Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Was just thinking, that if I was the CEO of ORE inside New Eden I would be very upset over the new Iteron hauls stepping in my my area of specialization. A ship that handles PI hauling, another for minerals, another for ore. It would be an insult and slap to my face. So much so that I would want to look at each of the companies ships and be like, WTF can we do to get players to want to use our ships for hauling.

Meet the Primae
"The Primae is a repurposed ORE design intended to ease the task of extracting resources from planetbound environments. Initially devised as a deep space salvage vessel for large-scale ore retrieval from destroyed ORE fleets in pirate-occupied areas, its previous incarnation was made all but obsolete by the arrival of capsuleers on the interstellar scene. Realizing that the ship could, with a few minor modifications, be made into an efficient resource harvesting aid, ORE wasted no time in revamping the design.

A low signature radius (a holdover from its earlier manifestation) adds a layer of defense to the Primae's already decent plating. In addition, the ship's two large bays have been re-engineered to hold equipment for planetside resource extraction and processed materials, making it an especially useful complement to any planetside harvesting endeavor."

Problem - the holds are way to small and even in its day, it wasn't very useful for PI b/c you could load stuff to the POCO.

Fix - Primae, sees a massive overhaul. Massive increase to the cargo holds. 50k m3+ for the PI (merge PI + Commander Center holds. It would gain and orbital canister drop ability (possible through a hi-slot item). The orbital canister drop would allow a canister to be dropped to a Launchpad on the surface of the would (personally love it more if it would just drop the canister near to a launch pad, then let the player link the canister and pull resources from it. Just not allow resources to move back into it, and once empty is falls in on itself). It would also gain the ability to allow launch pads to send surface goods right to it. Allowing players to avoid all POCO cost.

Noctis? "WTF, just take my tractor ability and steal it with some mobile unit." This ship though still in its place as a salvager, could have some minor tweaks to hold size (possibly to allow players to have a couple mobile tractors and room for a lot of more mission loot/salvage

Orca? Is a lot of ship, and mostly a lot of wasted ship. Massive maintenance hold, slow. Most people hide these babies in POS, so making most of the features even more worthless as the players aren't using them.
Idea, the Orca Prim. Remove the command ship features, replace the maintenance hold with a specialized mining ship hold, add more ore hold space, remove the fleet maintenance and fleet hold.
Basic thought: 75-100k m3 Ore hold. 10-15k m3 Cargo. Drone bay for Combat drones. New ship hold for Venture drones. Allow the ship to use 5 at the start and each level of (one of the ore ship skills) would increase this by one, to a max of 10.
Purpose is to introduce a massive BS sized mining ship, that can't hide in POS to gain ore. Doesn't have the boosting features of its sister, but can out mine Barges, and possible Exhumers for ore. Each Venture drone would be able to mine 250-500m3 every 60s. So, with 10 of these you could be doing 5000m3 every 60s. They would also need to benefit from player passive boost from skills, + Mining-links. So you might see say 500m3 every 45s. Thats a lot of ore moving very fast.
It would continue to have its poor aligning rate, slow speed of the orca. Possible reduction or even removal of all hi-slots. Limited to farming ore/gas depending on the venture drone type. Very costly, looking at the 500 million isk area, + each venture drone would be like 250-350 thousand isk. Would need to also be able to deploy combat drones even when venture drones our in use, maybe enough space for sentry drones (5/5).

Rorqual? Another HIDE ME ship. Would be nice to see a second edition of this ship, that remove some of the rorquals features, and turned it in to more of a mobile POS with a smaller ranged POS style shield. This would say allow the players to move this big risky ship into systems without a POS to start their mining adventures. But still leave the group at a higher risk of lose than normal.

Prime idea:
Keep the current versions of the ORCA and Rorqual, but provide a second version that is much more engaging in the world. Let these ships flee the cage of a POS, and be used more, as well as blown up more.

crapping up highsec?

oh my gosh scary wardecs and gankers....


Its not like nullsec players have to deal with :
Wormholes
Roaming gangs
Cyno campers
Pretty much everyone with blue standings


It is not CCP's fault you live in a crib your entire life and expect it to turn into a mansion.

CCP recently stated in an interview on usgamer that they're going to give mining ships another pass. Chill out. Besides, mining ships are in a good place right now. If they were any better we'd be seeing some problems with the EVE economy.
http://www.usgamer.net/articles/what-are-ccp-games-future-plans-for-eve-online