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The POTENTIAL is there, but, given current citadel tactics everybody is simply going to put these to down time for vulnerability and at best you'll be ganking miners while its active.

The structure itself will end up entirely immune, which sucks because like or not hitting a moon miners is a fairly huge part in nullsec warfare, its one of those things that allow smaller entities to harass larger entities in a meaningful way, not just 'lol ganked ur hulk'

Cumbersome M3 would be awesome if resources were distributed across all of New Eden, but the way it is now, it has to go to Jita... or at least you do to get the missing mats from any t2/reaction chain.

Then you're talking about full chain production in nul and low, some of which is done, but is not really the way it works atm.

I like the suggestion some have made that physically mining the moons w a mining fleet could speed up or increase yield, but that passive recovery continues in some form.

It depends what the mysterious goal is. If it's to eliminate passive income, I guess we'll see how many people want to pay for a game where u just sit there staring at a rock. Seems like an uphill climb for a recruiter imho.. lol.

If the goal is to encourage non-sov pvp and to force engagements, I've said, and have seen others say, why not just make the fracked chunk destroyable or create a mechanic where chunks can be stolen and set beside your cit on a blank moon that will refine it.

Then you have pvp engagements. My fleet is here to defend. Yours is coming to steal. Let's go. Instead of having to grind-mine, burn out of a bubble in a miner, warp to cit, reship, come back and fight. Or, we see a "stealing fleet" in the area in intel. Can we form up in time to stop you, or do you come destroy our chunk or steal a lot of it because we're not prepared.

Just the same mechanic is boring. You're entosising = your helpless, they come to kill helpless, maybe fight ensues.
You're mining with rorq mod active = helpless, they come to kill, maybe fight ensues
You're ratting in a slow align carrier or w bastion active = (close to) helpless, they come to kill, maybe fight ensues
You're mining your moon field at a set location and time w the bulk of your alliance forced into barges and exhumers = comparatively helpless until you reship

Let's skip the foreplay and get to the fight

I think many doomsayers are being rather short sighted.

Ninja Mining/Siphoning:

You can't siphon from a tower now without letting the owner know who you are--the siphon has your name on it. Thus, when people siphon from a moon in nullsec (keep in mind that no one actually does this because we're all honest and upstanding citizens of the various factions and would never wish to steal resources from our neighbors), one uses a neutral alt so that the illicit activities do not impact the faction standings.

The same will be true for Ninja Mining under the CCP proposed system: You ninja mine moon goo with a neutral alt. If someone is there manning the tower, they shoot you. Just like if someone today is watching the tower and they see your siphon... Well, they take the goo out and blow it up.

The change is what you use to siphon. In the new system, you siphon with a ninja minng fleet probably composed of Prospects or perhaps some new ninja mining ship CCP comes up with that doesn't have a transponder and doesn't identify itself to the structure.

Passive/Active Mining:

The key piece that a lot of people are missing is that mining ships need to be used to gather goo under the new system. This means that Moon Goo becomes intertwined with Ice and Minerals as there are still the same number of miner labor hours in the population. If Goo collection starts taking half of your mining hours whereas before you split it between Ice and Minerals, and mineral production takes a bath with only 10% of your time, well then you produce fewer minerals in your population and they become more scarce--the price goes up and the price of goo comes down because everyone invested their work hours in goo.

Passive mining presently allows the large nullsec blocs to set up giant moon fields that make up some fraction of their income. Some large blocs may not use moon goo extensively for funding, but some do. Adding a labor component forces them to more directly administer their moon goo production. Renting a moon becomes harder because of ninja mining and it forces the bloc to have ships or personnel in the area to chase off ninja miners when the goo fields spawn.

Increasing the cost of goo towers also means there will be less of them and likely more diversity of minerals on moons to make mining them worthwhile. It is likely that instead of having single, rare moons that spawn R64/32 materials, that the extracted moon goo ore fields will simply feature rare asteroids or less rare asteroids that feature small or trace amounts of valuable minerals or a combination thereof.

The present labor cost of moon goo towers is not 0. People have been saying that it's "passive income", but as someone who has run towers before, this is far from the case. Running a tower requires a lot of time and they're not very forgiving when you want to be lazy--your silos fill up and goo is lost and fuel is still consumed, or worse, you run out of fuel and the stick goes dead leaving all your stuff open to looters. Fuel costs fluctuate and sometimes, espcecially in certain areas, fuel becomes difficult to access. Large towers require immense amounts of fuel and are almost required to do certain refining processes. They have to be maintained for a few hours per week to manage the fueling, extraction, and configuration of your reactions.

