Nice graph. It clearly shows an up-swing in Retriever, Mack and Hulk volumes at the end there, although my main take aways from this are:
A. Miners in EVE are clearly very consistent in their habits, the volumes are amazing flat for most ships across the graph.
B. Rorqual was clearly broken.
C. Orcas used to mine a considerable volume. Given the size of the mining fleets I have seen I’m supprised it is that high.
D. You need a few weeks (preferably months) of data before you can really see how this is all going to shake out. The part following the changes is too small to tell how things will settle.
I’m fairly sure that the biggest issue in all these changes is not with the actual mechanics, but rather with expectation management. I think people were expecting a land of milk and honey following scarcity, but in reality that was the original issue and there is no way ccp wants the game will return to that.
Excellent write up. People constantly forget that CCP blatantly pushed injectors and Rorquals HEAVILY to make sales goals. People spun up new industry accounts to meet the Rorqual and Excavator demand, and people spun up new industry accounts to process the raw ore being pulled. That’s a ton of investment into a single ship, essentially. With it being nerfed so heavily, and with jetcans being untouched (wanna bet legacy code prevents them from being enlarged?), you’re going to have to stay close to either the Rorqual itself, a freighter, or a DST/BR, in order to deal with the ore you’re going to be pulling in with the subcap fleet because of the comparatively tiny ore hold.
With compression being lossy and taking time, and with the cyno changes, and with how oppressive Kiki fleets are, and SS nerfs to resist mods, and waste on Excavators on top of all the nerfs to it’s yield, people are going to be weighing the risk/rewards, and it’s going to start going the other way for a Rorqual compared to an Orca. In order to try to keep a Rorqual alive, they’re looking at possibly training a Widow alt to sit on grid with a cyno in order to bring things in to save it, and even then a Kiki fleet will demolish it.
Hell, we’re already seeing that in Wormholes. I cannot tell you the last time I saw a Rorqual in a hole that was mining or boosting. Right now, they seem to only be used for dropping cap charges off for dreads and faxes, or rolling holes, with the occasional bait sitting on a structure.
It doesn’t. The size limit on jetcans is 100% arbitrary. Ever seen an abandoned structure blow up? You get a whole bunch of 27,000m3 cans… that contain capital ships. Supercapitals, even. The number is a lie.
That said, I really don’t think jetcan mining is the optimal solution in the current environment. Especially not in null. Too many people get too eager to drop MTUs to auto-collect the rat loot, and that screws jetcans. (Ever watched 2 MTUs 100km apart fight over a guy’s jetcan while his hauler alt tries to catch up to it? It’s hilarious.) Multiboxing remains optimal, with each player having a rorq on-grid along with their exhumers/barges. Sit on the rorq. Fill up the rorq. Then it goes to dump off the ore, either by using the cargo deposit, docking in a large enough structure, or jumping out and back.
The same principle holds w/Orcas in highsec: they become the premiere ore-shuttles. As long as you have boosts overlapping and on different timers, nothing should ever drop.
Now, that kinda sucks for the guy who wants to mine with one account… but that’s what the Mack/Retriever bring to the table: empty it out less often.
Now, obviously, I can’t speak to usage in j-space. The last time I lived in Anoikis, we built a Rorqual in a C4 (and oh my god what an effort it was to get all that crap into the hole), and it lived in a POS. When we left the hole, we left the Rorq in there, piloted, with a tower, fuel, and stront in the hold, along with another character in a scanning ship, in case we ever wanted to come back.
And six months later, both of them were in highsec, because nobody’d been logged in in that C4 in enough time that it triggered an automatic sweep-and-clear. Kinda hilarious to find the rorq we were sure could never leave j-space sitting in a station in the Forge.
Yes, when the patch that aims for focussing on a support role decreases the support capability compared to prepatch(orca: loss of highslot[s] and and significant loss in fitting room).
Yes, I’ve spent years skilling up rorq accounts to mine, £500-£600 in subs. I either want a respec so I can switch the accounts to other purposes or for the rorq to remain a mining ship.
Imagine if you bought Tesla and 3 years later the car was amended to no longer carry passengers and travel half the speed, you’d either want the change reverted or a refund!
Can totally see why people who didn’t spend the time/effort/money on one are happy for them to be nerfed, empathy isn’t really a quality you see much in online personas, more the reserve of real world interactions, but that’s a different topic entirely!
The commercial relationship between the subscribing customer and CCP is very much real world, along with the expectations, exchange of money for service/goods, and factors which go together to make continued/repeated commerce more or less likely.
Put another way, no matter how much CCP tries to hide behind EULA, etc, that says they may arbitrarily dick about with your enjoyment of the game, it is very much bad practice to alienate your customers; do it too many times, to too many people, and you go bust. There is no God given right to a customer base.
Having a Paying Customer is no God given Right sadly.
So one may write in the Eula that one can change everything but that doesn’t mean anyone has to pay for the subscription.
Therefore the market will regulate itself.
Anyhow personally thinking that i am not a Betatest Labrat and not willing to pay for early access methods that get applied to this 18 Year old Piece of Software.
You have both misconstrued my (admittedly terse) point. I apologise.
If you are disappointed in Real Life, it is usually because you have deeply invested in items/people whose loss may have tangible and/or emotional consequences causing actual distress.
