Science & Industry

Improved racial ice? Details or did I miss it?

The higher yeild stuff - Smooth, Pristine, etc.

Thanks again Fozzie for trying to kill off Ice Botters, this seem like the perfect way to do it.

Maybe you should reduce the cycle time on the Ice belts, Iincrease the ice amount so that we are not mining everyday just to keep a few tower going.

Make the Null Sec Ice have more yield since it a much Higher risk, also why not make it so that system that have some Industry Level have a chance to spawn an Ice belt too, these would help a lot as well.

Properly botter be killed, but what is the miners with multi boxers or people with multiple chars?
these are now more or less unemployed because they are much too small belts.
if there are more than 5 or 6 chars sit inside the belts are empty after 1-2 hours
In large systems are currently 40 people in an ice belt
after an update ice belt would be so empty after less than one hour.
except that this will increase the amount of ice prices

sry for my bad english :/

I agree. The miners who mine the anom will know exactly when it falls. They will set a timer and know when it will come back. Botters aren’t that dumb they will know when the belts are drained throughout the day. I think it should be a random respawn in more than one system. For instance in amarr space Ice belts are being removed with no anoms to replace them. Why not add more systems in the non amarr areas equal to the ammount of the old amarr systems that had ice. When an anom is mined out in 3 to 4 random hours it spawns in a random system that can spawn ice anoms.

Example:
Lets say a random number of 24 systems can spawn ice anoms. Only 12 anoms can appear at one time The ice in system 1 gets mined out. It will be replaced by another ice anom between 3 to 4 hours in one of the 24 systems. If some one overlooks a system for too long anoms will build up in a system allowing some lucky person to find maybe 3 to 4 belts in an overlooked system.

tbh making the venture not only a frig, but with built in warp stabs was a big mistake. I still don't know what they were thinking.

Look at it this way. Low sec ice will give the Procurer a job. No one uses it atm.

There is still a mismatch of intentions to changes.

The value of the ices should be glare crust < dark glitter < gelidus < krystallos. Even with the proposed changes to Krystallos it will be worse than Gelidus. Gelidus is 500-250-75, and the proposed Krystallos is 500-125-125 (ozone-heavy water-strontium). Ozone is where the value of the nullsec ices comes from. To properly balance the ices there should be a shift in ozone refining yields for each ice type. Glare Crust should have 150 ozone, Dark Glitter 250, Gelidus 500, and Krystallos should be 1000. This will create a real demand for the better ice field systems because the burst mining yield is actually succulent.

The 4hr respawn times on ice fields will only prevent casual players from being able to mine during primetime, thus making ice mining an inaccessible profession to timezone restricted players. The 4hr respawn timer should be removed entirely, and balance of supply should be controlled through the refined ice product yields. This can be accomplished by changing racial ice to producing 200 isotopes instead of 300, lowsec should have an improved racial at 300 isotopes, and nullsec a better improved at 400 isotopes/block. This will actually create a sectioned risk/reward jump (0.0 > lowsec > highsec) and bring ice miners out of empire. At the very least, the low and nullsec ice field respawn timers should be shorter than 4hrs (3&2hrs, 2&1, or preferably instant respawn).

Lastly, the ice compression BPOs need to have their cycle times improved to bring them more in line with ore miners. This is a very simple database change of a single number per BPO. Either changing the runtime of the BPO, or by having them consume batches of 10 ice per run instead of only 1.

I realize at this point you're fairly attached to the respawning ice fields because you've already built the code for them. But it's really not the best or easiest way to solve the problem. I know you want to showcase the new "non-grav" scan-down grav sites because they're new and shiny. But a simple rebalance of ice refining yields will easily fix the system without the need for a 4hr respawn timer that frustrates everyone. The new scan down system is okay - without the 4hr respawn timer. But it's rebalancing the ice products that will bring order to the Force, and will allow ice mining to continue as a profession that everyone can enjoy.

Its trivial to swap from and ice fitted mack to an ore fitted mack and carry on mining till the ice respawns. Better still would be to completely removed the DOWNTIME respawn, both from ICE and ORE belts, only respawning them when they are mined out or the industry index changes.

Unlike ORE mining, ICE mining isn't being affected by Industry Index. Instead of tying the ICE types solely to the security status, adding in the alliance industry index, or faction warfare level as a factor to allow alliances another reason to hold and develop space, AND kill poachers, would add additional gameplay both in null sec and for faction warfare.



