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I got a cool idea that you could implement at the same time as the mining barge rebalancing!
With alot of new graphics update going into eve, i think it would be cool if you added a layer texture that makes the ship look like its more dirty and dusty the more cycles or minutes you are spending in a asteroid belt / grav site.
sort of like an animated texture, that then disapears when you enter warp and you see a small dust cloud fly off your ship as you enter warp.

Can CCP Screw-Up the New Ming Barge Iteration?

The tl;dr is "Of course they can." Those with short attention spans can stop reading there, I suppose.

It seems CCP might be well on the way to making the new roles for the upcoming mining barge/exhumer iteration mostly pointless.

Two of the exhumers currently have specialized bonuses. The Skiff has a mercoxit mining bonus. The Mackinaw has an ice harvesting bonus.

How will this affect the new upcoming iteration? Where mercoxit and ice mining are concerned, it kind of makes the upcoming changes pretty pointless. If you're ice harvesting, why would you fly anything other than a Mackinaw? Whether it's Hulkageddon or not, no matter what space you're in, you're never going to choose the more sturdy Skiff over the ice harvesting bonus that the Mack gives. This defeats the purpose of the player having to make choices, having to gear their activity towards other outside forces and factors.

I'd simply assumed yesterday, when I cheered on the upcoming iteration towards roles, that the specific mining type bonuses would be removed from the exhumers. It seemed nothing but common sense that they would be removed.

Apparently not the case. CCP Ytterbium clarifies in some Q&A on the ship rebalancing thread:
It's times like this when I wish CCP would actually go into some detail on the decision. What's their thinking on the issue? Why do they feel that removing the current specializations is the wrong course of action? Hopefully the reasons are deeper than just being lazy and wanting to push some changes out the door as quickly as possible.

But ...

If CCP did remove the mining type specializations from the exhumers, what would happen to them? Would there be any way to get those mining type bonuses, if they aren't attached to ship types? There are two equally valid ways for CCP to go about doing this.

1. Turn the Mining Laser Upgrade and Ice Harvester Upgrade modules into items that can load scripts. The scripts define any bonuses and penalties. Perhaps the Mercoxit Script gives a 60% bonus to mercoxit yield, while delivering an ore bay capacity penality, along with a penalty to gas cloud formation. This concept could be expanded down the road, with scripts for every rock type. A veldspar script, for instance, some veldspar yield bonus and an associated penalty.


2. Mining Type rigs. Want to mine mercoxit? Install a rig on the ship. Want to increase your ice harvesting yield? Install a rig on your mining vessel. The bonus of rigs is that to replace them, you have to destroy them, which would please manufacturers.
The codebase for both of these options are already in-game. These are not unique mechanics that have been offered up by the playerbase. CCP could do either of these painlessly, and likely quickly. Both options keep the new mining barge/exhumer roles intact, giving players the flexibility to mine what they want in the ship they want to use.

Why CCP is not going down this road, I have no idea. Smacks as a quick fix to some miner screaming, versus an iteration with some real longterm potential in mind.

While you raise a valid point, remember that exhumers are T2 ships. And CCP is not going to turn T2 ships into T1 ships.

Remember that T2 ships are all about specialization, while T1 is all about generalization.

So the three T1 barges are going to be general. They can do a bit of everything, but each in their own way (similar to how the frigs are being rebalanced). Some are better suited for certain things. The covetor will be better suited for fleets, the retriever for solo work, and the procurer for dangerous space (ganks). Each barge can work in every environment fine, but some are better at it than the others.

Now T2 is different. The exhumers take an aspect of their T1 hulls and amplify it. In the case of the Hulk, it performs better in fleets due to its massive yield and small ore bay. The mackinaw takes the large ore bay of the retriever and utilizes it for ice (which is huge). And finally the skiff takes the resilience of the procurer and puts it to use against the gas clouds that form mining mercoxit.

Now the reasons for why this is so for the mack and the skiff (a lot more so for the skiff)are in reality not really true, but this must be CCPs train of thought. Do you really need to worry a lot about toxic clouds such that you need battleship EHP? Of course not, but it gives you an idea of the reasoning behind these changes (at least from my perspective)

At the end of the day, the three T1 barges can do it all, with varying degrees of success. But the mack will be best for ice mining, which will be helped by a bonus for ice mining and the (upgraded?) ore bay it inherits from the retriever (less clicking). The skiff will be the best for mercoxit (as always) (the EHP thing doesnt really matter though), and the Hulk will be the best for mining all of the other ore, because of its yield.