A fuller quote from the comment-maker to whom I was responding goes like this:
It was the request for a ‘respec’ which triggered my reply, and then the demand for admission to the Game Design team’s executive branch.
This sort of consumer rights approach might work in a commercial setting outside the video game world - as indeed it should - but it is irrelevant in an environment where your rights, such as they are, begin and end with the Terms of Service - to which you agreed as a condition of access to the software.
Again, I apologise if I was unclear. If any of you disagree with me, that’s fine.
I’m not suggesting my consumer rights have been infringed, that would be utter nonsense, this is a game. I am pointing out that I have accounts dedicated to something that CCP have heavily neutered so the value for money to sub them is no longer there and I’m annoyed that a playstyle I enjoyed has been removed. I don’t think that’s unreasonable. CCP were selling a vision of the rorq 4-5 years ago which enticed me and others into striving for them, I wasted an awful lot of time and effort reaching my aspiration based on their prior design.
Look at other games, when something is nerfed you’ll typically receive a free respec to take the opportunity to adapt to other pursuits.
I meant that asking for the Rorqual to be changed in its role is understandable from your personal standpoint, but that design teams must consider the wider implications of such changes (not that CCP has always got that right…). I was being unnecessarily waspish about it though, so forget it.
Yes agreed, effectively that’s why I’m here providing feedback much like others, I’d like them to change approach with respect to the rorq more towards being better miners again, we can see from the recent resource graphs that for the last 18 months rorqs have been mining similar amounts to exhumers anyway, the problem appeared to be already fixed.
Others may want them to go further in the direction of making them purely a support ship. CCP can digest both perspectives and come up with a design. It’s all just feedback from different viewpoints.
They key difference for me however is CCP intentionally switched the rorq to a mining ship 4-5 years ago so this is entirely a mistake of their own doing. In many respects I wish they hadn’t made the changes 4-5 years ago as the accounts I now have dedicated to rorqs I could have committed to additional titan, dread, fax or subcap accounts etc and would likely still be subbed.
My point was not about consumer rights, but good commercial practice. CCP may be legally safe to make such large changes, thanks to caveats in EULA and TOS, but equally risk alienating paying customers. Which is probably not wise.
Case in point - I only (and only ever have) subscribe one Omega account, but I have several Alpha characters as well. I invested quite frequently in Alpha skill injectors to upskill said characters. This regularly gave CCP additional cash income from my purchase of Plex for said purpose.
Then, they suddenly changed the Alpha skill maxima and rolled back on specific skills, especially drones, for which I had specifically spent cash to buy Plex to buy Alpha injectors only two months before. The only way to get the use of the skills on which I had spent specific cash sums would now be to subscribe additional Omega accounts. Tres drole…
Legal? They would say so, given their EULA and TOS, and the contrary could only be proven in a court challenge, and would probably depend heavily on whether local consumer protection laws trumped small print in TOS.
Good customer relations? I have never bought Plex for Alpha injectors since, given that CCP demonstrated they could not be trusted to respect my investment on such matters. So, a significant means of getting extra cash from me, over and above my Omega subsciption, via micro transactions, is now denied them. Which given the supposed increased emphasis on micro transactions in their financial model might be considered… interesting… Their “balancing” decisions had a long term financial consequence for them.
I have certainly not rage quit over the nerfing of my beloved Orca as a solo mining platform, but I am watching them very carefully - basically, how much longer will I find the game worth the subscription?
In the last 18 months Rorquals mined so little because there was no point in using them as the available rocks were too small for Rorquals to be useful. Now that rocks are bigger again, an unchanged Rorqual would just start mining the same amounts as they did before scarcity. The Rorqual is not fixed and saying so just shows a lack of understanding of mechanics.
Changing the Rorqual into a tedious click-fest booster without appropriate mining capabilities to recover the cost of the ship is not the right solution either. The mining yield of the Rorqual was never the issue with the ship. The problem has always been that you can use more than 1 on a resource grid. Limit the number of active Indu Cores to 1 within 1000 km of an asteroid, bind all bonuses and features to the active indu core and the Rorqual would be fixed for real without being a pointless boosting click-tedium.
Moreover: No, you cannot use the “hard limits are not what EVE is about” argument. CCP is deadset on introducing hard limits in all sorts of places and activities. Here, this hard limit would be actually useful and reasonable, though.
This would obviously still obsolete lots of characters but those are characters that should have never existed in the first place. However, while these chars would also have to be converted into Hulk miners, they could at least still use 1 Rorqual that has the capability to recover its cost on its own without being a liability for the entire fleet. But instead of fixing the ship for real and avoiding the absolute negative experience for players to see the entire ship go to waste and become completely infeasible to justify on field, CCP goes the way of maximum frustration and minimal enjoyment.
Agree with a lot of your posts, but I don’t agree here. The fix was the separation of ores between regions. I think it’s ok that rorqs are used in null space, it’s no longer squeezing the high seccers as they mine entirely different products.
That’s besides the point when it comes to rock size, though. Even if all ore came from null, Rorquals would still be a bad choice if the rocks have 100 m³ ore each. That was what happened during scarcity and it’s the only reason why Rorqual mining numbers went down the drain.
CCP can code anything to be force-put into a can much smaller than what it’s designed for. I wouldn’t be surprised if the game has to spawn an invisible observer to dev-command cans like that.
J space ore anoms aren’t eve worth logging in to set a cloaky trap in. Moons aren’t any better really.
