it’s something we’ve seen in operation. We’ve had that exact situation develop w/escort fleets even when jump drives were involved. Make it gates, and they just burn out on the boredom even faster, because it takes longer to get there, and longer to get back.
Really, if CCP wants really widespread adoption of subcap miners in null, they need the industrial portal generator. Preferably with the conduit jump, just to make things easier to get there and get home when you’re done.
And all of the people whining about ‘miners will be impossible to catch’… yeah, they’re idiots. As I said above: Rorqs won’t be sitting out there among the rocks, giving crappy short-range boosts and not making any money to speak of. They’ll be sieged, and if the indy core’s active, don’t let the jump portal activate.
And anyone saying ‘oh, the bridging rorqs will be tethered, and the miners can just warp over’, well, if the miners could just warp over to the tethered rorq, they obviously could just warp over to the structure it’s tethered on. So the lack of mobility in getting to/from the moons isn’t helping the hunters in that scenario, is it?
And let’s also keep in mind that the voices saying ‘the conduit jump would make miners impossible to catch’ were the same batch of voices saying ‘Blackout will make it easy to catch miners’. It didn’t. And there’s a pretty simple way to understand why their expectations are exactly wrong:
Miners get caught when they’re lazy. The more your PvErs have the illusion of safety, the lazier they’ll be, and the sloppier they’ll get. And that’s when they’ll die. Miners who feel vulnerable stay alert. They work in groups that can say ‘hey, neut reported 2 jumps out in intel’. They’re on comms where they can learn the same things. They’re not getting lazy and vulnerable. Just ask the Jaguar pilot who tried to snipe some excavs in Delve earlier today, and got a face full of sentries and warrior IIs. One more tick, and they wouldn’t have warped out in time.
Predators want their prey fat and lazy, not alert and paranoid. But you know, that’s an issue of ecosystem… not economics.
1. Of course, if you’re willing to burn through ore with residue, the Rorq’s still definitely the better option for nullsec: it’s got the mobility the hulk lacks. Not only does it have a stupidly-good tank (2.4 million EHP while repping 31k dps before you PANIC for 6 minutes and rebuild your full shield amount to make them burn through it again while the defense fleet arrives), but it can, you know, jump out.
Oh, and that’s not in response to a threat. After all, Rorqs in ore belts of any kind aren’t just sitting there out of siege, core down, giving short-range, weak-ass boosts. Even now, they’re actively mining. No, the grand utility of being able to jump is… well, when you fill up, you just bounce back out to staging, drop off your ore, and bounce back. Simple and effective. Sure, it’ll cost you some fuel, but it’s going to cost you fuel to get a jump-capable hauler—or a titan to bridge freighters around—out to where you were mining to pick up the ore. So the fuel’s irrelevant. And let’s face it, between the cargo, fleet hangar, and mining hold, a Rorq, even without cargo expanders, hauls more ore than a JF. All that utility, you know?