Science & Industry

According to Fozzie, the ice anoms will be found only in systems that used to have static ice belts and there will be as many anoms as there were static ice belts in that system. So systems that currently have 1 static ice belt will have one ice anom that once mined out respawns 4 hours later, systems that had 2 static belts will have 2 ice anoms, etc.

I agree with what you say here. But you miss the key factor. Even if low end minerals rise due to high sec miners switching to ICE, the lowe end ores in high sec will not increase in value over the new composition null sec ores.Why? because the changes to the ore was the addition of low end minerals. If the price of low end minerals goes way up, even higher than it was, this will also drive up to price of the null sec ores as they have both low end and high end minerals in them.

Just for example look as the basic null sec mining system. The lowest industry level giving only the small hidden belt. These composition changes have drastically affected these belts. The small belt has to be completely mined out to get it to respawn. You can not just cherry pick the A,B,C's as they are limited and you need to flip the belt to get more A,B,C's to mine. The SPOD has to be mined to flip the belt and get more A,B,C's.

As far as low end minerals go, based on the OP's data, currently a small hidden belt yields a little over 6 million trit, over 1 million pyrite, and about 1 million mexallon. With the changes that jumps to over 91 million trit, over 12 million pyrite, and well over 1 million mexallon. This is not an increase in the volume of ore than needs to be mined, but in the resulting minerals after refining. This is a huge increase for the average null sec miner/industrialist.

To put this in perspective, say a null sec industrial player has 4 accounts. He has his own little corner in the alliance space he lives in, a couple systems in a dead end area protected by his alliance. With his 4 accounts, 3 HULKS and a Roqual he is able to maintain an industry level of 2 easily solo mining with his 4 accounts. With the changes to ore composition is is well worth while to flip the small hidden belts, especially if they are all you have. Previously completely mining out the small hidden belt would not even give enough low end minerals to build a single battleship. but with the changes you get enough trit to build several, pyrite is still a little lean, and mexallon will still be in short supply, but if the industrial player is building ships for his alliance he now only needs 1 jump freighter load of make up materials from high sec where he previously would have needed 3-4 loads.

Titanium was the biggest bottleneck for null sec industry, with the new ore compositions it will be in abundance for the average industrial player. They may still need to bring in bulk materials for capital ship building, but the average industrial player who mines there own minerals tritanium will not be such a problem anymore.

Thank you very much for your analysis Jita Bloodtear, I'm gonna spend some time considering you perspective and will continue watching this thread.

I'm on vacation today so I'll keep my post short, but I do want to make clear that no aspects of these changes are designed to combat botting. I leave that work to our excellent Team Security and I focus on game systems balance.

Also some info on the composition of the null/low ice fields would be handy so we can analyze the changes with those numbers, instead of just the highsec numbers, would be handy.

While in general I liked your analysis and certainly respect your opinion, I think your statements about ice are a little too speculative. I think things will not turn out as you predict.

You assume 30 ice miners will be at each highsec belt, and that group mining with corpmates will die out and discourage player industry ops. However, a counter-argument could be made that player cooperation will become only more important, as corpmates scout out different ice belts and then summon aid to mine the ice before other corps can do it. You could even see more wardecs as people try to protect "their turf" from other corps, leading to increased player interaction and cooperation beteween pvp and industry players -- prelude to a corp ready to move to low/nullsec. These are good things. And, of course, your statement that ice belts won't be around when people get home is too strong. In reality, there will be a distribution of outcomes on that front and people may need to interact with friends to find out where the ice is when they get home. What kind of gameplay is it to have a static objective which never changes, never depletes -- can never really be accomplished? Bots aside, this is a great gameplay change.

In nullsec, your rorq point is interesting, but in reality most of the ice mining will be happening in station systems where players can cooperate to haul goods back to station instead of rorq'ing it. You also discussed in various places the effort that people will have to go through to mine out fields and get them to respawn, like this quote: "an obstacle to harvesting the ice of true value. This will vastly hurt the profitability of nullsec ice miners and discourage them from mining." Yet, we do not know where prices will settle. Given supply (constrained) and demand (growing), it may be likely that the nullsec miners will be happy mining ice of any variant, because over a period of X days their expected value for the aggregate activity may be high. Kinda like ratting and finding faction/officer spawns. Not everything can be a faction spawn.

Anyway, I'd like to see how things play out on sisi, or even for a few weeks on TQ, before calling for more ice.

