Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The Retriever and Mackinaw keep the solo and low-attention mining crown thanks to their untouched massive ore bays. They'll be getting a slight decrease to their yield to help moderate their strength, as the previous round of balancing underestimated how much players value ore hold size.

why shouldn't we? this is an mmo where content is created by player interaction.

if you want to play solo, there are many other games that cater to that play style. they're called single player games.

confirming it's idiotic to promote player interaction and conflict in a game where content is fueled by player interaction and conflict

there is no problem with my post, but you sure are butthurt.

you can't please all of the people, all of the time.

i'm fine with them sacrificing a bit of some one else's game to benefit the masses.

Changing the mining bonus to a duration based one is of some help to the issue I will bring up. But the Skiff, and to some extent the Mack, still have one big disadvantage compared to the Hulk: fewer strips. To see the issue, consider:

Most miners target a roid, and let the miner run its full cycle. If the roid is small, some fraction of the cycle will be wasted. With the Hulk, if one of your strips is on a small roid you will lose some small fraction of your total yield, up to a maximum of one third.

But with the Skiff, you could lose up to a complete cycle by targeting a small roid. As the single strip takes so much ore in one cycle, there is a greater chance the roid will pop and you lose part of the cycle.

The result is under most practical uses, the Skiff mines much less than your table of numbers would indicate.

How to fix? I see three methods.
1) Redo the models so all mining ships have the same number of strips.
2) Make the strips on the Skiff cycle faster (but still produce the same cubic meters per minute). Of course the player can do this manually, but it just makes mining even more of a click fest.
3) Make it so if you mine a small roid, the miner starts its cycle part way through, so its timed to end just as the roid runs out of minerals. (This would fail if there are two strips on the same roid. But, that is a rare case anyway).

#2 is the only one that can be done by just changing stats. The others require more coding.

If the hulk had the same capacity as the mackinaw there would be NO REASON to ever use the mackinaw. However I agree there should be some boost to the hulk ore bay. Currently as it stands a pilot with exhumers 5 fills the hulk bay over 75% in a single cycle. At that rate you would need to empty the ore bay every single cycle. Couple an orca and/or a rorqual ad this becomes an extreme micromanage ship (one of the reasons i don't mine). This should be increased to the point I feel that you should be able to get at least 2 cycles before filling it even at max skill.

For the love of God, give Mach's more PWG and CPU, It's on extremely extremely tight fit to tank it with 1 invu and 2x amplifiers which doesn't work. It's like you are saying "No, you can't tank it you need to die for using this ship !!"