EVE General Discussion

except the mackinaw does the job well enough that the skiff barely sees any practical use in high sec.

completely agree.
the skiff is designed for a niche that simply doesn't exist.

looking at the recent devblog, the only use the skiff sees is mercoxit mining as it retains fittings from a previous incarnation of the game which illustrates nothing more than "swapping ship and losing a little bit of yield for 1 asteroid per grav site is less inconvenient than refitting the ship i actually want to mine in"

Anyway all boils to WHY did CCP nerf mining ships suicide ganking?


In the "old times" you had the same amount of miners going around with no tank and others going around with a tank.

Mining ships were gankable by the guy who could field a cruiser and later 2 destroyers.

All were more or less happy, the random ganker killed the random miner.

Once a year there'd be Hulkageddon and more miners would die and CCP (and not only them) would highlight it as a Good Thing and be done with it.


Then something happened. Organized, long lasting, large scale ganking.
From casual ganker killing the occasional 2-3 miners a day and having to deal with sec status dropping we went to:

- professional and efficient ganking, basically scorched earth approach. Competent Concord corraling away, efficient timers usage. An industry.

- sponsored refund for the ship losses.

- big wallets ganking corps fielding Orcas and quick replacement ships in order to circumvent -10 penalties and the reship logistics and related downtimes that affected the casual gankers.

- never ending duration for the Hulkageddon, which means no change to the scorched earth for the foreseable future.

- sponsored by richest null sec alliances which means never ending funds. Plus it meant a positive feedback mechanism, where the more the kills the more the demand for the materials exactly produced by those alliances.

- concurrent ideological campaigns to single out and blame miners portrayed basically as dimwits only good for gassing (I still recall this unlucky mention, as my relatives were put in such camps and it REALLY offended me).

- mined materials prices rising by 400% in 2 months as a consequence, with immediate consequences on the game economy.


ANY software company seeing this behavior in a game would quickly terminate it, and this is what CCP has done.

This is not an EvE specific event, many PvP games had mass players farming nerfed once it surges to heavy duty industry status.



How to nerf it? Not easy at all. Keeping suicide ganking profitable is a typical case of "price does not justify super powers" listed by Tippia so many times.

In fact, as long as it's profitable, raising the bar only helps taking out casual gankers. Industry gankers can potentially field endless concurrent ships so in the end they'd just bring double, triple the numbers in order to still make a profit.

By making it not profitable, even an endless amount of firepower is not going to help so it's useless to field it.

And thus the unprofitability has been put in place. To keep too overpowering huge alliances from perma farming people.


This is also related to boomerang and freighters ganking. As long as it's under control, nothing will be done and I sincerely hope CCP won't buff anything.
But as seen for boomerang, those practicing it could not control themselves, they brought it to scorched earth industry status and got it neutered.

I suggest those killing freighters to control themselves else if once again they make scorched earth they WILL be nerfed.

I know there are many ways to defend from things blah blah but CCP looks at statistics. If too many die per moving averaged unit of time they engage the nerf hammer.

Why should you get the bonus from a Skill which you no longer have trained?

no idea, because i just opened the show info window on my mack, and mining barge V is there as a ship requirement.

rubyporto is like meth.
not even once.

Oh hey, I thought Barge was a nested pre-req. Learn something new every day.

Still, Exhumers never had T2 resists. The bonus was just changed from being included in the base stats to being applied properly as a bonus.

no it's one of those secondary requirements, it requires mining barges V AND exhumers at whatever level..

Working as designed.

Carebears are a source of great revenue to CCP, and therefore, must be kept happy. They are not to be easy targets of opportunity for people that suck so badly at PVP that they have to get EPEEEN from attacking miners instead of fighting other players that are ready and looking for a fight.

Interesting. I was unaware of that.