Is there something wrong with it… that’s a semi-complicated question and you’re going to get a bunch of different viewpoints across null. Obviously, a lot of Rorqual pilots are of the opinion that they’ve spent a lot of isk on their rorqs, and a lot of time skilling into it. And many of them have been paying subscription fees to keep those accounts in Omega while they trained and even through things like the Blackout, anomaly nerfs, Rorqual and Excavator nerfs, and then the ‘scarcity’ economic rebalance that happened completely separately to all of those pre-Dec 2019 changes. As with anything that people have to invest time, money, and effort into getting, they don’t want to see it devalued.
And that’s the thing. It’s not that they feel they’ve been milked for cash—that was never any great secret, after all. CCP was heavy-handed enough when the Rorq changes + injectors went in that everyone knew it was a cash grab, and certain CCP devs were honest enough to carefully avoid denying it, all with a wink and a nod. The thing the players are annoyed about is a bit different… and it’s really two bits.
First, they’re annoyed at the waste mechanic. Sure, it got renamed, but it’s still waste. It’s still completely framed in a negative way that gives negative reinforcement. Whenever you use the tools that get you the most throughput, you get told, effectively, ‘AND HERE’S WHAT YOU WASTED’.
Negative feedback produces negative emotional responses. It’s why the auto industry, in looking to changeover to electric vehicles, focuses on ‘EVs get all this MPG!’ rather than ‘Yeah, so, congrats, you avoided X emissions from your tailpipe. Here’s how much pollution had to be created to make those batteries… oh, and here’s how much went into generating the electricity you used to charge the car…’
That’s not to say EVs aren’t more eco-friendly overall, of course, because the oil companies play the same game when they don’t tell you just how much the average person in any given nation pays (either directly or through taxes) in health costs due to petroleum. They’d rather we all focus on the relatively low cost at the pump.
How people react to something depends entirely on how it’s framed. Give them a bunch of negative framing, and they’ll see it in a negative light. That’s why they had to revamp the waste mechanic to make the higher-yield options more wasteful in the first place.
Initially, the T1 stuff created more waste. That got changed because people pointed out (many of them, the very mining corp leaders who’d be making those decisions) that it could negatively impact how willing people were to welcome newbies. After all, newbie points laser at rock, laser collects 100 ore, burns another 100 ore, mining corp’s out 100 ore, compared to the guys w/faction lasers.
Now, imagine if, instead of ‘we’re doubling all the resources, but there’s a chance you’ll burn extra’, if it had been framed as ‘T2 modules and faction modules have a small chance to perform extremely efficiently. When this happens, yield will remain unaffected, but collecting 100 ore will only remove 50 from the rock’… then there’s no perceived negative effect. Only a potential bonus reward for the people who’ve invested time and effort to be really good miners. Toss in a ‘we’re increasing the yield in rocks by 50%’, and miners are probably giddy as hell over the changes, even though it’s actually less ore out there than we have now.
Framing matters. But it’s only part of why some rorq pilots are a bit ticked off. Another part of it goes back to that whole ‘devalued’ thing… but not devaluing the rorqual. They feel like their investment was devalued. Not the thing they got, mind you, and not in terms of money. They feel like, as paying customers, like that investment of time, money, and effort wasn’t respected by the company that wants them to keep paying.
It’s not unreasonable for customers to want to feel like the company respects them. And it’s not unreasonable for them to decide that if a company doesn’t respect them, that company doesn’t need their money.
Now, to side-track a bit and answer your question for myself… Personally, I don’t have much problem with Rorqs and Orcas going back to primarily being support vessels. As I’ve said in a reply to an earlier thread, I think Rorquals should not be the most common mining ship in nullsec, and I think the comparison holds for Orcas in highsec.
But I do think that they have to bring more to the table than just their support abilities—they have to be able to mine. Absent the ability to mine, the only person bringing a Rorqual is the guy already flying a dozen hulks, who wants the boosts. So the ‘aspirational’ part of capital industrial ships becomes ‘I aspire to run a Rorqual once I’m already multi-boxing basically as much as I can handle’. And of course, it’s the same w/the Hulk in HS.
