Assembly Hall

The changes to industry and exploration that came with Odyssey were good in many ways. Null sec now has much more industrial capacity. although we have yet to see a significant increase in the activities that capacity can support. industrialists have been given more means to function in null sec, but have yet to be given a motive to move. These players will no be forced out of high sec, they need to see something that makes them want to go, despite the added risk. Many will never leave high sec, but the bigger that incentive is the more will go.

Even weeks after Odyssey I still have not seen any justification for the move from gav sites to anomalies. Why? it just does not make sense. let us consider some points.

- There will now be more targets for ganker, as everyone knows ganker prefer targeting players that can not shoot back like miners. Now all those miners hiding in the grav sites will be sitting duck targets for gankers.

No there will not. The miners that were sitting in those hidden belts before were only there because they could mitigate the risk. They were only vulnerable to ships with probe launchers, or cunning gankers that would set up traps. As both of those are rather rare, the risk level was acceptable. Now that the tools to mitigate that risk have been taken away, those miners that were hard to find before will not even be there now. They will not be sitting ducks, just waiting for a ganker to stumble upon them like a rat in a belt. they will move to somewhere that they do not have to rely on luck for survival.

- Players who never bothered with exploration before now have a mechanic drawing attention to it. Exploration will become much more common.

Yes this is true. Odyssey will encourage many who have never tried exploration before to give it a try. But what does this have to do with grav sites? changing grav sites to anomalies does nothing to improve this. Moving ICE fields to anomalies was a nice change, they were static belts before, not grav sites, this would have made them slightly harder to find for those that do not know how to activate their ship scanner. However considering that is automated now, ICE fields are basically exactly the same effort to find as they were before. You just click on the list of scanned sited rather than the overview. Not a big deal at all, but a step towards eliminating the over view entirely, which I understand is a goal eventually.

However why include grav sites in this? It would have made sense to move all static belts to anomalies to get them off the overview, but grav sites and static belts are very different things. While this was a good change for ICE belts, it was very bad for grav sites. Why eliminate grav sites? Make all the static belts aonamlies like the ICE fields, but leave the grav sites as they were.

Grav sites offered improved isk/hr to the miners over the static belts available in the same system, but at the cost of being harder to find. You needed the skills and equipment to finbd them to get that improved isk/hr. Now they are as easy to find as static belts. - imbalance #1.

Grav sites offered increased income for those willing to put in the extra effort. Now they are available to anyone via the new active scanner. Why? is that not what static belts are for? If this is the way the game is heading then just remove all static belts and add more ore anomalies and all mining can be done in anomalies. It makes no sense to offer the higher value belts at zero effort required to find them. - imbalance #2

Grav sites outside of high sec offered a extra layer of security, Considering that mining ships are sitting ducks with no way of defending themselves they need all the protection they can get when operating in dangerous space. With the protection of the grav sites mining ships were only really threatened by other ships with the means to scan them down. Through the use of D-scan you would see the probes and have plenty of notice to warp to safety before the potential gankers arived. Provided you were paying attention, not semi AFK. To some this seemed to be excessively safe, yet mining in these sites in low sec and NPC null sec was still very uncommon. Why? while the threat to miners is not just while they are mining, they are slow travellers, and they still nedd to get the ore to a station once it is mined. Low sec and NPC null sec where still to dangerous to be worth the risk even with that added safety of the grav sites. Yet this layer of safety was removed, making mining even more dangerous in these area's than before. Now any ship can see the ore anomaly within seconds of jumping into the system, and the miner will not get any warning on D-scan via scanning probes that there is an incoming threat. Where a miner could once mine with the only real threat being hostile probers, now every ship that jumps into the system is an immediate threat. This is not a slight increase in risk, but an astronomical increase in risk, to an activity that was already such a high risk almost nobody did it. - imbalance #3

Mining deep inside alliance territory has always been fairly safe. With good intel channels you know about gankers while they are several jumps out. you rarely see a neutral let alone a hostile in the system you are mining in. and there are always roaming defense fleets in the area that will jump on any incoming ganker fleet before they get to the miners. The added level of safety provided by the grav site was not really needed here, but was still nice to have. Yet even in these systems where mining seems to be even safer than in high sec, many of the miners have been on the forums complaining about cloaked campers disrupting operations. A single cloaked frigate could render all that safety void. So the risks here is still high. removing a layer of safety here makes the situation worse. - imbalance #4

As a long term Null sec miner I agree with all of this. The fact that a ganker enters a system and can warp to the site in less time than it takes an Orca to get up to speed and warp out, makes mining in Grav sites more dangerous than Belt Mining. I agree with all the other changes that have taken place, the fact that we can now get enough Trit to actually build Cap ships without importing massive amounts is a wonder.