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I think CCP is missing an opportunity with the retooling of ice belts with going about it this way. Rather than have ice belts respawn a few hours after depeltion with an expected uptime of a few hours and always in the same systems, a more gold-rush style atmosphere would come about from ice belts respawning after several days or weeks with an amount of available ice estimated to deplete in that same timeframe, and most certainly change locations.

This would encourage a prospecting attitude among ice miners, who would necessarily have to search for and relocate to new resources. It would also avoid a likely downtime of "professional" ice miners waiting out a 4-hour period, and instead fill that downtime with searching for and moving to new sources.

A 2-hour-uptime 4-hour-downtime schedule would just be tedious. Ice mining is tedious enough.

I'd have to disagree.. There's NOTHING tedious about warping 10 alts to a belt in mackinaws, targetting the same ice rock that doesn't deplete.. and then going afk for an hour while the hold fills.

But with this system, even a player that's sitting at his keyboard mining will be caught since it takes mere seconds to be able to locate the right anomaly and player, while the align time on the mining ships is crap.. And don't forget, CCP was trying to ENCOURAGE mining in low/null. This way it's just going to be way more rare to see miners in low.

As for the ABC thing from WH to HS markets, that's hardly a valid argument. With the mass amounts and the amount of space the ore took up, there wasn't a lot of WH dwellers EXPORTING their products to the market. Using the refinery is pretty much useless as you're basically just throwing away 1/4 of the materials by using it. I would say majority uses it locally to build stuff and avoid the hassle of importing it instead. Personally, I don't see anything wrong with that.

In all honesty, it makes no difference to me, since even my WH dweller never mines because of the hassle associated with it.

Why would you do something as foolish(being VERY nice) by making grav sites in wh to be able to be scanned by ship scanner and making scanning instant? this will ruin wh mining and wh space entirely. Wh space is the frontier, its supposed to be difficult but now you are downgrading it to the level of the rest of eve simply to satisfy those who don't live in Wh space.

I am looking forward to the changes to the ABC ores and the needed love given to spodumain. One of the shocking realities of Null Sec was how important tritanium became the further from highsec you found yourself. I view this as a positive step in the right direction for Null Sec.

However I do wonder how this will impact the price and desirability of Jump Freighters whom supply a good portion of those needed minerals to Null Sec builders currently.


Power To The Players!

Hell no. If you want to fly a supercapital, either dedicate a character to it or get a holding alt. Supercaps are difficult enough to catch and kill; allowing them to dock is beyond stupid.

Actually, what you do is roll your statics and close them when you don't need them. Then you don't have to waste a body watching a wide-open doorway into your system that could admit a fleet at any point. For any in-holes you happen to have before you start, you close them or mass to critical (closing is preferable). Basically, if you're going to do a real mining op in a wormhole, you shut the system down so that the only thing you're worried about is a new in-hole opening up.

Even doing this today, you *still* have to have the system covered with scan probes (we usually keep either a deep space or combats out) and you *still* need the miners hammering directional every 5-6 seconds. Because humans are not robots and go afk to use the bathroom, get coffee, or start talking and just forget to click the clicky, the combination of everyone doing these things gives you a fairly good, but not perfect, chance to spot the hostile coming before he makes it to the juicy mining fleet. Usually. You'll still lose some ships from time to time from people being slow to warp out or just not paying attention like they should be.

That's today.

With this change, d-scan becomes more or less useless for protecting mining fleets in wormholes (or much of anything else, for that matter). The only thing d-scan is going to show you is enemy probes - any hostile roam coming in is more than likely going to be cloak-capable, or at least their scouts will be.

Now, realistically what you'll have to do to keep your wormhole mining op secure is:

- Shut all the holes into the system.
- Keep a scanner out with combats or a deep space watching for new sigs. This usually needs to be a main because the scans need to be going constantly, but you can fit a probe launcher on a hauler.
- Cage your grav site in warp bubbles and build a safe point for them to warp out that's not in line with any planets. This will delay hostiles warping in long enough to try and get miners out.
- Run a combat patrol of ships to run interference while the miners warp away and switch to combat ships for response.

So, is it possible to still mine in a wormhole? Yes. Is it going to be as easy for smaller corps to do it? No. That's my main concern really. This change is really going to hurt the smaller corps inhabiting lower-end wormholes, who have trouble getting more than 5-6 pilots online at a time just due to low membership. You could argue that corps that small shouldn't be in wormhole space, but see my post a few pages back about the available content in a low-end wormhole. You can't drag a bunch of people into space like that and expect them to log in and just sit there if there's nothing for them to do.

Wormhole ore is a tiny, tiny percentage of total ore. Even if it is higher-end stuff, it's a drop in the bucket.

See the graph on mined ore volume in this dev blog.

That being the case, I highly doubt that this was an "intentional" nerf to wormhole mining. I'm actually not sure what the intent was, since in my experience, miners "hiding" in grav sites was never really a problem for gankers/pirates anywhere else either, but who knows. Just like cloaks, combat scanners are the norm amongst people hunting for kills these days. I think the problem is just that when CCP was thinking about the change to grav sites, they didn't think about how things work in w-space, with the lack of a local channel to warn you that a non-blue is in system.

Please do explain how the mining changes hinder new alliances in 0.0

Warning about new holes works based on need and time for breaching fleet to scan you down with probes - meaning you had 1-3 minutes minimum to detect new whole and search for intruder probes or uncloaked ship before warp to POS.

As you say that is currently plenty of time for alert well manned fleet to handle new wh. But...


Now you have maybe as little as 20-40 seconds from new hole opening until they start arriving at your mining site. Scanning grav sites will now take 5-10 second and no probes or uncloaking. And even the most constant probe spamming loses 5 seconds or so detecting. Since most barges need 15-20 seconds to warp out that does not really leave much time for human problem recognition and communication..and more normal scanning every 10-30 seconds will simply miss out sometimes.