History of mining in Eve
Beta: Hop in your frigate and mine with your mining 1 lasers. Collect ore, return to station and refine into minerals and build things. If youâre cool, do it in a group. The idea of 10 boxing eve not yet conceived because frankly, Eve wasnât very good yet and most PCs werenât up to the task of 10 boxing.
Release: Hop in your cruiser with many more turrets and mining 1 lasers. Mining laser 2 if you were a boss in a big bad bob alliance.
Post Release: Introduction of industrials. Repeat as before. Mine with as big a ship as you can, preferably something with 8 turrets for all of the mining laser goodness. However comma, dump cargo into space, and team mate picks up with his newly researched and built Iteron Mk5, which was the biggest and baddest of them all.
Some other obscure update: introduction of freighters. Now lots of ore can be moved from station to station. Markets begin to emerge. Jita is king.
Another obscure update: CCP decides that mining laser 2s are just no good and people shouldnât have to use battleships and cruisers to mine tritanium. Good for them. Someone has a brain. A mining dedicated ship is introduced. Mining barges/exhumers with stripper miners 1s because no one likes crystals. Mining is harder but more efficient. Miners are happy. Efficiency is good⌠PVPers are happy. Mining barges are easier to kill than a battleship. (debatable). Content is created. Mittens is happy. Sir Molle rejoices.
Update number whatever: Freighters can now deposit giant things into space. Like player built station eggs. And Enormous freight containers. Exhumers can suddenly super efficiently mine while orbiting enormous freight containers. Freighter is now possible to be used as transportation to/from mining site. Whole belts are being mined. They instantly respawn, but most people arenât aware or care about this because most people continue to not 10 box or 20 box mining toons. Efficiency hasnât been mastered yet but content seekers rejoice. Generally accepted as a positive update.
Rorqual capital ship introduced. Rorqs park inside POS shields and send YUGE boosts to mining fleets somewhere else in the system. Miners love it. Itâs absolutely great. PVP content seekers see no direct bonus as a rorqual is invincible inside a POS shield but more miners mine than ever. The economy is pleasant. People are happy. Freight containers pop everywhere.
Commence Shitting on Miner update: Someone at CCP decides that a customer purchasing an account and a monthly subscription to sit in a ship inside a shield is not good for the game. Even though dozens of associated accounts (and income sources) are sitting in an asteroid field somewhere. Itâs decided that boosts canât be rendered from within POS shields because wah wah OP. PVP content lovers herald this as a great update since they like to pew things. I agree with the PVPers. Miners are annoyed because NOW they need to move their ship 1m outside of the shield. Preferably next to a gun that pews. No content is created/destroyed with this update. It is an annoyance to miners but at no cost to efficiency.
Irrelevant update: Orca/Porpoise/other odd miner centric ships added/tweaked. No real content created or destroyed. Except a few dumb people who lose orcas chocker block stuffed with BPOs. Whoops. But these are isolated instances.
Mining now continues like this for about what, 5 years? No problems, no complaints, everyone is happy and develops their characters based on the gameâs mechanics.
Now, fast forward to about 2014-2015. CCP devs get this idea that they need to fix a system that has functioned without any huge problem for years. Like years not being an understatement. It lasted from the beginning of my military enlistment until the end, these years were OK. Mining was fine. â Then CCP said nah. Letâs wreck our game. Letâs start with POS shields and on grid boosts⌠Rorq pilots (100% alts of miners) were like huh wait what? We need to do things? And we will be immobile siege mode? We gonna die. This = bad. And CCP agrees that this is bad so they are gonna make Rorqs able to mine 10 times as much as a hulk, the current best miner in the game. And get an invulnerability shield and can cyno and CAN DO LOTS OF THINGS to counter this HUGE nerf. However, this changes the meta. 10x hulk means every hulk pilot MUST convert to rorqual to remain competitive. Hulk pilots were like 6b isk fully trained. Not including the hull and fittings. Without irony, CCP releases injectors around this period of time. So no problem, at a âlittleâ cost of 75% of your skill points, you can retrain into a capital ship rorqual for the little price of like 18b per account not including hull price (large) and drone price, which we will also make comically large at 1.5-2b per drone at the time. RIP. Miners are furious but commit to the new mechanics based on the promises of the devs that rorqs will be better.
Miner Hate update #1: Rorquals are immediately seen as OP. They mine whole belts in hours by themselves. CCP must âfixâ this. So yields are drastically reduced to about 4x a hulk. Still amazing. But ânot as greatâ as before.
Miner Hate update #2: Rorquals still borking the market with huge yields. CCP reduces the travel speed of drones to compensate. A Rorqual now yields a peasantly 1.5 times a boosted hulk. PVPers love the new content. Drone kill mails are a thing. MJD drone far away, pew it, rinse, repeat. My killboard is lovely.
Miner Hate update #3: Miners are resilient and havenât mass quit yet so CCP says asteroid belts shouldnât respawn instantly. Now you need to wait / or move your fleet to a different system. Miners are furious. Multiboxing all these rorquals has already become hell, not to mention the necessity to be in a huge titan backed fleet to protect your assets. PVPers donât care. This has no effect on their content creation/removal.
Fluff update: Moon mining is introduced: This has no impact on the actual mining meta of Eve but forces a tedious and unnecessary mechanical replacement for an automated POS mining system. The majority of miners see this as tedious, unnecessary, and irrelevant. CCP surely rejoices at their own creativity. PVP content may/may not have been created due to this update. Itâs hard to tell since so many miner have already quit mining to do other Eve monotonous tasks like incursions; which are now more profitable, or mother ship ratting and in some cases, titan ratting, because like mining, CCP nerfed tf out of titans super early on with the removal of their original DD.
Miner Hateupdate #4: Quantities in existing asteroids reduced because too much market corruption has already occurred. Miners are on the edge. Livid. Most have quit already or begun selling assets because the âdonât worry, your rorqual will be great nowâ promises of CCP have been exposed as complete BS. PVP content is reduced due to removal of miners from the game. Dedicated miners with 10+ accounts have had it. Accounts are unsubbed. CCP has succeeded in doing the one thing that a company ought not to do: kill off their income purposefully.
Miner Hate update #5: Iâll give CCP credit. They waited a little while to completely bork the industry in Eve; Making decisions without actually playing the game is pretty easy though, so letâs introduce waste; and make Rorquals completely obsolete. Orcas are boosted though, which is irrelevant already. PVP content almost completely destroyed except for the rare instance of masochists who continue to mine out of habit or necessity, than enjoyment. Iâm not shocked by this vagrant disregard for player base opinions. Itâs normal in an old game like Eve, but since there are already better games in the pipes, itâs a non issue. I have kept my account subbed for the last 3 years, in the off chance that CCP gets bought up by a competent publisher. That seems unlikely. But I do have 300m SP now, so station spinning in our âforever immortal player built stations that can now be killedâ is a little nicer with a big number next to my char sheet.
