Market Discussions

Without suicide ganking on an economically significant scale, mining in HS is an effectively riskless activity. Remember how, before HAG started, miners were always whining about how little they got paid? That was because, before industrialized ganking began, mining in HS was an effectively riskless activity.

Without the ability to profitably gank mining ships set up for maximum yield, suicide ganking on an economically significant scale cannot happen.

Finally, suicide ganking **** tanked and untanked Hulks has been profitable since Exhumers were introduced. Why should that change just because it became popular?

Balanced resists as in weakest at EM (56%) and therm (64.8%), exactly what gankers love to see!


Once again you posted a joke fit that 0.01% of the players will bother training and wasting massive money upon.

Many miners are really just side projects, some times the player has even to use one account and you can be sure he won't train your usual "All V skills" magic setup in place of their PvP / mission main.

Let me show you a fit that *works* and *is cheap* and *alt worthy*:

[Mackinaw, 30K EHP general mining]
Damage Control II
Mining Laser Upgrade II
Mining Laser Upgrade II

Limited Adaptive Invulnerability Field I
Small F-S9 Regolith Shield Induction
Upgraded EM Ward Amplifier I
Upgraded Thermic Dissipation Amplifier I

Modulated Strip Miner II, Veldspar Mining Crystal II
Modulated Strip Miner II, Veldspar Mining Crystal II

Medium Core Defense Field Extender I
Medium Processor Overclocking Unit I

Hobgoblin I x3
Warrior I x2


This gives a practical ship to actually existing characters, without the need to waste years in SP, using hideously cheap modules. Way better resists and > 30.4 EHP. Oh wait, it got just 2 MLUs and thus a 8.2% yield sacrifice had to be made, as intended.

Will people take the sacrifice? Those who want a Mack do. Because they are there for the AFK factor, they care more for the ship to stay alive while AFK than for your magic 3 MLUs.

Those who can't sleep at the night due to the lack of 3 MLUs will use Hulks.

What? Going Hulk they have to make a sacrifice in tank, need to be in a fleet and crystals cargo size? Intended, once again.

The "no sacrifice, I want Hulk performance-in-a-Mack" guys are right there, in your mind and in some particularly bad threads on General Discussion.

Once again, I am suggesting that ships should be balanced based on the higher part of a gaussian representing the average player SP and skills.

You can't balance dynamic games based on theorethical, purely on paper and not existing in game data. The outliers will exist, sure but they will be a single digit percent.

With your doctrine, instead, you'd make everybody a gimp because on paper it's possible to put in years of efforts all focused on what's usually just an alt and make it godlike. Thus everybody not as trained and high SP (90% of the playerbase) would suffer much more than due.

Instead, guess what, you are welcome to the new game changes, CCP agreed with me and not with you.

As a miner by choice, I'm one of the edge cases that you're both ignoring.

I run a Skiff, again by choice, as I'm more then willing to take a little longer getting minerals then someone in a Mackinaw or Hulk. I happen to think that the trade offs built into the current iteration of mining barges and exhumers are well balanced. Something you're missing is what those actually are. Skiff/Procurer are designed for defense. Retriever/Mackinaw is designed for storage. Covoter/Hulk is meant for yield.

The actual trade offs are in how you want to protect it, a fully defensive setup like I prefer will ignore all but the most determined of gank attempts. A balanced tank/yield setup isn't as capable of shrugging off a more then casual attempt at a gank. If someone is absolutely determined to max out mining yield, an average attempt to gank will likely succeed.

Tank = Skiff (Using max skills results in more then 100k EHP)
Storage = Mackinaw (Even the best setups for one still can result in about 40k EHP, assuming a balance between yield/tank)
Yield = Hulk (At max, most Hulks don't exceed 25k to 30k EHP due to needing fleet assistance as a near requirement now)

Now those numbers (all from memory, so some variance may show from EFT or other fitting tools) show a trend towards easier to kill. Now if that isn't enough, let's look at high alpha damage ships looking to kill one of these. A Skiff obviously will take between 5 and 8 Tornadoes to kill in Empire space. A Mackinaw will take 2 or 3 Tornadoes. A Hulk will likely take 1 or 2 Tornadoes to kill.

This is all assuming an average Alpha of approximately 14.8k HP per hit.

