EVE General Discussion

Malc,

While you are here, can I ask you to look into why CCP decided to do a restriction on the ice minable in high sec for Odyssey?

Who thought there was too much ice? That ice was too cheap?

Tin foil hat says they are retaliating for the threadnaught and being forced to work on the bad code, making sure POSes truly are a small portion of the community.

I figure it's more the usual CCP way of shooting themselves in the foot while looking to the stars, but that's what the CSM is supposed to help with.

Currently prices for JIta are 211K buy and 233 K sell.

I'm patting myself on the back for buying a crap ton at 135K two days ago.

The change in the mechanic makes a bit of sense to me, but this part about only spawning enough in high sec to meet 80% of high sec's demand has left me scratching my shiny head.

As a 3 year asteroid and Ice Miner, I approve of every single change for Odysssey.

Brilliant move on CCP's part.

Also, enjoying all the tears.

The Bots will actually have the easiest time adapting. Because they can wait. Undock, wait for the scan, scrape the screen for the belt. Not there? Dock, wait, undock and repeat. When the spawn shows up, log in the fleet and go mine. Players will not tolerate that level of boredom. A bot does not get bored. Also, once the belt does pop the bot can note the time, log everyone out, wait 4 hours and log everyone back in.

But CCP can see that sort of behavior, so expect more dead bots.

Cool? Ice joke in there somewhere.

At first it will heat up, which we are seeing now, but likely to depress POS related activities in the long run. Is this really a good thing? They are simultaneously making POSes easier to use and at the same time making them more costly to maintain. Confusing.

I reiterate my request to Malc, and widen to any CSM7 or 8 Member to look into this, and if the explanation doesn't make sense, talk to the appropriate devs about it.

This is absolute nonsense. This change will be trivially overcome by bots. Anyone who thinks this change was meant to combat botting is seriously delusional.

The intention of the change was to reduce the quantity of available ice from infinite to less-than-infinite.

Anyone who hasn't been living under a rock?
Anyone who has ever done the math on ice isk/hr?

I think better questions would be, "Who DIDN'T think there was too much ice? Who DIDN'T think that ice was too cheap?"

It will be a drastically shorter list.

The prices at the moment are a result of speculation, not changes. There hasn't been a change in supply and demand, it's just people buying it and waiting to see the moment before the bubble bursts. Prices will go back down, but won't hit pre-fanfest levels ever again.

The change is basically because CCP wants to make null-sec industry a thing. They want people actually mining in null-sec and producing products in null-sec. That's why null-sec ores have had their yields greatly increased when it comes to the low end minerals normally imported from high-sec. That's why outposts are being buffed to make industry easier. It's also behind the ice changes. That extra 20% that high-sec can't support has to come from somewhere, and it's probably going to be null-sec since it's easier to defend.

Ice had to be moved to anoms. Belts always spawn after downtime, and if ice was in belts it would all be harvested by one timezone before the others had a chance at it. They had to untie it from timezone, and moving it to anoms was a simple way to do it without overhauling the belt spawning rules entirely. The fact that it hurts botter is icing on the cake.

Okay, seriously, why the **** do you people believe this?

Here are the givens:

-The new scanner can be configured to fire on session change, so they don't even have to bot the scan aspect of it (not that that wouldn't be a trivial few minute's worth of coding to overcome).
-We know exactly which systems ice anoms will spawn in, so it's not like a bot really even has to go looking for them.
-Existing bots are already capable of doing things like warping around.

This basically means the net difficulty added to a botter's life is identifying the correct anomaly to warp to. These are not difficult tasks. I would go so far as to label them the very definition of trivial. The fact that the ice will deplete has no unique detrimental impact on the botter (that particular aspect is felt equally by both legit players and bots).

I'm reasonably certain, in fact, that there are a number of bots that already farm high-sec anomalies for escalations, so there's a pretty good chance that any changes that would need to be made to mining bots already have functional code in the wild that could easily be implemented into a mining bot.

Dealing with bots is a security issue - not a gameplay mechanics issue. It would be EXTREMELY difficult, if not impossible, to devise gameplay mechanics that would be difficult to bot without also being extremely impractical or unpleasant for human players (think CAPTCHAS...IN...SPAAAAACE!).

This will not deter bots, and that's okay. It's not meant to.