High sec has to continue to work because that is where new players start. To bring them into part of the game that's basically broken would cause fewer of them to stay with the game.

A bad way to solve the compression issue: What if you swapped all the POSes for ones that use the ice that you got? Then you do not need to export 75% and import other ice to cover the "out of area" POSes. Yes its a overwhelming thing to do, 1000's of POSes, but it does solve the issue. (Ive been involved with the setup and take down of a few POSes. I know the magnitude of what I'm saying. Also that some POSes just are not that good for some applications). Then you just ship the ozone to high sec.

Somewhere it was stated that low and Null ice fields will be slightly bigger. This implies something much less than your recommendation of 10x.

I foresee blobs of 100 ice miners going from system to system, stripping each belt in just a few minutes. Then locust like, moving to the next. Others log in: No ice. Their only choice: Join the locust blob.

In any event, the amount of ice in high sec can only support about 35% of the ice miners that are currently operating there. The ice just will not spawn fast enough to support more, and the faster miner cycle will cause what does spawn to go away quickly. How many will do other activities? Or just log out? Drop alt accounts? Quit the game? Time will tell.

Here's an idea:
1) Keep the current miner cycle speed, or maybe buff it 25% to 50%
2) Make Null belts all contain the better isotope ice, like Thick Blue Ice, and none of the basic ice.
2a) Low sec could all be the better type too.
3) Make the better isotope ice be twice as good as high sec ice.


I liked your 4^n analysis. I note that the high ends will still be overproduced in Null, giving Null an income source selling it to high sec, and giving industrialists in High a source of those minerals. Ore actually seems to be in good shape from this change.

ozone is the new technetium.

wanna have sov? can't, gotta have a supercap, which you can only get if you have sov.

wanna fly *any* cap, or run *any* POS? can't, have to have sov because of prohibitively expensive ice prices.

Sounds like these changes are breaking EVE even more than it already is.

Or you just ship it raw and pass the markup on to the consumer.

There's also the point pmchem made. As CCP does more and more to de-emphasize top down (eg moon) income as a source of alliance income in the future, bottom up income, including mining taxes, will be more and more important. Right now buffing the Rorqual would be a means to evading those taxes more easily, thanks to how taxation works. Now if we want to discuss changing how mining taxes are collected (say, automatically at point of collection; I'm sure we can come up with a reasonable lore based explanation), then I'd be happy to talk about and advocate for compression buffs.


I think you're getting ahead of yourself. We don't actually have the details about the belt volumes yet. If it proves to be an issue, I'll make a note of it and bring it up with Fozzie directly

As to the respawn timer, there should be about 650 nullsec anomalies by my count, compared to the ~100 that will exist in highsec. Those ~100 will supply 80% of the game's ice, which means nullsec would be capable of supplying about 500% of the game's ice, even if those belts are only 2500 block belts. That number goes higher, of course, if the block count climbs. So, I don't really see the need for them to respawn instantly.


The timezone imbalance in the ore sites is a good point here.




Before prices went bonkers a couple months ago, dark glitter looks to have been worth 25-30m/hr, and the racial ices around 10m (with a mackinaw and max boosts.)

At today's prices, that's 16-19m/hr for the racial ices and about 36m/hr for the dark glitter.

That means that post-patch, at today's prices, the racial ices will be in the 32-38m/hr range and the dark glitter will be worth 72m/hr.

So, excuse me while I express absolutely zero sympathy that you will be "forced" to mine something so "terrible" that it will be worth more than dark glitter is now. Your income is going to be considerably higher overall than a highsec ice miner's will be, even if the sites are still only 2500 blocks, so there's no actual risk/reward imbalance between ice. If a risk/reward imbalance exists, its between the highsec ice sites and the nullsec ore sites, but given that the ore sites have 4-8x the volume and respawn instantly, I'd say that the nullsec ore sites still have the competitive edge.

It'll be interesting to see how fast these NULL SEC ice fields deplete versus HI SEC fields.
Do NULL SEC ICE bears ISBOX like you see in HI SEC with 20 odd ships?

Because we haven't officially taken office yet or something. And, I've got 1100 more likes on the other character that I used to post on. And, I've only been posting on this character for a couple of months, so I'd pass you in short order anyway.

So there.


I know plenty of miners in null multibox just the same way that many in highsec do. How fast the belts deplete will depend on their size.