Science & Industry

I'm sure this info is out there somewhere and I'm just incapable of finding it, but how do ore sites "respawn" within a system? That is, do some currently existing ore sites have to be popped before another can potentially appear, or do the currently existing sites simply disappear after a certain amount of time?

Also, I hope i posted this in the correct section

Awesome, thanks for the info.

actually it depends on the site. The static sites, formerly hidden belts spawned by prospection array sov upgrades will respawn almost immediately after depletion. then there are the random belts, that used to be the normal gravametric sites that can spawn anywhere restricted on by security level. if you find one of these random belts in a system, when it is depleted it will respawn, not sure exactly what the timer is, but it can respawn anywhere. there is very little chance of it respawning in the same system, or even constellation.

However, as these sites are now very easy to find they are cleared a lot faster, and thus respawn more frequently, increasing your chance to have one spawn near your home system. They used to be very hard to find, requiring good scaning skills and equipment, now any noob or ganker can find them.

These new ore sites were a great addition, but I would like to see us still have the hard to find gravametric sites in game. Some of us relied on the safety net provided by the difficulty to find them when mining in non friendly territory. Keep the ore anomalies as they are, but please bring back the random gravametric sites for those of us who actually relied on them.

I believe it is some what random between 2-4 days. May not be random for sov spawned sites, i never payed attention when I mined they as they were mostly always up.

A site that spawns and is not completed will despawn on its own, but sites that are depleted will respawn near instantly. in the same system if they are spawned by a prospecting array, or in a random location if they are random sites.

To offset the increased value of null sec ores with more risk in mining them

(I don't agree with the change, but that is why they did it)

I would like some more exploration also. Part of the fun of mining a grav site was finding it and scoping it out. I have scanned down plenty of sites and just sold them. The newer way isn't as fun to me and makes mining feel even more robotic and dangerous.

It was difficult to mine in a non high sec system but at least they had to work to find me. Now they just have to click one time and they are with me. Don't get me wrong, I do like to the pre scanned sites but I very much miss the old kind. I would support almost any kind of ideas to bringing them back.

My suggested solution is to replace the pre scanned grav with WHs and make the WH grav sites static. WH guys know what they are doing and nothing, as far as mining, would change for them. I also think seeing WH on the auto scanner would lure people into them. This would be exploration and would add some content for WH corps by giving them targets and new recruits that think WHing is cool. Lots of ships lost in a WH because I like to risk it but I made more than I lost. It was fun and I will never forget some of those pops.

Which is a complete contradiction to the original idea of grav sites. Grav sites were among the hardest sites to find, with the smallest signatures, the better the site, the harder it was to find. This is how is was for years. I hated it when I was a noob because I could never get a grav site to 100%.

I learned to appreciate how hard these sites were to find, and the rewards for putting the time and effort into finding them. With time I came to appreciate the safey associated with those sites. Not that they were ever "safe", But in area's of space where it would be suicide to mine in a static belt, the grav sites were minable provided you kept a hawks eye on D-scan. Now you are safer in the static belts, even though it is still suicide to mine in them.

Making the old grav sites anomalies was a nice step for newer players. new explorers can now access these sites without help, and get hooked on exploration without having to invest months into training scanning skills. However, even though the ore anomalies are a nice addition, the grav sites should not have been removed. We should have both. The good grav sites gave the veteran miner/explorers something to search for, that took time and skill to find. Something that would give a higher isk/hr than normal mining, but require more effort and skills to access. The fact that potential gankers had to put comparable skill and effort into finding you inside one of these sites is what made them worth looking for, even above the higher end ores that were found in them.

I do not consider mining deep inside Sov null empires to be mining in dangerous space. What I speak of is low sec, NPC null, W-space, and maybe some sections of sov null held by smaller groups that can not defend their space as well as the power blocks.

Two things are required to get miners out of high sec into such dangerous space.

-First of all the isk/hr has to be much better than what they can get in high sec. I do not mean a calculated isk/hr based on the ships max yield multiplied by the value of the ore, but actual isk/hr of the whole operation. 60M/hr based on max yield is not 60M/hr when you only spend 20 minutes out of every hour actually mining, it is now 20M/hr, much lower than can be made in high sec.

- Second, miners need the ability to mitigate the added risk through, skill, experience, and planing. there is no isk in a suicide operation that may be ganked in the first 5-10 minutes.

This was possible with the grav sites. There was still a lot of risk, but considering the only threat was from ships with the ability to scan you down, and you could watch for there scan probes on d-scan, the risk could be mitigated, even in a system with considerable traffic.

The problem came in when you added in the logistics of getting that ore you mined to market. Even if using a jump freighter the cost and risk invloved in the logistics reduced the isk/hr of the operation much closer to that of a high sec operation. This resulted in this activity not becoming very popular, the risk was just to high for a reward comparable to what could be had in high sec.

Now rather than balancing this risk vs reward to make this activity actually worth while, CCP removed in completely. Sure those who have no idea what it takes to set up an operation like this will say, the sites are still there, you just have to protect your ships. The thing is the size of fleet that would be required to provide that needed protection , could be used to take and hold sov space, If they had such a fleet at their disposal they would not be in this dangerous space to begin with.

this change of grav sites over to anomalies did not add any targets for the gankers. There were not many miners brave enough to enter these area's before the change, now their are none. So you actually lost targets. What is the better option. Having targets in these system, that take work and planing to gank, or not having targets at all? Sure ideally removing that layer of protection and having the miners stay would be grerat for the gankers, but that will never happen.

Take an example of a hunter, out hunting deer in the woods. The deer have many places to hide, the hunter has to be clever to get close enough to spot the deer and take the shot, without the deer seeing him. it would be much easier for the hunter if all the trees and brush were gone. he could then spot the deer from a long way off, with nothing in the way to block the shot. However if there were no trees or brush to hid in the deer would not be there, as it would be suicide to stay. Thus the hunter would have a clear easy shot at nothing.

As much as I hate being ganked, I accept ganking as a normal part of any MMO. However I am not going to sit out in the open as a free shot for the first ganker that comes along. I will do what I can to mitigate the risk, and make the ganker work for the kill. As a miner I do not have the tank or DPS to fight back, my only defense is evasion. if mining an ore anomaly in dangerous space means I have no way of mitigating that risk, or evading the passing gankers, I will simply go somewhere else, I will not operate a suicide mining operation. The gankers have gone from having targets that were hard to catch, i.e. a good hunt, to having nothing to hunt at all.