EVE General Discussion

of course people mine outside of high sec, where you are dead if you get tackled regardless of tank.
also rats outside of high sec are arguably more isk/hour than the mining itself is.

no, this is a thread about the fact that the mining barge balance was ******* awful and mining barges need another look. it's mostly awful due to the fact that the base ehp on the mack/hulk make the skiff obsolete and the mack having more tank than the hulk means it's stats are not balanced in comparison to the two other exhumers.

did you actually read the post or just the corp tag associated with the OP?

They can fight back. A flight of ECM drones are very effective and you are unprofitable to gank in a hulk once you pass 16k on a buffer tank. All of the exhumers were able to make themselfs safe from for profit ganking pre buff.

The irony of a ganking corp having far better knolage of how barges work than the miners is not lost on me

Those changes I suggested will bring about a predator-prey interaction as ganking will be profitable depending on the miners fitting. As can be seen from the past most miners will fit for max yield and cargo at the expense of everything else. This would bring about the possibility of a predator-prey relationship between the gankers and miners. Miners can choose to remove themselves from this relationship by going with a tanked skiff yet they won't be capable of AFKing as the hold will be to small. Active miners would prefer the hulk which will be hard to gank because they are at the keyboard and capable of warping away, they will still be somewhat a part of the relationship because of individual factors. While the bulk of the relationship are the AFK-miners.

It's almost exactly the same thing I've been calling for.



So why should they be safe from significant threats while doing so?



I suspect that, after some initial amount of ganking you'd end up with miners using the large tank/large hold combination. That's what the application of your first and second laws suggest, at least (Large tank+Large hold=Safe AFK).

Why should miners who make no effort to keep themselves safe (AFK), and sacrifice nothing significant (your second law suggests that yield is not significant to them) to keep themselves safe, be safe from significant threats?

I meant within a class (Exhumer v Exhumer, Barge v Barge, nor Exhumer v Barge).

VV was suggesting something like being able to have a Skiff tank with a Mack cargo at the cost of a lower yield (I assume still higher than a Ret's). I'm pretty sure that would come out on top for most miners.

I like the trend towards retrievers. Miners shipping down to limit their exposure to risk. It's almost like one of the suggestions I spent most of HAG suggesting to them (oh, it's exactly one of those suggestions). I fly T1 cruisers all the time. They allow me to limit my exposure.

It also makes room for people who are willing to put more effort/risk exposure into mining to make more money. If the mining income standard becomes the Retriever's income, then the Skiff pilot makes relatively more, and the Hulk pilot even more to compensate for the increased risk exposure/effort they experience.

i don't even see it as an issue.
if you invest the extra time to skill exhumers to V, you get the 5% yield bonus. you still gain something. the issue secondary to all of this is; you don't gain anything from that 5% in high sec, really. asteroids pop too quickly and if you're afk mining you sure as **** ain't short cycling asteroids using a survey scanner (not to mention you can't fit a survey scanner on a max yield retriever without either mining upgrades V (but who trains that?) or a cpu rig).

however when it comes to ganking, isk tanking seems to be one of the best ways to tank your ship, imo.

i don't only consider high sec; that's why i don't consider it a problem. i simply consider it emergent gameplay or whatever.
if people in high sec want to isk tank (and they do, look at the proportion of high sec ore mined by a retriever) then let them. i think it's interesting that even in light of huge ehp buffs and things like that, people are looking at the situation and going "but, i don't need to look at my tank in terms of ehp, i need to look at it in terms of what i gain in isk/hour vs what i lose when my ship goes pop".

if they don't want isk tanking to be a thing, then they need to honestly look at widening the gap between exhumers and barges to justify the price tag of an exhumer. currently the only ship that seems to be doing this is the hulk, and that's because the ores that are being mined by the hulk are null sec ores where tank and ore bay are irrelevant and people have the tools to avoid losses entirely meaning you simply stack up yield and make the isk/hour as high as you can get it.

however due to the nature of high sec, no intel channels, small asteroids, etc it's an inevitable fact that it's only a matter of time before you get ganked and the longer you can string that out for the more the favour tips towards a retriever than a procurer/skiff and with the small and wasted yield bonus on the mackinaw (due to the small asteroids and nobody short cycling due to the whole afk mining malarky) why would you sit in a 170m isk pinata when you can sit in a 30m isk pinata for the same reward?

i think that, after all that has been said here, any one who disagrees that the mining ships need another balance pass are kidding themselves. i also hope that CCP are reading this thread.
i know i can be a troll sometimes, and i know i'm hardly a beacon of enlightenment. but damnit if there's one thing in this game i give a rats ass about, it's mining.

Yeah you have no proof that its "super-terribad" and I avoided putting specific numbers for a reason, you literally posted "its bad because I said so." Remember I advocated for appropriate fitting resources as well, you seem to conveniently ignore that. I have no intention of rolling back the resists because a T2 ship should have T2 resists I assume that idea is respected when rebalancing them. There is no "poisoned bait" here, if anything the "poisoned bait" was in the old revamp which made everything but the retriever/mackinaw obsolete.

The Hulk, Mack, and Skiff never had T2 resists. It had and still has a resist bonus based on the Mining Barge skill. For a long time, instead of applying that bonus, their base stats simply included that resist bonus in them on the assumption that everyone flying one has Mining Barge 5. The only people whose resists changed were people flying Exhumers with Mining Barge 4.

The Mackinaw is not meant to be the ship to use if you're concerned about being ganked. That's the job of the Skiff.