Player Features and Ideas Discussion

It still locks them out of serious use outside of high sec.

Null belt rats often spawn double BS, with support boats. Exhumers don't tank that kind of dps and still make sense as a play choice above ratting or operating in less dangerous areas.

Interesting discussion gentleman. I just wanted to say I agree with Nikk Narrel and I'm wondering what game some of you are playing.

I mine in wormholes With a friend or solo we will scan down the entrance, if unoccupied, kill sleepers and then mine with Ventures. Where is the support fleet in this scenario??

Why do I not use a mining barge? Because to do so would be suicide. Yes we have done so but the align time on the barge almost guarantees that you will die if someone comes. We just happen to be careful, lucky and constantly on D-scan. The Venture is considerably more survivable than any barge and fun to play. If I take a barge into a wormhole, I fully expect to lose it.

If a miner were going in with a fleet escort, it would take a fleet to destroy him so I don't understand why some of you bring it up. If I did have such a fleet I would absolutely take a Charon or Hulk in there as the risk to me is then negligible. In the game that I play, fleets don't come after me but rather individual players hunting for ships weaker than their own. Miners are absolutely fair game. I get my thrill staring at my ship go around a rock and hitting D-Scan constantly. They get theirs scanning me down and coming in guns blazing.

No soloist miner should expect to he ever able to carry out a large scale mining operation alone. Nor should their ships be ungankable. To my mind that would introduce a serious game imbalance and not be fair to the pirates. That being said however, if I'm going to use the ship, it has to give me a decent chance of surviving/escaping the gank. If it offers none then the hours I have spent finding my rare WH and ore anomoly are wasted. No fun for me.

At this point in time the Venture offers the highest chance of success and some reward for my time. The barges are almost certain death. The key thing the Venture has is its quick align time and +2 Warp stab bonus. The rest is gravy. If the Procurer/Skiff had the same, I'd immediately abandon the Venture in favor of one of those ships.

Right now the Procurer to me was just a stepping stone mining barge I used before I could afford to buy a better one.

I enjoy mining. I have had occasion to observe a few details.

Two exhumers, each with 5 "Vespa II" drones, can handle a lot, but occasionally a double BS rat spawn can overwhelm defenses.

As far as PvP goes, no. Only in high sec are current exhumers possible to stand their ground, while Concord does the shooting.

Interesting question Luc Chastot. I'm not sure what a 'normal' WH fit Venture is. I use 2 x meta 4 T1 miners, a cloak for my high slots, mid is a MWD, rock scanner and med shield extender. My low is a WCS. Rigs are Polycarbon Engine Housing, and 2 x small mining drone augmentors. All these are T1. I also have 2 x mining drones. My general philosophy is 'go cheap so when it blows up it will bother you less'...

I also have the BPO for the Venture so I basically have an unlimited supply. My general goal is to be over my target rock and off of it within 10-12 minutes. The longer you are in WH space, the odds of you getting spotted increase. So get the payload and leave immediately... Your only defense is to get away quickly.

The are quite a few threads on these boards and in other sites about mining yields which are very comprehensive. You definitely should look them up. Just based on what I have read and going on memory the Procurer's strip miner + bonus will beat the twin mining lasers on the Venture. Thing is that the Procurer has a 12,000 m cubed ore bay vs the Venture's 5,000. From my point of view in the WH it's good in that I have to make fewer trips than I would in the Venture. Its bad because I have to spend longer over target and that increases my risk. The Procurer is unusable though because of its long align time... you have to be very on-the-ball to get away!

Please note that solo mining in low or null is not at all the same as WH mining. Rats respawn at a completely different rate so I can jump into the WH in a completely unarmed ship and mine in an ore anomoly without worrying about NPC spawns AFTER the sleepers have been taken out.

The reason why I prefer WH over low/null is twofold. A long while ago, I checked the belts in low sec and found them to be not much better than the ores I found in high sec. (This could have changed). If you need large volumes of readily obtainable high-sec ores its infinitely better to mine them there. I find the risk factor in low/null is of an order of magnitude higher than the WH and the rewards, at least in low-sec, are somewhat paltry/non-existant.

Higher risk because in low/null anyone scanning can spot you on D-Scan or Overview who enters the system. To get me in the WH the hunter has to want to be in the wormhole and has to go an extra step to find me. To make matters worse is the issue you bring up with the Rats... they respawn rather frequently and with considerable firepower. No Venture's two drones will be able to do much against battlehips sized Rats.

Would I risk a stab at mining again solo in low or null sec? Yes I would but the reward would have to be there in the form of some nice rock. Second I would have to have a ship that could beat off the respawning NPC rats and give me a reasonable chance to get away from player pirates.. and as far as I can tell the only one that would come close would be the skiff.

And here is the last criteria... if I am going to do this I would want to do it in a ship that was expendable. The skiff most certainly is not... I just checked Eve Central and I can see it selling in Jita for ~ 154 mil ISK. (Base hull, no fits). Venture hull ~ 400,000 ISK. Or in other words, strictly in terms of cost, I'd have to lose 385 Ventures to be cost-equivalent to losing one Skiff.

So here is my challenge to ORE. Design us a cruiser class mining ship. Think of it as an expanded Venture so keep the +2 stab bonus and give me a good align time. Also...

1. It has to be able to fight off belt rats.
2. Ore hold somewhere between a Venture and a Skiff.
3. I have to be able to have a decent chance of running from players.
4. It has to be cheap. ie: T1. If I am going to go belt diving in low/null I'm definitely going to be going through quite a few.

Hi Nikk, I totally agree with you (again).

I'm wondering though if it is not a bad thing. The game, by design, is tilted towards group play. So mining in low/null sec with exhumers can only be done in an appropriate group. The risks/rewards are shared among its members and that is the way the devs have designed it. Soloing a mining barge can only be successful in high-sec by design.

In a PvP game, anyone who is going to fly an Industrial or Mining vessel will expose themselves to far more risk than those who fly exclusively combat vessels. Low/null sec PvPing in an unarmed ship had better have a decent reward for the risk it entails since most of us don't have an unlimited supply of them and constantly waking up in the clone vat gets boring.

You think we would be better appreciated. We also provide a valuable public service to the Eve Community by being low-end-of-the-food-chain bait to those players who are looking for easy targets that don't shoot back. If it weren't for us the pirates would get very, very bored and probably quit for lack of targets. Fundamentally, solo miners provide other players with kill mails and pumped up kill stats!! If it weren't for us, there would be no James315, no minerbumping, no high-sec suicide ganking miners...

You'd think the devs would recogonize the value-add that we bring and actually provide us with better tools and rewards that would entice us to go further than W-space or high sec... but sadly they don't.

Bottom line is that if you choose to play the game a certain way then parts of the game will be out-of-bounds to you.

I see them all the time. Saved a few miners in our system because they were in a Procurer.

And been baited by some while they were mining.

They work.

125 bandwitch on t1 mining barage ? Sure nothing wrong with better bandwitch than prophecy or myrmidon battlecruisers , dedicated drone platforms i may add. Go on ...

You have two categories under consideration, for your general idea here:

People willing to use these ships and people unwilling to use these ships.

The first group won't get smaller unless something happens to make the ship less playable.

The second group won't get bigger unless something happens to make the ship MORE playable.

The dynamic in high sec already defines these ships as having desirable qualities.
What can be done to make them desirable outside of high sec?

Keep in mind, with local intel making avoidance a given, they need to be more than just survivable. All exhumers have this currently.