The towers that come close to "passive income" are really the R64s. You don't need reactions, just a tower and a periodic hauler to go and fetch the goo and fuel the POS. Only a select few large bullies typically have passive income at this level. Small corporations can't protect an R64 from a large bloc and it's difficult if not impossible to take a POS away from a bloc with supers and renters and pets to protect its interests.


If your reaction has non-local inputs, you have to buy those and ferry them usually from Jita out to the tower to complete your outputs. Using a Jump Freighter is the most efficient way to keep the tower set up, but flying jump freighters around costs fuel, too, and requires a lot of movement of cynos and in regions where you don't have a safe structure, you have to jump to space where you are vulnerable adding risk to labor.

Low sec Opportunities:


As I mentioned, instead of using haulers to move moon goo around, you now will use a miner. Obviously since you're sitting at a structure with infinite storage, you can just dump the mined goo into the extremely nearby structure and then probably compress it making it way easier to transport to hi sec or you can refine and react it just like you used to without having to set up elaborate Rube Goldberg machines by positioning little bits and bobs in a space bubble.

It's not like you were just sitting in your PvP ship watching your bank balance roll up... Someone was transporting and selling all of that stuff between all of those towers likely in a Deep Space Transport which is a giant pain in the ass. Now you don't have those haulers running around. You have a Miasmos picking minerals out of cans floating in space and occasionally depositing them in a structure within 350km instead of a station 8 jumps out.

Plus, now most or all of your goo is coming from just a few moons (one for smaller groups) instead of 20-50 moons scattered all over a region.

I'll bet that a group who's sitting high on the hog feeding off of a nice juicy R64 with no reactions to speak of feels a bit dejected, but you probably should... The balance of moon income is likely to spread out a bit more.

And if you still say that your hauler guy doesn't like mining, well, that's fine, too. Contract it out and then sit in your PvP ships while you hunt incoming poachers. Nothing attracts PvP like a defenseless mining fleet.

That is what I meant to get across.

Thanks

The structure will end up immune? I am pretty sure they'll have vulnerability timers, just like other Upwell structures.

"At an inconvenient time for you" isn't the same as "immune."

The chances of this being the case are pretty slim. Why revamp the rorq at all if you don't let it be eligible for the new shiny?

Heartwarming to see that the mega-alliances still care for the little guy and are not just arguing for their self-interest.

1. Moon Mining is not passive income. Whoever says that must have a grave misconception of what it means to be passive. Doing a lot of hauling (fuel, goo to market) for some 200M profit per month on a regular R16 moon is not passive by any means. You are probably putting equally or more active time in that, than AFK mining in Null or HighSec for 200M.

2. The current system needs a change, but not because it was passive. It needs a change because it is too easy for the already rich and powerful to just sit on the same moons and almost impossible for any newer guys to enter this activity in EVE without being completely obliterated or forced into becoming the slave of some shitlord.

3. So many people are talking about the New Player Experience and they forget that it doesn't end with a set of missions after a day or two. The actual experience for many New Players is that EVE is in too many ways far too dominated by some established guys and that CCP provides game mechanics that support such lazy-ass dominance rather than making it uncertain for everyone and favoring the active and inventive. Moon Mining is currently one of such mechanics and from what I read so far about the new mechanics this will not change. The only way I could see a change to the better was if the moons holding minerals would constantly change and thereby really forcing people into a more active playstyle.

4. Now someone might argue: "EVE shouldn't feel safe", but this is exactly the phrase you will hear from people who already achieved relative safety: all their possible losses will be replaced within the hour and they don't know the feeling of uncertainty anymore. Make EVE unsafe again, for everyone, no matter how big their blop, no matter how much ISK they already have. That would be a good goal, that would provide for a world which is open enough for more New Players to stay around, because it doesn't have the smell of your grand-fathers old socks.

The income is about as passive as it gets. If you have even a glimmer of ability to optimize things, you can avoid touching a moon miner for a month or more. The size of the income so generated doesn't make the income less passive. Nice try cherry picking a dumb example, by the way.

Again, you're cherry picking a low-value example to try and pretend like moon mining isn't passive. The passive or active nature of income is completely unrelated to the magnitude of income so generated.