And that’s not really all that aspirational, you know? New players don’t try out EVE and tell themselves ‘I can’t wait until I need to pay for 10 or more accounts!’ So the big boosting ship needs to be able to do something for itself, something so the guy running 1 account in a corp mining op has a reason to be the guy bringing the booster. Because yeah, it’d be lovely if everyone pooled their mining yield and divvied up the cash evenly between the entire group… but these are people, and 9 times out of 10, people just ain’t that nice to each other.
Right now, those big ships can do that. They can mine. Or at least, the Rorqual can. We’ll come back to the Orca. A Hulk mines more than a Rorq, but the hulk also has to empty its mining hold fairly often. 11,500m3 being filled at a rate of 141m3/s (max hulk strip miner yield) means you have to empty the hulk every 82s. With a cycle time of 40s, that means basically every 2 cycles of the mining lasers. That gets to be a lot of clicking. Can’t even do something else for a minute and a half, or you’re losing efficiency.
Everything else, the Rorq still gets more yield/s. It just doesn’t do it without generating a lot of waste residue—without burning a whole lot of rock. And that goes back to the framing issue. Because we’re being shown what we’re doing in a negative light.
How groups are approaching this depends a lot on just how accessible resources are for subcap miners. I can’t speak for everyone, obviously, but the way some groups in null are threading the needle right now is that higher-quality resources, or resources that are close to home, have a definite bias toward subcaps. Rorqs might get told ‘you don’t mine the R64 ore’ or ‘you don’t mine the name R64’, like the Bountiful Loparite. The good stuff gets saved for the subcaps, because they waste less of it. And then it takes 6 hours to clear a single moon.
As the resources get further from where the miners live, the Rorqs get more leeway. Someplace far enough out that the Rorquals need a midpoint cyno? Or even 2? Go nuts, use the excavators. Just get it mined, dammit, because it needs to not be completely wasted.
And that’s a matter of mobility. The Rorquals can get there, without much difficulty. To get subcaps out there, you have to jump them out there in Rorquals, and have the pilots run around like headless chickens in shuttles, trying to catch up and get into their barges and exhumers. Because you might need to do 3-4 moons in a day, even at the longer mining time, and you can only jumpclone to the Rorqual once in that time. (Honestly, the clone vat bays in both Rorquals and titans are… pretty useless, as-is. But I digress.)
So what you wind up with is the places where you’re more likely to see killable subcaps… are where the defense forces are strongest, and able to come to the rescue the fastest. Because the places the defense forces can’t easily get to… neither can the barges. Which means the predators that would feed on barges basically starve.
Those are the same guys that argued against the Industrial Conduit Jump, because they felt it would make miners ‘too safe’. As if the Rorq is just going to sit out there among the asteroids not sieged. You know, sit out there without like 80% of its defensive abilities available, and 90% of its mining and boosting capabilities. A booster… that can’t effectively boost. Yeah. That’s gonna happen.
If they want the miners to be where they can be caught, then the miners need to be in ships that are easier to kill, out where defense forces can’t just take 4 gates and be on top of you, and the miners need to feel safe. Because that’s how you get them to be lazy, sloppy, and dumb. And that’s when they die.
Now, just to loop back to the Orca, for the highsec comparison. In HS, with a boosting Orca, the Hulk maxes out about 101m3/s. The Mackinaw, just shy of 70. So what does the Orca get, to make sure that it’s worth the solo Orca pilot’s time?
28.3m3/s. Less than half what a Mackinaw gets. 3.3m3/s more than a Covetor, with T1 strip miners and no mining upgrades, gets. So, that feels right, yeah? A 2 billion ISK ship should get slightly less performance than a 52.1M ISK one, yeah? After all, it’s not like the Orca pilot has to spend more than 3 months training up to be able to fly the ship and provide the full level of boosts… or, you know, train Fleet Command V to max out the range on their boosts, which is even more time sacrificed to making that cheap-ass Covetor outperform him.
So, yeah, I think the Rorqual’s in a better place now than it was… but the Orca kinda got violated in the stern section with a rusty chainsaw. It doesn’t need to be massively better… but it does need to outperform a damned minimally-effective barge.