Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Is low sec space designed to be owned and managed by the largest and best-organized groups? I would argue, "no." It is designed to be accessible and profitable for small corporations and individuals - and it currently is that.

This thread is premised on the idea that mining - a quintessential small group activity - is not attractive in low sec because it is not profitable enough to draw people there to do it. I would argue that people do not go there to do it because there are other things that make more sense for a solo or small gang pilot to do from a reward/risk perspective in that space.

Low sec exploration, belt-ratting, Level 5 missions, and FW are all accessible and profitable for small corporations and individuals. Yes, they accept greater risk for the greater rewards, but unlike null sec, you don't have to be very large and very well-organized to thrive and survive.

We always talk about risk vs reward, but it is more about reward/risk to capital investment, where reward is the expected amount you can make doing a specific activity and risk is the likelihood that you will lose your capital investment conducting that activity. Certain activities are inherently more profitable than others. Likewise, certain activities are inherently more risky than others. The size of the capital investment also matters, because ultimately that determines whether what you are doing makes sense. In my experience, it isn't just about how likely you are to lose your capital investment, but also how easy it is to interrupt your activity by greatly increasing the risk.

My perspective on this is somewhat limited - I do not currently live in low sec permanently. I did, however, spend several months there with various alts assessing the viability of a solo play style. Thus, I have intermittent solo PVP, solo low sec missioning, low sec belt-hunting, and exploration experience. My experience was that there were many people in low sec who would actively hunt for you. It was much like attempting solo work in hostile sovereign space (I've done a fair bit of that too).

In any area with any appreciable traffic, someone would spot your activity/presence and come to investigate further. This incentivizes activities that are harder to investigate - missions are run in deadspace, so combat probes are required; exploration sites also require probing. People ran the belts, presumably looking for the various faction/special spawns, but they did so in agile, semi-disposable, or PVP fits (Vexors were very common). I never saw anyone actually mining. I rarely, if ever, observed people running low sec anomalies. When I was running belts, I frequently had to go to safe spots if I could not handle my potential opponent(s).

It's not that you will automatically die if you mine or run anomalies in low sec, it's just that in high traffic areas, your activity will be interrupted sufficiently often that it ceases to be profitable, when compared with other activities you can conduct in the same space.

Setting up a mining operation takes some time. You scout for the best belt or mining anomaly. You have your booster somewhere (presumably in a friendly POS). You have your miners set up on their rocks. You have your haulers warping back and forth to get the stuff out of the belt. Then a neutral enters local (or gets spotted coming down the pipe by your trusty scout/alt). You warp everyone to the POS/station and dock them up until he passes through. He pokes around for a few minutes, then moves on. You set up again. Another dude comes along. Rinse. Repeat. Even if you never get caught, your activity is sufficiently interrupted that your profit goes way down. This is true in both low and null.

Contrast that with any activity where you must be scanned down to be interrupted. If I am running missions or escalations, I can happily continue until I spot combat probes on d-scan. If I am exploring, I can happily continue as long as I do not see any probes at all (unless my opponent already scanned the site down before I came into system). The effort required to kill me is higher. Unless you catch a mission runner or explorer on a gate (easily avoided in this age of mobile depots), you will not catch him unless he is not paying attention or ignores the risk you present.

Null sec mining is currently not very profitable compared to most other null sec activities, but it is a necessary task. And will hopefully become more necessary in the future as logistics gets harder. It is relatively easy to interrupt null sec mining (one AFK cloaky with a credible hot drop threat is usually enough). Null sec players are expected to organize further if they need to mine ore or ice to keep their empire running. I would like to encourage further organization and cooperation in null sec to mitigate the risk - so I would not make mining in null sec safer.

If people want low sec mining to be a "thing," my suggestion is to put in mining exploration sites again. That will up the effort required to interrupt that activity enough to make it profitable for a small group to mine in low sec. There is no need to buff the value of the ore.

Im not sure where you get that argument from. All security levels of space should have the necessary tools for any size of group to survive and thrive. Arbitrary limitation based on some crackpot theory of "if you want to play big go to nullsec" is fundamentally flawed and a main reason why Low Sec is in the position it is today.

The problem with Lowsec is that it does not offer even close to the required sustenance to carve out a pocket of space and build and thrive. As I displayed on the past page there a very clear and distinct lack of required production materials within lowsec space. Profits aside these are materials that are the base building block for any long term infrastructure to take place. If you can not acquire even the basic building blocks to establish a colony in a location...then why the hell would you. You won't and people don't.

In regards to Nullsec, you do not have to be very large to thrive there either you just need to be smart in where you go and how you live there. Nullsec is very friendly to small nomadic groups largely because it has the functionality that supports progression of a group. You can find everything you need in Nullsec, unlike Low Sec where you absolutely must import a large portion of the basic necessities to facilitate growth. Of course however taking space and living in space are very very different things...if you desire to take space in NS you do need to have a fairly large and oiled machine, if you want to live there well all you need is a jettisoned container a ship and some wits.

Short story is that Lowsec does not have the viability to support groups of people in a "living" capacity. Is there other things to do in LS, certainly, but you can also do all those very same things day tripping to LS from NS or HS. Until the basic building blocks of EVE (minerals) are attainable in lowsec to the same or similar capacity they are available in NS and HS you will not see thriving groups of players outside of FW and the occasional pirate group that hunkers down in X region for whatever purpose.