As things stand, nearly every miner I know or meet use Mackinaws for mining in general now. Most of them don't fit a DCU for any reason, as it interferes with yield. The few I know who do fit better then normal tanks are fairly patient people in general anyways. So the loss of yield doesn't bother them. Those that don't fit the DCU have a max EHP more inline with a tanked Hulk, this results in an easier to gank setup due to making a choice to maximize yield. As such, a solo Tornado could potentially take out a solo Mackinaw kitted out to maximize yield. (This is based on assumptions on fitting the Mackinaw, such as fitting a survey scanner instead of an Invuln or a shield extender.)

Ganking someone, while a legitimate action by game rules, shouldn't really be a profitable venue when attacking miners. Offset the costs, certainly. Be able to pay for all ships involved with extra left over, not so much. You want profitable ganks, go kill idiot haulers. If you want to kill miners for profit, it's now time to war dec the corp. (Most miners either will jump corp, or just not undock in most cases.) If you're looking to deny assets to a corp ganks will work for that, just be ready to pay for it now.

Due to the ganking community not being willing to compromise with the miners on a proper buff to mining ships to increase survivability, CCP took unilateral measures that basically eliminated any profit from ganking miners. If anyone is to blame for these changes, it's not CCP or the mining community at large. Both of them were willing to work with the gankers to keep them all happy, while increasing survivability of mining ships.

Now that the changes are live on TQ, the griefer community has started doing what they blamed the mining community of doing. Whining over not being able to wantonly kill any mining barge at anytime they want to. Time to adapt, gankers. If you want to kill miners, you're going to have to work for it now. Mining in Empire has never been risk-free as people seem to think, the risks were just different. Most of those risks related to how the market fluctuated on a daily or weekly basis.

Like it or not, things have changed. Risk vs Reward right now is skewed a bit towards the miners, which isn't really a bad thing. Ganking is a CONCORD punishable offense, and as such should always be a lot riskier then what a miner faces on a regular basis. Risk based on actions taken is a fairer way of doing things. The way things were working previously was just short of broken. The only ship that stood a chance of surviving a gank was the Hulk, and only at the complete loss of yield bonuses not included in the hull bonus list and fleet bonuses if in one. Now that 4 ships in the mining classes actually stand a chance; gankers now have to actually pick a target carefully. Not just drop on the belt and pop a random miner for giggles.

Again, you're arguing that ships should be balanced based on their least intelligent users.

Intelligent Hulk pilots didn't show up on killboards before the buff because they didn't get ganked. Either they were smart enough to figure out that they could tank their ship *shock,* or they mined aligned, or whatever.

The Mackinaw is overpowered because Smart Miners can fit it such that it is strictly better than the Skiff. It doesn't have to sacrifice any fittings in most sec bands, and in the lowest HS bands, it can still fit an unprofitable tank with 2 MLUs, rendering it equivalent to the Skiff with double the ore hold. So why would you ever use a Skiff to mine in HS?

I've only been skimming this rather dull back and forth, but if I'm not mistaken, what he's saying is that Macks tank "well" enough that they eliminate the role that Skiffs are supposed to fill.

Your first line, the "not a problem one," is what this is replying to. It's only not a problem that Mackinaws are strictly better than Skiffs after ~6 weeks additional training if you're claiming that ships should be balanced based on terrible fitting choices.



It takes some 6 weeks of additional training to get all the tank you can out of a Mack. Why should the developers reward people who chose to go off and train other things instead of training for just 6 weeks to protect their ships? Where's the buff for my Logi 4 pilot?



Capability, not module name is the measure of a fitting. A Mackinaw can be made unprofitable to gank in HS. This takes all the wind out of the Skiff's sails.

And I'm not saying that EVE should not reward Smart players. As you said, this is MD where you have to read the post you're responding to.


Not losing a 300m ISK ship is a pretty good reward for being smart.

The smart miners who liked tanking their ships should be using a Skiff, because that's what it's designed for instead of using a Mackinaw because it tanks so well that there's no reason to use a Skiff. The smart miners who kept safe in other ways have no need for tank, so this discussion has no impact on them.



So where's the EHP buff to every other T2 cruiser? Every other T2 cruiser can be suicide ganked while empty for about the same profit as empty Exhumers (pre-buff). Same thing with Miner-Tanked T2 Cruisers (no tank, all DPS/Guns). (Actually, T2 Cruisers fit like an untanked mining ship are more profitable, because the rack of guns is more expensive).