I'm fairly sure that is exactly what CCP is doing, nix the hulk being awesome at everything. There is no pvp ship that is awesome at everything, so their shouldn't be a mining ship that is awesome at everything.

I'll bet CCP will amplify the characteristics of their T1 hulls whilst also getting (keeping) their specializations.

Hulk + Improved Cloak = Covops Barge.

i have to say "mining ALL the ores" isn't really a specialisation for a t2-ship.
ice and mercoxit are specialized. maybe the bonuses on the hulk need to be more specific then just "yield".


some quick ideas:
option one - make the hulk bonus only apply to "high risk" ores to be found in deep low sec and 0.0
maybe like arkonor, bistot ond crokite. oh and spod. this thick brick of sturdiness is pain in the ....

option two - make the hulk the dedicated gas mining ship. since the t1 barges get more yield anyway, why not get rid of the uber-roid-sucker - anyone-whants-to-fly completly and introduce a gas mining ship. ore bay needs to be changed into a gas bay so normal mining would go through the new 600m³ cargo hold. gimping normal mining with hulk down to an undesireable level.

option three - make the mack the dedicated gas mining ship, give it a big gas storage hold instead of an ore hold. self reliance is surely a good thing when gas mining and the newly added ehp will not hurt either.
secondly make the hulk the dedicated ice mining ship and give some survivability so that it may survive gank attemps. at least the the non-serious ones. change the ore hold into and ice hold which needs a supporting ship like orca to be as efficient as one can get, and gimp the hulks ability to mine normal ore to a level below the mack.
maybe change the ice mining mechanics so it isn't promoting afk mining that much?

So crazy it might even work

I kinda like option 2, with the covetor sliding into the "big fleet o' regular-rock destruction" role and ditching the belief that there *has* to be a more-better option for basic mining. It gives each of the T2 ships an actual specialization and promotes use of the T1's for the day-to-day operations.

Though,

in any case,



times eleventy-billion. Even just cutting ice cycle/yield/chunk m3/refining in half so it starts out more like half-again as long as strip cycles rather than *over 3 times* as long as strip cycles would make it less of a pain (no, it's not going to *stop* botting and afk-ing, but it'll at least not punish people who don't afk it as much).

The only problem to changing the hulk from the best roid rocker out there to something else will be the wave of miners freaking out because of changes to the hulk. Doing what you guys ^ have said would be interesting, but I think a lot of people would just leave the game/cause a ruckus just because they don't understand what is going on.

On a different note, I really hope CCP expands the ORE ship line. Right now we have 3 barges, an orca, a noctis, and a rorq. Since the frigates are loosing their mining bonus, we are getting a mining frig. Due to its mobility I have no choice but to believe that it is intended for ring mining (where mobility is key). Now that we know that cruisers are loosing their mining bonus, I would have to believe (or hope) that ORE will be debuting a new mining cruiser. It would be cool if the barges and their T2 counterparts were focused on ore mining, while their more traditional frigate/cruiser/(battleship?) hulls would be focused on ring mining (or gas harvesting). Perhaps CCP could add more hulls, or just make the cruiser hull focused on gas harvesting.

Generally speaking Minmatar boats are the lowest dps of the competing gun boats. The are typically the fastest but suffer from the worst fitting stats and typically the worst tank and worst electronics. Matar ships often have damage bonuses where other ships get other useful stats and the damage bonus just helps compensate for the naturally lower dps therefore is kind of a wash.

As far as I understand the minmatar ships lag behind everyone else in everything except speed. Matar ship excelle at PvP strictly because of their ability to dictate range and make use of huge falloffs which just further reduce DPS but give a margin of safety from shorter ranged counterparts. If you reduce or eliminate the speed superiority of the Minmatar ships then they instantly become the most useless ships in game.

The minmatar are a race of people that are scrappers. They were a slave race and have had to fight for everything they have. By game design they have been made the PvP dominant race of ships in game. If you want to ship balance and give Gallenete ships enough speed to catch Matar ships in PvP you will need to change the entire concept of the game and redesign all Minmatar ships to give them a role or use and then completely change the entire Eve backstory.