ORE and ICE are already so easy to smuggle to empire that refinery taxes in null sec are a purely optional tax for most people. Making fast movement of compressed ORE and ICE across EVE even easier makes this even worse.

While you are at it, adding a four hour delay into the respawn of ORE sites would be perfectly reasonable, as well as bringing all the static asteroid belts in the game into this system.

The spirit of these changes was to offset isotope harvesting to low/nullsec because highsec produced too many. If there are better incentives for mining racial ices in nullsec then it will happen.


Goonswarm has their own agenda that rarely overlaps with that of the public good. As an actual miner I can tell you quite clearly that exporting ice/ore to empire is not trivial. Right now ore is rarely exported to empire because the refined mineral yield is much smaller than the ores. And ice is exported to empire out of necessity because nullsec cannot consume it and highsec needs it.

One of the major issues here is that non-miners are the ones advising CCP on how to change the mining profession. As both of you are doing.


This is completely inaccurate for highsec miners. Highsec ore belts are completely stripped clean within hours of downtime, especially centered around the mining hubs (ice systems). The highsec ice profession as we know it is about to completely die.

In a nullsec upgraded system it is possible to shift into ore ships. But as I've said in my analysis thread, I like the ore changes because they make sense and actually accomplish a reasonable goal. I consider nullsec ore mining to be a viable profession. BUT, why would we artificially restrict low and nullsec ice miners when the entire goal was to encourage them? The "supply problem" has never been with the low and nullsec ices. It's always been a highsec problem. If there's a highsec supply problem, then address that issue by itself.

Factoring in industry index or faction warfare would be good, and would add incentive to groups of players to work together.

Just because Goonswarm hasn't yet found a way to make isk from miners doesn't mean you need to destroy the entire ice mining profession. Goonswarm is hurting for income after the expansion because of the collapse of technetium.

You're foaming at the mouth over possible tax income you see from "more ice miners in nullsec" that you're pushing really hard for these changes. You don't care that the changes will destroy the ice mining profession because you might make some short-term isk. Casual highsec players will no longer be able to ice mine at all. Nullsec ice will cater entirely to the poacher rather than the true industrialist. The changes are bad.

You have a problem with tax evasion. Not with ice mining. Your problems are independent and you shouldn't be dragging down one part of the game in a futile effort to prop up your own.

You have a prominent voice in the media and the CSM, so they believe you are actually representative of the mining profession. But you are not.

CCP wants there to be more low/nullsec ice miners but have not properly analyzed the implications of the changes. Non-miners have become bandwagoning "yes men" pushing for changes that hurt miners because they have nothing at stake.

If you want to tax nullsec ice mining, that's fine. But there's no reason to gut the profession to get this. There needs to be a reason for miners to want to refine in nullsec and right now there is not. Reasons why you should NOT refine ice in nullsec include:

• Nullsec cannot consume your ice products fast enough (not enough demand)
• Nullsec wants to tax you, highsec does not
• POS refining arrays offer perfect refine for ice (so why refine in a taxable station)
• Refined ice products are larger than the compressed ice blocks (thus shipping products after they've been refined is harder)
• Empire has extremely limited ozone. This demands export of nullsec ice to empire

Now if you want local ice refine in nullsec you'll need to satisfy at least one of these conditions:

• Nullsec needs to have better refine rates than empire (this means nerfing empire)
• Nullsec needs to be able to consume a greater percentage of the ice products that are produced locally
• Ozone, Heavy Water, Strontium need to be smaller m3 than compressed ice, so they can be refined locally and exported to market
• Highsec must no longer demand the majority of the nullsec ice products

The ore mining changes meet many of these criteria, and thus nullsec ore mining has become more viable. Now ore miners can actually build things out in nullsec. And with the instant respawn on the hidden belts there is an infinite supply of minerals waiting to be gathered. The mineral balance can still be improved to cover the shortfall of pyerite/mexallon, but it's a good start.

There's no reason that both problems can't be solved. But they don't need to be solved at the same time. Right now ice mining is about to be destroyed, so that's what we need to debate. Ancillary issues can wait until the proper time. The proposed ice changes are endorsed by non-miners who have nothing at stake but large-scale market manipulation games. There's no reason to run headlong off a cliff here with changes. The ice mining profession can still be saved and it can still be balanced.