Player Features and Ideas Discussion

if some one hot drops your mining op every thing that isn't a procurer will be a wreck before you can fend them off, i'll wager.

however in terms of npc rats with every ship having a 25-50m3 drone bay, the swarm of drones will deal with rats easily enough.

let's face it though, an orca will always haul ore faster than a mackinaw and the hulk is still going to be the daddy of mining yield. i highly doubt mining op fleet composition will change in any way what so ever. at least in null sec operations.

New FOTM in terms of baitship ?

Cost of these new ships will be a key consideration as to how reasonable changes are. For instance I would expect Hulk and Covetor to be the low cost throw away ships in future. Partially because of external support and partially due to high loss rate. I assume one shot from destroyer or even top T1 frigate fits is still your design goal. And honestly fleets can usually only threaten revenge in low or high sec and even much of the time in null.

I mean be real...fleet protection is a usually bogus term outside of null sec. Fleet protection only applies if you you can blockade access to the system or surround your miners in warp bubbles. Once a smart ganker is in system he effectively has your barges dead once they are BMed. BM can be 3rd party, stealth scouting, combat probes, or a quick flyby before final attack run. You really can't stop BM process either if they are smart and you are not going to shutdown at every blip on scope. You can kill him afterward but you can seldom stop the barge kill in high or low sec without lots of luck or bad thinking on his part.

So price redesigned Hulks and Covetors accordingly. And if you really don't want cheap Hulks wandering about alone and depending on getting overlooked...as is already the case... try lowering that cargo space to 1.5 cycles where they need haulers/Orcas to avoid jetcanning or frequent trips to station.

i have to say a lot of people are still missing the whole issue the hulk will no longer be the premier mining ship that role will now be the rets job with its lets face it hugh ore bay and no possible battleship standard base ehp itll be able to take a licking and keep on ticking. were the ret use to be mainly used in fleets for low sp player it will now be the only solo miner you will see out there and the hulks role will now have to be in a fleet i like it.

Also anoher point you all seem to be missing is the defecite in ore per cycle wont be as lacking as the ret will come closer to its hulk and cov counterpart as ccp did state in the dev blog they wanted to redress this so dont be suprised if the rets ore per cycle wont come to about half a strips close to a hulk or a cov.


TBH i also think what the above poster is saying even though ive be laughed at by guildies i also expect the hulkto drop to around 100m if not a lil lower and for ret prices to jump to around what a hulk is now well maybe not that much but to actualy cost more than a hulk.
also see a dramatic jump in the price of a proc due to its ehp going to be stupid.

Tiericide is all well and good. I wholeheartedly support the idea of making all ships useful - if a design was obsolete, it would be retired, not left floating around for uneducated people to use.

These changes raise a couple of red flags with my brain:

First off - I strongly dislike the idea of completely eliminating non ORE Syndicate based mining vessels. I know it's fluff, but it's ridiculous to think that all of the dozens of empire space shipbuilding corporations would simply decide to abandon the mining vessel market entirely because ORE happens to have them cornered. Rather than one ORE frigate being offered, I would much prefer to see four empire sourced frigates made to fill the same newbie / cheap miner role - each with its own set of slightly different, racially appropriate bonuses. This dependence on ORE Syndicate vessels essentially makes mining the only profession in the game with absolutely no racial ship variety or requirement to train different racial skills for different sets of bonuses.

Secondly - I welcome the idea of a larger, specialized ore bay. Current bays are a bit small for their physical size. I think it's a mistake to make these ore bays THAT big. Not having hauling support is the drawback of solo mining. Mine as a group, or risk your ore - that's the name of the game. That drawback is an essential component of mining dynamics as they stand. These bays should never exceed at most about half a jetcan.

Third - Making smaller vessels have higher capacity than larger ones is counterintuitive and immersively jarring. Why would a Retriever have more cargo room than a Covetor for any logical reason? It wouldn't. It's a heavy handed gameplay mechanic change with no basis in logic. Yes, I know the argument I will hear - it's a game, it doesn't matter. Well, to some it does matter and we have subscription money too. I've seen a lot of changes recently (renaming for example) that removed some of that atmosphere and replaced it with nothing, but they didn't violate common sense. This idea does.

If you want to rebalance mining barges to make them all useful, do it in a way that makes SENSE. For example, instead of making the smallest barge have ridiculous physical tank for no apparent reason, how about giving it signature radius bonuses , extra warp strength, or interceptor like bonuses to afterburners? Instead of making the middle sized vessel have the highest cargo for no reason, how about giving it the ability to launch passworded 10,000m3 jetcans, which can only hold ore?

Biggest issue I see is the lack of a low skill mining frigate. If ccp want to encourage would be miners to try it out, you cant do that by having the first ship as a specialized skill dependent frigate.

No racial mining frig or cruiser = no miners mining while training for specialized mining ships.

Someone cried about how this will make mining more solo and it destroying the core of what is an MMO, yeah because solo ganking is so in line with an MMO :)

I don't see this revitalizing low sec mining. If anything it will maintain the status quo even more. High sec is now safer for afk miners. I think the big ore bay and the big tank will be enough to encourage miners to step down a notch from the hulk...especially since they are making non-hulk yields be closer to what the hulk can do.

Meanwhile, anyone who can do organized mining ops will stick to hulks and mine where it is most profitable.

That said, depending on the exact specifics of the new ships, there *may* be a use for low sec mining.