So just to make sure I am understanding this correctly.

Low Sec shouldn't be changed to be more attractive to groups of people to live in, because it would attract groups of people to live in it that might be more successful at exploiting the viable living conditions than other groups?

That is your counter argument?

Keep lowsec how it is, because if you change it so people would desire to live there, then they might actually live there?

I mean I guess thats reasonable, after all nothing screams arbitrary limits like being resource depleted compared to other regions, for no other reason than, well Im not sure the reason maybe CCP has one though.

That's your interpretation of my words, not what I said, ie. you didn't correctly understand what I said.

What I said is that a system which gives any group size the means to live in an area, only the biggest survive. It happened in Null sec already, where exactly this kind of system is in place.

Low sec is an attractive enough place as it is -- for the right kind of people. The only problem is that EVE lacks the right kind of people or they have died out over the last years. And now people want to change a perfectly fine system in ways that suits the lazy, convenience-driven player base instead of requiring the players to adapt to the perfectly fine working system, in terms of mining yield that is.

Where do you get that with the resource depletion? If no one is mining, as you and others constantly state, the belts should be full to the brim with roids and ore. I also see lots of very valuable ore anoms all over Low sec space, but no one to mine them. The ore is there. What we are missing are the right people, not just to mine them but also those who support them. And the last kind in particular is in utter shortage. Instead of seizing opportunities and trying something "new", people want to remove mining altogether and call miners things that're worse than "being the doormat of the game".

Low sec ores in order of value ranking.
1st, 4th, 7th.
If you count Kernite as low sec since it's mainly available there, 6th.
And this is with Crokite having a sudden resurgence in value.

Nothing is wrong with the value of low site ores, the Market dictates the prices.

Well we can hardly use the current situation of NS as a benchmark of viability for other regions...especially considering the fact it is in the process of being remodeled due to the Sov system being fundamentally broken. But sure lets run with this. Lets imagine that NS only had one viable mineral to access the majority of the time. Do you believe that it would still be the hotbed of popularity it is today. Imagine if you wanted to produce anything at all in NS that you had to import all your materials from outside NS, not because it wasn't safe to get them yourself, but because they just didn't exist in your space. Would you and your corporation continue to live in this space even though you were spending more money importing than you were exporting? Would other people flock to your space to rent from you so they could harvest their one readily available commodity?

I think that NS is a very GOOD example of what having access to required commodities can do. Sure the current state of it is an US or THEM mentality (due to nonresource related mechanics of course) but NS is also the most populated it has ever been, its net production volume is the highest it has ever been, the amount of activity on a day to day basis is the highest it has ever been. This is of course thanks to many years of tweaking and adjusting the access to materials. From the rebalancing of Drone Regions resource reprocessing to the Technetium bottleneck smashing. Nullsec has become a vibrant region of space only through the process of easing regional restrictions on access to materials, procurement of materials, and of course liquid isk generation.

Your implications on large groups dominating lowsec is completely irrelevant however to actually making LS viable. If groups of people wish to band together and work as an organized group the resulting outcome is irrelevant. There is no system in place in LS that would cause one megagroup to be the end all be all. Hell that mentality doesn't even fly in NS. There are thousands and thousands of people who play every single day in NS without holding allegiance to one of the 2 big entities, and they are vibrant groups of people who are capable of living and operating in NS solely because it is actually capable of sustaining positive growth. LS in comparison is capped on the availability of randomly generated anomalies, and access to the Jita market. The differences are quite staggering and the only similarity is that Concord doesn't exist in either area.

I had periods of up to 4 hours with no one else in local. It takes about 5-10 minutes to get setup (including logging in). Yes I had a POS set up, but in my case I was using the POS for other things, so I didn't factor that in as a cost for the mining. No I had no intel channel, didn't need one, I had local.

And no I wasn't using any kind of "external help" as you put it. Believe it or not, alt+tab (or what I was actually doing, clicking windows on the start bar) works just fine.

My setup process went like this:

Log all clients in in a specific order, so as miners (covetors) were arranged into pairs (I have 2 monitors) and haulers/Orca were last on the windows list. Setup fleet into 2 squads of 5 covetors and a hauler. One Covetor pilot had squad command, the orca was in wing command. Overviews were set to show only one type of rock per pilot (one pilot for Veld, one for Jaspet, one for Scordite etc) Then you put each group into a different belt. Lock the closest 3-5 rocks of the type shown on your overview and start mining. Cycle between your pairs of miners and dump rocks into a jetcan, when you get to the end of your list of clients (the haulers) you empty the cans and take it back to the station. If anyone comes into local you squad warp twice and you're safe.

With a bit of thought and setup time you can quite easily run multiple mining clients with no "external help". Though doing it this way does require you to actually play the game rather than alt+tab and come back in 20 minutes to empty your holds.

Sure.... You are deliberately biasing the stats to suit your argument.

Yet the market outright disagrees with you on the value of low sec ores, which are valued purely by their mineral content.
Meaning your claims are irrelevant.

Also you can get 'high sec ores' in Low Sec as well, which makes the overall spread of minerals available in low sec much greater, as well as Null Minerals in Grav Anoms.

Its not the lack of Ore, its the scarcity of minerals available in LS. **** me I sound like god damn broken record.