Player Features and Ideas Discussion

TL;DR

Sell procurers/covetors/hulks

Buy skiffs

Train 21 day free trial hauler alt for skiff w/ throwaway Miasmos

Sell retty/mack

?

Profit

I'm OK with the new the designs, but the way they were implemented on the old models is just plain fugly.

I know, this is mostly a rp thing again, but if you had designed these ships from scratch, you would not have done it like this, and you (hopefully) know it.

I mean, here is the Hulk: a ship designed for superiour mining yield. It lacks good defenses or a large cargo bay, but despite that and being the biggest ship of the three, is has the lowest yield per turret of the 3 ships.
Now how does that make sense? The biggest ship has no room for the amazing 1-turret-mines-as-3 tech despite not having defenses or large ore bay?

It would have made more sense if you applied the Hulk stats to the Skiff model and vice versa (while keeping the Skiff 1-turret-as-3 bonus on the skiff of course), it would still be cheap and ugly, but at least it would make more sense.

And why so cheap anyway, you design combat ships quite regularly, why do the miners get this cheap solution? Aren't they worthy of new models?

we ever going to see a tech II mining frig?

...Asking a dedicated PVP ship to defend a mining fleet can often lead to mind numbing boredom for the PVP pilot, so we're providing the option for players to make sacrifices in their mining ships to allow self-defense.

Definitely agree that asteroids should have a massive sig bloom, but you don't want to nerf a barge's res too much. Cruiser-level (rather than the current frigate-level) ought to be sufficient, as you need to tell your drones what's scratching the paint before your hull tanking skills kick in.

I just want to reiterate what I said in an earlier post as I feel it bears further emphasis. With the barge's quick locking time, +50% bonus to drone damage and a battleship tank, the procurer will be frickin *nasty* against small ships, and that's with level 1 barge skill. I strongly suggest reducing the locking speed and consider giving only the skiff the 10% drone damage bonus.

1. Procurer midslot nerf - basically this works out to a yield nerf with the loss of a midslot, in order to get the roughly the same EHP you have to consume two low slots (RB II + DCU II) but you only gain one additional low slot from the change and you lose a midslot. So assuming you still need a large tank to survive a gank attempt long enough for help to arrive, you will take a yield nerf to get it. For Procurer PvP bait, losing the midslot just means less fitting options, which is basically fail as well since Skiffs are generally too expensive to use as bait. Procurers also become more obvious bait since it is SOP to use cheap post-nerfed ships as bait. I don't really see the point to either of these changes.

3. Skiff buff - Probably will make the Skiff the best mining ship in the game, excellent yield, decent size ore bay, incredible tank and great drone DPS. This could be a rather significant nullsec mining buff since the drone HP and DPS bonuses could allow this ship to solo null belt rats, though I would have to defer to the nullbears for the final take on that. For any ore belts and anomalies that are close to a station, this is the go-to ship. Skiffs will probably also entirely displace Covetors/Hulks in corp mining fleets since the latter didn't get the buffs where they were needed and the yield bonuses aren't worth the paper thin tank. But this brings up what could be a major problem with this buff in that every botter and ISBoxer in New Eden will be buying fleets of these ships and fielding them with the usual Orca + Freighter setup and they will be almost impossible to harass by suicide gankers, at least not economically. It would take an entire gank fleet to take out a couple of Skiff botters with this change, and I don't think this is good for Eve. I've had quite good faith that mining bots were more or less policed by players via suicide ganking, and that if players decided they just didn't like botting/ISBoxing, they could take justice into their own hands if they so chose. Well post-patch, player policing may no longer be viable against this class of miners. Now, I have nothing against ISBoxing per-se (of course I hate botting, but thats a given), the problem here is that in the long run most highsec mining ganks will fall entirely on the small time miners in retrievers and macks, and that would be unfortunate to say the least.