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long gone are the days when 50,000 player regularly logged.....and this is the best ccp could come up with? many players had perfect hulk and orca skills and now the hulk is nerfed to benefit whomever is the flavor of the month.

These changes made me come back and try out the different mining vessels, all round a good change, though I would still prefer the Hulk with slightly more cargo hold and able to tank better.

All the ISK spent to get five Hulks with cargo hold optimization LOL. At least I can do 2 cycles before the ore hold is full when not being boosted. Oh well I guess it's just a game and there are other ships.

Or listening to my one year old and three year old make noise (they start yelling "ahhhhh" at one another and won't stop).

Having used the Retriever and looking at ice mining, I can see how this is really a master stroke by CCP. Here's why: It is now easier for any player to get a ship and go get ice for their POS. Using a Retriever allows a large amount of ice with minimal baby sitting. So more people can easily do this. Therefore they need to buy less ice. So ice botters are making way less from selling ice. Since they bot to make isk and/or real cash (I'm sure they do this, despite it being against the rules), it becomes less and less profitable for them to bot, making them stop botting. After all, if more players are now getting their own ice, they don't need to buy it, creating a glut on the market and causing prices to drop, killing botter profits. Eventually, a larger number of botters will be gone, the glut will decrease and prices will stabilize so players can still make some isk mining, but not as is currently.

A new balance will be found with less miners overall, getting more people to follow other career options. I can see ore mining following a similar path as well. As more players do their own mining, it just stops being useful/profitable to bot-mine.

The changes actually make it easier for botters, and regardless of the prices, botting will still be profitable, its steady isk income for no effort. If prices go down, they just put out more bots.

Hulks were always very gankable due to the paper-tank fits so many miners used. (Cargo over tank always seems like a good trade until some Goon comes by and turns your expensive exhumer into a pile of space debris. And cargo over yield -- expanders instead of MLU's in the lows -- was just a dumb way to use a Hulk.)

The buffs to the T1 barges are actually a bigger deal than to their T2 exhumer variants.

Consider the lowly procurer: prior to the patch, it really had no reason to exists except as a hull for the Skiff. No miner in his right mind would have flown a procurer -- an Osprey outmined it and offered better protection to boot. It was one of the worst ships in the game, by far. Now? It's a decent low-end miner with an awesome tank. The Skiff, even more so. I'm sure I'm not the only one seeing roles for these ships that have nothing whatever to do with running mining lasers!

The Retriever went from being a "meh" T1 option to being an awesome (and cheap!) solo mining vessel. And the Mackinaw is now the Mack-daddy of the mining world for lots of pilots who used to roll a Hulk.

The Covetor is now a viable alternative to a Hulk if you're just starting a mining corp and need to outfit your pilots (though a Ret is probably a better option, honestly).

And the Hulk? The Hulk is still the king of yield, so that hasn't changed. If you flew a Hulk before, very little about your life will change unless you depended on a big cargo bay (which apparently a lot of Hulk pilots did). But since the Hulk is now targeted at fleet mining ops, individual cargo should be less of an issue. In other respects, the Hulk is as good as it ever was.

would be cool if we could get a 2 pulse notification burst when our ore bay gets to the point where it won't hold another strip miner cycle. Though I guess you would have to treat the strip miner closest from finishing as if it represented the barge's total strip miner yield.

worthless change
worthless effort
worthless things to train

keep ruining the ships and the playstyles.

go go go

Anybody for whom the crystal problem with the hulk is an actual problem would probably be happier flying a mackinaw, if they can get over the fact that they can't get the best cargo hold and the best yield in the same ship.

And if you are mining in 0.0 in anything but a fully boosted fleet with haulers and guards you are already giving up the yield, so WTF is the problem here? Upset that there's now a ship better suited to the task?

The changes to the various mining ships doesn't bother me too much its part of what happens in EVE and for that matter any MMO.

What bothers me, NO ANNOYS me is the unified inventory crap and its impact on the cargo hold/corporate hanger/ship maint./ore hold. etc. Navigating all this crap is annoying because it doens't work quite right nor do changes stick, and the cargo hold button on the hud takes me to what is now the least used storage location.