Player Features and Ideas Discussion

ALL:

I joined Eve about 3 months ago and have been reading voraciously on as many topics as I can. My first and main job is mining. After my first retriever was ganked in TAMA, I realized there's no way to protect myself in 0.3 space as a solo miner.

After a few more gankings, only in retrievers and a mackinaw, and some more research from both perspectives, the gankers ("gankstas"?) definitely have an unfair advantage. They can come up to your machine while cloaked, scan it for tanking equipment, go refit in a staging area, and come back for the suicide run.

Insurance is a small help. Platinum insurance raises the ship cost by about 1/3. Worse, I've always been podded. There's no penalty for the pirates, and so there's no reason to not pod the defenseless miner. [Implants are expensive.]

Insurance for the implants are, I suppose, out of the question.

IDEA#1: So here's the idea. Let's have pirates that do not pod their prey be in one category, "non-podding criminals," and pirates that do pod be in another category, "podding criminals.". The difference is that the authorities will attack "podding criminals" and destroy not only their ride but also their pod. This makes it more expensive for podding.

IDEA#2: put self-destruct on more expensive, larger ships only.

IDEA#3: add the ability for pilots to hire NPC "bodyguards," scaling force and time by cost. This allows some safety for solo miners in exchange for some of their profits. Considerations like war and traveling between factions and other issues make this a can of worms, but there is some potential in this idea for people who still want to fly mackinaws and retrievers but cannot adequately tank, or who would rather fit for mining speed than for tanking. So I need some constructive ideas to flesh this one out.

Thanks for reading -- hope this inspires you!

Mateo

Hi Andrew,

I couldn't agree more. And I've never been back.

Regards,

Mateo

Unfortunately the way this game has grown has made it very difficult for the solo player to thrive as they can in other games.

Mining in low-sec is something that you can do, especially now since CCP introduced the higgs anchor rig to the game. Fit on of these, warp in to a book mark past the belt and align to your safe spot as you mine. Depending on where you set up your safes in relation to the belt you mine, you can fill your entire ore hold as you pass through the belt, while staying aligned the entire time you mine. Keep an eye on local and D-scan and you should be pretty safe.

Otherwise, use a procurer or a skiff and fit them with a sturdy shield tank and a damage control. Train for and keep one flight of ecm drones and one flight of warriors. Send out the ECM drones if you get tackled and if your opponent drops scram flee- you should already be aligned. If your ECM drones fail to jam immediately and the tackle is squishy enough a flight of warrior IIs can make short work of them.

Also, you should have a travel tab you can switch to if you think your ship is about to be destroyed, or a bookmark that you're ready to warp to. Pods insta-align, so you should never lose one in lowsec, unless it's to a smartbomb.

You can never really protect yourself totally from ganking, best you can do is make yourself a less appealing/more costly target to gank. You also need to factor in a risk/reward ratio you can fly a tanked Procuer, or a mining yield mackinaw, or anything in between on the scale. As much as I of course don't like losing a ship, you can't really play this game trying to "avoid" losing a ship, but rather "lessen" the loss instead.

Also take note that Mining barges used to be a whole lot less durable than the are now, so adjustments have already been made in favor of the miner in that regards.

There are a number of options to defend against gank attacks already, many of which involve having allies.

As far as options for solo miners.. stay in high sec and try to have enough tank to last til concord can save you, and keep your head down. granted neither of these are really appealing options, but they are what we have.

As far as options beyond that... I can't really think of anything, the bounty system is meaningless, and restrictions from criminal status can be worked around, and I'm not familiar with how effective hiring merc corps is. Also, even if a miner could exact punishment on a ganker, that would likely only increase the risk of being ganked, as a reaction is one of the things that many gankers seek out (if not the main goal).

The only changes I can see that are viable imo is to adjust the risk/reward ratio, or make changes so drastic that half the player base would quit.

Given that CCP likes adding more options rather than limiting options, one idea I could see as viable is to increase the range between high tank/low cost/low profit and Low tank/High cost/High profit. Perhaps a mining barge only module that greatly increase defenses at the cost of yield, and a module that increases yield at the cost of defense. As this would amplify options that already exist.

Hey OP, do you realize that the entire reason people loathe and target miners is because they constantly beg CCP to have highsec made safer and safer, and to make it more difficult to kill them at the expense of the gameplay of everyone interested in highsec PVP. The desire of miners to mine AFK for hours without interacting with anyone has had a direct negative impact on the gameplay of thousands of other players and miners don't ever stop asking for the next nerf to PVP so they can just be a little more safe.

Gankers have an advantage over miners because of the things they do and know. They scout their targets, know how much DPS or alpha they need, they get good warp ins, they fit their ships appropriately and above all they cooperate with others when they need to.