You're also mischaracterizing what he said. He didn't limit his comment to mining ships or untanked ships. He said that Suicide Ganking should always cost more for the Suicide Ganker than he can recover. When everybody pointed out that that was stupid (and impossible without eliminating Suicide Ganking entirely), he ran away from the thread. In other words, CCP Soundwave was dead wrong and doesn't clearly understand the mechanics and economics behind suicide ganking.

If there had been a big rash of Brick Tanked Hulks being Suicide Ganked, that would have been a problem. But as long as the Mack can be unprofitable to gank with 2 MLUs, the Skiff is entirely overshadowed. If the Mack had to drop down to 1 MLU to be unprofitable to gank, that would be better (I happen to think that it should be 0 MLUs to be unprofitable to gank, since that's a more significant sacrifice to gain Cargo Space, the best stat for mining ships) because then it's giving up Yield (compared to the Skiff) in exchange for Cargo space.

Hulks haven't been replaced in HS because of tanking issues (easy proof, the Hulk tanks better now than it did pre-buff), they've been replaced because of the Mack's ore Hold. As you pointed out earlier in your post, the Ore Hold is the killer app of mining.

One of the proposals floating around (and I think it's a good one) is to swap the tanking capabilities of the Hulk and Mackinaw (including the third Low Slot). I still think it runs the risk of obsoleting the Skiff, but at least the Hulk will have a fighting chance against the Mack.

Which part of "upper percentile (in a player skill gaussian)" is too hard to grasp?
I did not say civilian booster Macks are to survive but the really well fitted ones.




Or maybe you could turn the question in something more appropriate: "why a miner has so few ships choices and his available skills are so few that 6 additional weeks max out everything?" A PvE / PvP pilot have dozens of options and skills, an industrial has few. Not their fault if the game is shallow right there.




Considering they said ganking should not be profitable, the Mack is just fulfilling the design like a Skiff. It's just harder to make it though, while a Skiff is much easier.




The smart miners who liked tanking their ship should be FREE to choose exactly like every other pilot. If they want immortality even in 0.5 sec and against 3 catalysts then Skiff is the right tool. If they prefer to stay in 0.8 sec (where minerals are WAY fewer kinds and roids smaller) and also give up on yield then Mack is the tool for that.
Seems quite linear to me.




Does the gank happen or once again you are talking about some funny worlds that live in your mind? Care to show how many T2 empty cruisers get suicide ganked vs how many mining ships?

Also, talking about apples and oranges, where are my 220mm to fit on the Mack? Oh wait, there aren't and the only defense for a mining ship is the tank and not the gank? How odd that ships with no gank are given tank, eh?

So you're saying that the Skiff's a useless brick? For once we agree. As long as a Mackinaw is unprofitable to gank with 2 MLUs, it mines the same as a Skiff, has the same likelihood of being ganked as a Skiff, and has twice the cargo space of a Skiff, so it is, in all cases, better than a Skiff.



Sorry, I was too busy calling for CCP to topple the biggest problem with mining at the time; the fact that the best mining ship (by mineral volume yielded) was the Sentry Carrier. Then I was trying to teach miners how to avoid getting ganked.



1. Not compared to the Skiff. Look at the first line of the couplet you bolded.
2. No, they didn't. They just stopped including the resist bonus from Barge 5 in the base stat readout and now calculate it after you step in the boat with Barge 5. The Exhumers never had T2 resists.
3. I fit Meta stuff to combat ships for fitting reasons all the time.
4. So? I use fitting rigs on combat ships all the time.
5. So? I am talking about the balance between the Skiff and the Mackinaw. The fact that the Cargo hold of the Mackinaw is more valuable than the yield bonus of the Hulk is a whole separate discussion.

The Mackinaw is a T2 Ship. The Iteron V is a T1 Ship. One of these things is not like the other.

Searching for deadspace Hulks to gank is not the backbone of the industrialized ganking needed to provide any significant risk to the activity of HS mining.


Why should HS miners be able to run their ships in the most efficient way possible without being subject to any significant risk?

No other HS activity can be run in the most efficient way possible with a similar lack of risk.
The most efficient Mission runners have faction gear (often enough to be worth ganking), can have their activities disrupted by people stealing mission objectives or by people wardeccing them (unlike miners, Mission runners lose money if they're in NPC corps). The most efficient industrialists can lose billions on market changes or have their activities disrupted by a wardec (depending on whether they do invention or not). Incursion runners run the risk of suicide BBs, bad Logis, etc. Freight operators run the risk of Suicide Gank (limiting yourself to 1-2b per haul is less efficient than not doing so).