The winter expansion has a name! EVE Online: Catalyst will launch on November 18th. Between now and then we’ll have some deep dives into various features that are coming in Catalyst. This will be in the form of dev blogs, dev interviews, and live streams. You don’t have to check them all out, to stay informed, though! As with our previous expansions, you can expect the full expansion patch notes published on November 14th so you can prepare for all that Catalyst brings.
Highlights of what’s coming
A new, unpredictable ore ignites a galaxy-wide resource rush
Hyperspace fractures reveal volatile asteroid fields rich in Prismaticite
Command new ships: the Pioneer mining destroyer and Odysseus exploration ship
Mining refined with faster cycles, critical hits, and improved UI
Explore the stars with the new 2D map
Start your journey with a new epic arc
Carriers updated, PLEX logs added, and much more to come
@CCP_Swift more snow coming in space?
I seem to remember someone suggested you add comets to the game, so the miners could mine ice, ore, and gas in one spot. Maybe in 2026?
Whether you’re warping into New Eden for the first time, or just want to explore everything the new expansion has to offer, a new accessible and brief epic arc has got you covered.
Explore and experience the new mining content through an introductory narrative journey, intended to test a new way to introduce expansion content. At the end, you will have a new Pioneer mining destroyer to launch your mining career.
This new arc will introduce the Catalyst expansion to pilots of all experience levels, and help new capsuleers set goals and discover some of the wonders of New Eden.
Rather than just randomly give miners more ore on a critical hit, why don’t you make mining more engaging and strike against botting at the same time, by nerfing mining output overall, and tying the crits to playing a minigame? That way bots, AFK solo mining, and the large-scale multiboxing that makes the mining ”community” so thoroughly unappealing to everyone else becomes unprofitable, while solo and small-scale multiboxing, actively playing the game, becomes competitive.
To crib an idea from the great Aiko Danuja, make them play ”Ore Tetris”. If they perform poorly (or don’t play), their output is nerfed to very little. Maybe some asteroid slag chunks break free and damage their ship a little. If they perform average, maybe finishing two levels per minute or something (something where one player small-scale multiboxing could reasonably keep up across three accounts), their output is buffed up to where mining output is currently. If they perform very well, multiple levels per minute and no losses, like a solo player focused on his one client, his output is buffed up to be noticeably higher than it is today.
It doesn’t have to my idea specifically, but if this is to be a mining overhaul expansion, I implore you to do something about AFK mining and botting. This is genuinely one of the worst parts of EVE Online. Nobody likes mining, and nobody likes miners. Fix that.
The beautiful thing about local is that if you keep it in a separate window, you can just put it next to your window for the minigame and notice new players entering system instantly, and glance over it regularly without distracting from the minigame.
Mining critical hits is an awful idea. Lets say I run 5 covetors and know that I have to do a compression cycle every 3 minutes. I keep them all in sync so that they all complete cycles at the same time and I do my compression. I’m not botting or input broadcasting or anything, I’m at my computer interacting with the game, watching local, with a movie on my second monitor.
The absolute last thing I need is half the covetors getting out of sync due to increased randomness. That absolutely wrecks me because I’m doing things manually. But it helps botters, they can just compress whenever the cargo is close to full. If a mining laser turns off on a bot fleet then the bot just turns it back on.
There’s this thing that happens in game design that bugs the hell out of me where devs think that adding complexity is the way to deal with automation. And then instead of actually adding the kind of complexity that requires human input they add triggers that need to be monitored constantly and responded to. Random critical mining is a direct buff to automation and I don’t understand why the dev team would do it.
Thats why a good mechanic offers both versions: ignore the “minigames” and just don’t get crits (or not many), get good and be able to do the “minigames” while paying attention to the local and get bonus profits. Obviously only works with 1-2 accounts … which would be intentional. A real fleet (not a multiboxed one) could even share responsibilities, have the boosting command ship watch over the local, while the others could greatly increase the profits from optimizing the crit-mechanics.
Lots of good ideas to help mitigate botting and multiboxing in here. It’s a shame CCP has no intention to actually put a stop to something that earns them a lot of money.
