EVE General Discussion

Right no you dont need to fit any tank at all to be unprofitable to gank in a mack. Where is the tradeoff again?

They said you shouldn't be able to gank the bare hull for profit. This is the second time I have had to tell you this.

Also if there is no profit to be made then people will not gank them.

At the base level. None of us are denying the fact that suicide ganking a completely unfitted Hulk with a Catalyst & profiting from it was a little silly, but that doesn't change the fact that many miners made themselves profitable to gank regardless by either not fitting a tank, or putting deadspace shield booster on them. CCP eventually acknowledged that miners in general were too greedy to fit a tank & gave them exactly what they wanted. They now literally have their cake & eat it too.

Mining ship's three traits are cargo hold, yield, and tank. The mining ship can give up tank to get better yield, like most miners were doing prebuff. Now though with the EHP buff I agree with you, ore bay's can't be messed with and they already come intrinsically tanked. So the EHP buffs for the mack/hulk (to a lesser degree the T1 variants of those) need to be rolled back, yields need to be adjusted and the ore bay's need to be expandable. This would allow you to make trade-offs again.

I agree and I think by addressing this they can add more possibilities for mining specialization. If you have three ships for three different purposes and three trade-offs that can be made you get far more possibilities than if you have three ships for three different purposes and one fit for no trade-offs. (9 versus 3)



You hit exactly on the issue at hand here and CCP will fix it if enough people raise the issue. Like that one dude said I'd prefer CCP give these things a thorough work through and put out a good polished fix instead of band-aids. I assume this exhumer "rebalance" was a band-aid.



If they do the rebalance right their won't be a new "king miner." There will most certainly be a best fit for a certain activity but it won't be the mackinaw for everything. I don't like to reduce diversity so I think scrapping two ships is a bad idea but you can see my idea for fixing the mining ships in the OP. We definitely know that the "rebalance" destroyed miner diversity.

I'll toss you a bone here and reconsider whether that post was trolling:





I quoted all of the major post CCP Greyscale made so I feel that the context was not required as it is in the plain text. CCP Greyscale is clearly speaking about fitting design and later he does get into module design. My argument is that CCP Ytterbium's "rebalance" of mining ships has completely eliminated the trade-offs for mining ships and I have posted a solution in the OP.

Initially I was referring to when RubyPorto said (cut and paste):

"CCP Greyscale's vision of how ships should be balanced (see the OP)"

when your original post was linked to the module thread. Since many people do not jump to other threads, much less read the whole thread and just the most current posts before they just spew their opinion on the current matter, perhaps I worded it wrong, but I was stating that CCP Greyscale was talking about a module change and not a ship alteration. I was not directing this statement at you La Nariz but at others, including RubyPorto, since yes, it could be reasoned that CCP Greyscale would feel very similar about fitting modules with their pros and cons compared to overall ship fitting designs with their pros and cons. But your original link was to CCP Greyscale talking about a module change whereas RubyPorto was stating the above quote. A good debate and discussion should not be undermined what may be considered a twist of schematics by those that do not agree.

But for the record, I feel the Mack is quite overpowered. My mining friend, after reading from your corporation on how to survive Hulkaggeddon and proceeded to gear and skill for survival, felt very slighted by CCP when they made such a drastic change. Still will take out that "brick Hulk" every now and then, but gets annoyed by how easy it has become for others.

And Kate Stark offered some good insight that I agree with.

I'm sure there's another NPC corp alt out there who will lose all faith in [GEWNS] after seeing this post.

And the next one after that.

And the one after that too.


Lose ALL the faiths.

I did not state any hard numbers because I expect CCP to do the testing/balancing so it all becomes a working product for the rest of us. CCP Fozzie has done a great job balancing combat ships so far and I'm pretty sure he can handle mining ship balance regarding slots/pg/cpu. I agree that none of those should be done on their own, they all need to happen at once. The gas mining thing is to add more specialization right now there is only specialization for ice and ore but not gas. It would allow more trade-offs and more diversification for mining ships.

My input as a miner & indy pilot:


All politics aside, the Goon and a few other posters are right; the current mining ship stats need to be re-aligned. The Mack is too close to a Hulk in yield, has a bit too much 'free' tank and the Skiff now has little purpose.

To some extent, I liked the pre patch set-up, using these ships in both their original roles and in their intended roles. However, I strongly believe that having the addition of the Venture (the new mining frigate) to the mix, could set the stage for a more permanent solution.

Now that we have a mining frigate, it's time to create a mining cruiser and eventually a mining BC- these are your new hisec mining ships. Note: the new BC would be designed for either heavy ore mining and ice harvesting, and the new cruiser for gas or ore. We then add a new gas harvesting (GH) rig, or give the new cruiser a GH cycle bonus.

All T-1 Barges & and Exhumers would be removed by ORE as outdated designs. All current T-2 Barges & Exhumers would either be moved to WH, LS, or Null or would have no applicable bonuses in hisec usage, thus putting the Skiff back into it's Mercoxit role. The Orca would remain a key industrial, mining, and/or support platform across all fields, although, new features and a more modern design could be added. Implant and boost bonuses could remain relatively unchanges, with perhaps some minor skill additions or changes.

This appraoch would allow several important things to happen:


1. Re-alignment of the supply, demand, and price of common ores, ice, and gasses and perhaps allow the addition of new materials and/or technologies.
2. Simplify and streamline the current mining ship roles, while adding new and possibly exciting features.
3. Give players a better reason to 'want' to leave hisec simply because the Exhumer class 'will' be king outside of hisec.
4. Would create a new middle ground between hisec safety & pirating, as well as allow CCP to develope new hazzards to or isk sinks for the hisec mining profession that are not directly 'regulated' by special interest groups.

Lastly, the threat and thought of being ganked (risk vs reward) isn't always a pleasant one, but it serves a very important purpose- it keeps players moving around within the confines of the EVE universe. But with the release of that mining patch, there appears too be too many players mining and settling within hisec systems that rarely ever had more than 10-15 people in them at a time.This could mean one or more of the following: 1. there has been an incredible gain in new players to the game. 2. there has been a large shift from one or more empires to one or more empires.3. there has been a huge shift from low or nullsec to hisec.

Regardless of how you look at it, my point is that the physical confines of the EVE universe isn't getting any larger and this is a huge problem for those of us who play solo, want to relax by taking a few loads of ore in, or those who simply want to do their own thing in the relative safety of hisec. It is definately affecting the availability of resources, has to be influencing the markets, and can't necessarily be a good thing for isk to plex sales. These things will be and are stressing out a lot of dedicated and veteran players who at some point, may just decide that EVE no longer offers them what it is they want from a game.