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1. No need (or point) to ruin your Hulk with cargo expanders → more reason to tank → easier to protect.
2. No need to use the Hulk to begin with, but rather go for one of the larger-tank/larger-cargo models → easier to survive.
3. Less loot → more expensive ganks → easier to become a worthless target.
4. More utility in cheaper ships → more expensive ganks and cheaper losses → easier to become a worthless target and easier to just write of any incidental loss.

Good news: you never had to run from a lone destroyer to begin with, and there's even less need to do so after this change. If you had to run before, it's because you broke your Hulk, not because the game is broken. With this change, the Hulk (which can already withstand multiple destroyers and even a tier-3 BC or two) will be the weakest ship in the fleet. If you cannot wrap your head around how much this has improved your ability to protect yourself, then trust me: the game was never the problem — it was you, all along.

Non-broken game is now even less broken. Very good job, CCP.

All looks good to me .... bring it on ASAP please

For starters, the price tag of the Hulk is quite irrelevant to its balance and survivability. Even so, as it is, the Hulk can already survive a significant amount of damage and with fleet support, it can quickly become more expensive to kill one than to lose one. This change makes the Hulk the weakest of the exhumers, so if you need even more tank than that, the option will be there.

Also, there's nothing strange about the Mack being the better choice for the solo highsec miner because the notion that the Hulk is the peak predator to rocks is no longer valid. Finally, why would the Mack would be the only choice when the Retriever fills a similar role and when the Procurer and Skiff offers even more tank (if that's your main concern)?
This also falls in to the “Hulk = best” mindset. The entire point of the tiercide effort is that this will no longer be true. The Hulk will be the best for some purposes; the others will be better for others. Also, consider how tiny a portion of the overall ship the bay is. A Mackinaw is 150,000m³ — the new ore bay accounts for 27,500m³ of that. The remaining 80% of the ship is taken up by whatever lore bits you'd want (engines, crew space, debris sorting etc). That give a lot of room for explaining why the Hulk is that much larger: maybe the sorting machinery that gives it that higher yield takes a whole lot of space — everything is tripple-scanned instead of the once-over it gets in, say, a Skiff, so the skiff discards a whole lot more potentially useful pieces of rock.

If the visuals bother you, it's easily fixed by switching the hulls around.
Again, group mining: just dump that ore at the end of each cycle if you manage to suck up that much. That's the price you pay for the increased efficiency.

The Orca can carry the crystals just fine — it's a floating secure can, and has room for over 8,000 mining crystals. If you have so many miners that that isn't enough, maybe a second Orca is in order… Also, the space isn't all that precious — you just need to have a good chain of indys bringing the ore back to station. And if you can't get hold of an Orca (as an alt or otherwise), then maybe its companion ship — the Hulk — isn't the right tool to use. Again: it's that “Hulk = best” mindset, and it will no longer be true.

Because highsec is a hostile environment. In missions, you fit for sufficient tank to survive and being able to complete the mission without losing the ship. Same here: you fit your mining ship with sufficient tank to be able to survive an attack and bring back the ore. Outfitting a barge for maximum efficiency is like filling a mission ship with nothing but guns, weapon mods, tracking computers, drone mods and sensor boosters: not very clever, because it will not actually be efficient at all.

As with anything, it's a cost-benefit analysis: is the benefit of getting 200m³ more ore worth the cost of losing 300M ISK worth of assets?

Hey folks, thanks for the feedback, here are some answers for you.

[list]

WHY WORKING ON FRIGATES FIRST WHEN SO MANY OTHER SHIPS CLASSES ARE BROKEN?(battlecruisers in particular): that’s mainly because we are not just fixing ships, but overhauling EVE balancing as a whole by removing tiers. This is an extremely tricky move, which is why we want to start to get experience with frigates first before we move to the more problematic hulls.