Miners are at a disadvantage because of the things they don't do and don't know. They don't actually look at their client while mining, they don't tank their ships, they don't attempt to maintain any kind of awareness of the threats around them and they absolutely love to mine all by themselves with nobody to help them if hey get attacked.

Planning, knowledge and cooperation win and deserve to win against ineptitude, ignorance and isolation.

If you want to mine and not get killed then actually play the game while playing the game and play it with some of the tens of thousands of other players you're logged in with and you'll probably find you get exploded less.

Procurer is designed to tank to battleship standards. If your main concern is not losing your ship than that is the barge to fly. Barges now give the player choice and it's up to you to choose.

First of all: -1 for all of your three ideas. They wouldn't change anything.

With being only 3 months to the game, i can understand, that you are not happy about losing 2 retrievers and espacially 1 mackinaw. But you have to realize, that these losses were very much your own fault. You learned the hard way, that there are other players, who will gank your mining ship. Now you have to learn how you can avoid that or at least minimze the risk of becoming target again.

Your first loss was a Retreiver in Aunenen.
So, you went to lowsec with a Retriever. Bad idea from the start.
Even worse, you went to Aunenen. A system famous for being camped.
You had absolutely no modules fitted. No tank, no warp core stabs, no prop-mod, nothing......

Very similar:
Your second loss was a Retriever in Tama.
Just.... don't go to Tama

Now to your Mackinaw loss in Piekura:
You left 3 mid-slots empty.
You used Drone Mining Rigs, while mining ice.
You got ganked by "CODE."-alliance.

Enough of your mistakes, here are a few hints, on how to survive next time:

- Stay in highsec, untill you know the game and its mechanics better.
- Minimize the risk of becoming a gank-target, by flying tanked procurers or skiffs. You can google for anti-gank fits.
- Never leave slots on your ship empty.
- Find quiet systems to mine in. You can use the ingame map, to see kills in the last 24 hours or use DOTLAN to get info on a system before you go there.
- Always pay attention to who is in your system. Add known gankers (espacially CODE) to your watchlist. As soon as you see them entering local, get to safety, or at least start aligning, so you can warp out fast.

That would be a good start, i guess.

Anyways, i wish you good luck out there and...

...welcome to EVE.

Not really. I made some decent money mining Jaspet in a quiet low-sec system on the side for a month or two, until I got kicked out. You can even jetcan mine in some instances - it's just about finding the right system.

OP, none of your ideas seem to address any problems (or "problems"). First, you should not get podded in high-sec. A catalyst will take much longer to lock your pod than it will take you to get off grid. I'm not sure what you're trying to address with self-destruct. A long self-destruct would be meaningless versus a gank (which lasts < 1 minute), an instant self-destruct would deprive all pirates of their kill.

Finally, you mention NPC bodyguards. Nothing makes me facepalm more than when people suggest bringing along muscle on a high-sec mining op. Listen: you can not fight gankers. They have already accepted that they will lose their ship. They have already accepted that they will lose their ship within 20 seconds. Unless you have a multiboxer fleet of 30 cruisers standing by to blap their asses, there's nothing you can do.

Ultimately, suicide ganking is balanced enough for high-sec miners. You're just misplacing where the balance should be. The balance isn't during the gank itself, but in the miner's ability to avoid ganks entirely. Gankers hang around high-traffic systems and ice systems because this is the easiest place they will find those plump, juicy Exhumers they want. If you find low-traffic systems in low-security space then you can mine for weeks without getting targeted.

Jenshae a barges armour is not built for combat. big or not, every available space is made for mining equipment and ore bay capacity. The physical models may be a little unrepresentative because they are still the models that were used pre-specialisation, where the hulk WAS the biggest and tankiest. maybe we'll get new ones sometime.

Now a Hulk still tanks like a cruiser, a ship of similar size that is DESIGNED for combat with thick armour and shielding. its only a small tank compared to the tankiest sub caps in the game.

You can always fly a Skiff.

Stop mining, worst ******* profession in game....everybody loathes you no matter how much you spout about being the backbone for holding up the industry of creating ships. Surprisingly, CCP could remove the entire branch and just seed minerals with the ability to fluctuate price at their whim....you wouldn't see a change in anything other than people bitching how they trained for mining only. Mining is designed to anchor a corp to one location, with the intent to set up processing into building industry, and make you nothing more than a shooting range of static targets while the entire rest of the game playing combat ships move about cause nothing is tying them down to one location and nobody wants to watch over miners. So, stop mining and just go train guns, surprisingly you can still "mine" ships with autocannons or hybrids than reprocess for minerals at a much worse rate