Also, frigates suffer the most from current tiers issues, and as the first vessels provided to new players, not reflecting a good image of the game if they are being told to skip them entirely to train for battlecruisers. Finally, it's virtually impossible to hit everyone wishes at once with one set of changes, as we have hundreds of ship to go through and there is unfortunately no guarantee we can directly fix the ship you are interested in. We know it's hard to ask such a thing after years of neglect, but please be patient, we will get to them eventually

HAVE YOU CONSIDERED MOVING SOME FRIGATE HULLS INTO DESTROYERS? Yes, we have in the past, but that idea was dropped it would create inconsistencies between the different model sizes. Besides, we preferred introducing new toys for you to play with, because all that new glittering usually is much more excit… ooooh, shiny!

ARE THERE GOING TO BE INDUSTRY / INVENTION ADJUSTMENTS PLANNED TO ALL THESE OVERHAULED SHIPS? Yes, that is part of the “tiericide” project, but we want to wait until we finish all ships from a specific size before this is considered to avoid frequent disruptions to the economy.

WHAT'S HAPPENING WITH THE HULK AFTER THE CHANGE? Exact modifications are still vague, but the plan is to quite reduce its cargo hold and add an ore bay of the same size than the removed cargo hold. That means cargo expanders and rigs won’t affect the ore bay at all, requiring players to unload ore more frequently. This is by design, as we want the Hulk to be moved into a fleet purpose that has to rely on others to make proper use of its best mining output. That also means we will not be introducing items that affect the ore bay size.

DRONES USUALLY DON'T MIX WELL WITH LONG RANGE COMBAT DUE TO TRAVEL TIME; HOW DO YOU PLAN TO TACKLE THIS? Again, this is quite a bit early to tell, but an option is to have drone frigates provide a bonus to drone speed and tracking instead of just raw damage. Not only it avoids making them too much overpowering next to other frigates, but also provides an appealing purpose next to the larger drone hulls.

WHY IS IT TAKING SO LONG TO MAKE SUCH CHANGES? WHY ARE YOU TAKING SO MUCH TIME REBALANCING THINGS WHEN YOU STATED PERFECT BALANCE WAS NOT POSSIBLE? That’s tied to the first point of this reply: we are totally revamping EVE balancing philosophy, and that unfortunately takes time. Even if perfect balance cannot be achieved, we still wish to take proper time in our balancing process to weight options, consider player feedback for iterations instead of just rushing to get everything done as fast as possible.

ARE WE RECEIVING NEW MODELS FOR THE REVAMPED SHIP ROLES, LIKE THE BANTAM? Nope, not at the moment. It could be worse though, you could be flying a Moa .

ARE WE RECEIVING A DEDICATED GAS MINING SHIP? A point that needs to be taken into consideration – if that is possible we will integrate it into the Skiff, otherwise you may have to wait for a dedicated hull to arrive.

HOW ARE YOU GOING TO TACKLE CAPACITOR ISSUES WITH TECH 1 ATTACK FRIGATES? First, by increasing their capacitor quite a bit, then by possibly having a fixed role bonus, even if we are not too fond of that on tech 1 ships. A most likely option would be to have a capacitor reduction to warp scrambler and disruptors on them just like on Interceptors.

ARE YOU CONSIDERING CHANGING SOME FRIGATES TO FILL A LOGISTIC ROLE? Not at the moment, as we do not believe frigate hulls would be quite tailored for such a role: they are too frail and lack range to do the job properly. See the answer below for a more details on logistic ship plans.

SINCE MINING FRIGATES ARE GOING AWAY, IS THERE ANY PLAN TO DO THE SAME WITH THE POOR MINING CRUISERS? Definitely, we want to remove mining bonuses from the current tier 1 cruisers and properly emphasize their logistic role when we start overhauling the cruiser class.

ARE YOU PLANNING ON REVAMPING TECH2 SHIPS THAT MAY BECOME OBSOLETE WITH SUCH CHANGES, LIKE THE ELECTRONIC ATTACK FRIGATES? Well it’s not like EAS are not obsolete already, but hell yes we do want to improve them. However we first want to finish all tech 1 hulls before we move into more complex matters to have a frame of reference we can base ourselves upon.

ARE YOU PLANNING ON CHANGING FRIGATE SKILL LEVELS AS PER OF THE "TIERICIDE" INITIATIVE? Yes, forgot to mention that point in the blog. Plan is to move all tech 1 frigate skill requirement to 1, while level 4 is used to jump into destroyers.

WILL EXHUMER SHIP SPECIALIZATIONS BE AFFECTED BY SUCH CHANGES? Most likely not, except maybe for the Skiff as mentioned above.

ARE YOU CONSIDERING A ROLE OR ANY KIND OF BONUS TO MAKE FRIGATES BETTER AT LIGHTING UP CYNOSURAL FIELDS? We don’t necessarily want to make capital fleets easier to move than they already are, but if such an attribute is considered it will most likely be on the support frigates (Magnate, Heron, Imicus, Probe).

[*] WILL THE BANTAM BE A MISSILE SHIP AS PROMISED A LONG TIME AGO? The blog specified it would be changed to a sniper role to take over for the Merlin overhaul, which means using hybrids turrets. If you like missiles, the Condor and Kestrel will be your hulls of choice. We also would like to remind you that quite contrary to popular beliefs, Caldari main weapon systems...

And thanks for the Answers!!! Now maybe we can stop arguing about cargo holds and some other stuff ... maybe

Is there any way we can get back the Cargo Expander rigs on our mining ships? They will be useless now, and when I bought them, they came with a lifetime warranty.... or something like that... I will have to destroy them to replace them.


Also you have not yet mentioned how or if the Exhumers current roles (Mercoxit, Ice, Ore) will be effected.

Very much so. Thanks!

The only thing would be the differentiation between the T1 and T2 barges in terms of how old and new roles mesh and how the whole “all exhumers/barges will be close to the Hulk in yield” bit plays out, but that's hard without actual numbers and I'm guessing you're not quite there yet.

In particular there's the question along the lines of why the dedicated ice miner (the old role of the Mack) will also be the solo ship (the new role of the Retriever hull). What if you want dedicated ice miners with group benefits?

No, what I'm saying is that lazy miners will have the perfect tool for the job: the Mack/Retriever — in fact, it will probably make their lives easier. It won't be as good at pulling in ore as the Covetor/Hulk, but that's the price you pay for laziness.

I'm also saying that people need to stop assuming that they must fly a Hulk. With these changes, it will be the wrong tool for the job in a lot of use cases — preferably, it will only be a good choice in about 1 out of 6 use cases, rather than 5/6 as is the case right now.

Well that answers that. I think it's a reasonable approach. We live with this to an extent on the Orca.

When released you'll have a lot of Hulks and Covetors out there with cargo rigs though. Might be wise to have a plan for dealing with that, but I am sure that's clear already.

No, you didn't. As my original post questioned both the term and usage of "mineral compression", that was rather the point. I just pointed out, while thanking you for your contribution, that you didn't address "mineral compression" when responding to my post.

Wait what?

Who said that?

Why is the Kestrel so popular as a frigate?

While light missiles could possibly use a boost (and battleship class Torps and Cruise while at it too please), I find it difficult to comprehend the idea that they would be eliminated from frigates.

The main problem with light missiles are the split weapons hulls that only have bonuses to one or the other. Wish you would consider doubling up on the bonuses in those cases. They would still be more skill intensive and fitting is an issue, since they don't share damage mods, but that's usually acceptable. Particularly true on frigates where you can't fit too many of weapons focused mods to begin with.

I personally enjoyed flying 2/2 Merlins and Tristans. It led to entertaining flexibility, and overcame a lot of the range issues with Hybrid turrets. They just needed those doubled up bonuses to be competitive in PVP.

LOL.. Come on, this is CCP we're talking about .. what makes you think there'll be a 'testing phase'?