EVE General Discussion

I used to mine ice in Minmatar space, and I used to have to constantly wait for belts to spawn because of these large fleets. If I was lucky, I would catch them as they spawn and get a good half-hour of mining in before they all show up and force me out of the belt by depleting whatever ice asteroid I choose to mine from. The belt disappears an hour or two later, only to wait 4 hours and do it all over again. I gave up and decided to go into production instead.

The demand for isotopes is where the strange economic disconnect is taking place. It's not even some vast circle. It's just a injection from one sector of the economy (ice mining) into POS and capital ships. It needs to be redirected. Perhaps to this.

The problem for POS is that isotopes are a limiting mechanic. Why do we even need a limiting mechanic? It's not making any POS disappear. Often it seems like there are more dead sticks in the game than live ones. Why penalize players who are taking risks by taxing their activity to support the most popular botting activity. It's another example of creating a positive feedback loop to reward avoiding player interaction. I really hope isotope consumption isn't a part of the new sov 5.0 structures unless ice mining involves a respectable way to get and keep players in space.

The other trouble with making ice the prime expense of POS is the effect on POS numbers. Is the number of sticks on R8s several orders of magnitude greater than on R32s? The big trouble there is lack of demand for the R8 products. If it was they who produced the capital ship fuel, things would be a lot more interesting in that arena.

Capital ships are their own ball of yarn. Less isotope fuel is being used now than ever. I'm surprised there hasn't been a collapse in isotope prices. If strictly industrial ships used ice isotopes for their cyno capability, it would kinda make sense and be pretty balanced. I've kicked around the idea of an industrial cyno.

Currently, we go through a lot of hassle to build them, and then they are pretty much independent once they are born. It's even harder to strike at their logistics chains than it is to strike at caps, and even those few opportunities have declined with the projections changes. To be fair, those have been pretty necessary. If caps are tied to sov structures, then they should be continually dependent upon them. That would mean a switchover from isotopes, to something derived from new structures, or anything which produces conflict. The bulk of building materials for capital ships should be coming from low end moons. Beyond that, modules need charges made from low ends, and they need to get their heat damage or structure repairs from structures and from materials derived from them. Fozziesov makes logging off expensive, but it doesn't tie anything expensive to sov, and that's a major disconnect that established players will exploit.

What's the future of Ice though? Well it needs to depend on investment, and investments need to be attackable, and that means the new structures. Your noobcorp multiboxer can't do much if he can't anchor refining installations, or those which will seek out or spawn ice signatures. An even better solution would be procedural generation to allow exploration starting at system belts, allowing people to find all sorts of things, even things for which they were not looking.

So what's your solution then? More ice wouldn't mean more isk for you. Most functions of isboxer outside of using it as a glorified window management software is banned.

This is eve htfu and fight for what you want. Otherwise go run missions.

You do understand the paradox of your complaint, right OP?

If they dump Ice belts out so you can Ice mine your little rump off, the mega fleets will do so as well, the prices will bottom out and you will have something new to complain about. If you had come in saying you wanted to mine your own Ice to augment your Industrial game I could have appreciated that but you seem to present an idea that you want to do it for income.

It has been parroted 40 million times, you can mine Dense Veldspar, sell it and get more Ice material or make more ISK/ hr and you always could. There really is absolutely, unequivocally, no reason to mine Ice in High Sec. Go mine something else. Anything else. You are playing an EVE that has been dead for two years.

You're the troll. These mega fleets who show up and target every roid you mine and "force you out of the belt" don't exist. A solo miner can get a good 2 hours of mining per spawn, sometimes 3 hours, and up to 4 hours is possible in certain systems. You're just jealous of guys who get more ice than you because your solo barge can't out mine multiple people.

sorry but three systems is does not a "try" make so it was not an "assumption" it was a observation. the fact that I am mining ice right now with a grand total of 11 other ships in the belt spread across at least 3 fleets shows that all of you pushing this agenda have put forward zero effort PERIOD you all want a multi billion ISK per month income handed to you well guess what? that aint going to happen EVE has a "competitive" player based economy so when I read your comments all I see is "working as intended"

Where are they lasting 2-3 hours routinely? I'm not in the majority of ice belts admittedly but I've not seen any last that long even on off peak times. Or is this primarily non-highsec belts?

If the ice field isn't mined out, it will be in the same state after downtime.

Yes, obviously mining products are the bottom building block for all industry in EVE.

Im not saying CCP should increase yield or whatever. Also increasing prices is not something CCP can really do, the market is run by players. Only real way to push mineral prices is to increase demand and that would mean tweaking all industry to require more materials. All in all it would only push prices of almost everything up.

Im saying mining needs a rework to be something you actually want to do, something that actually earns you isk. It shouldnt be something that people do afk with 30 alts and make **** isk by selling mining products.

We already have mining missions, but those are just stupid in general. How about combine normal mining with mining missions. You mine to get mining products to sell and isk/lp/standings for doing that **** in the first place. Could actually be something worth the time. Wouldnt upset the market since there would be no real changes in supply or demand and on top of that you would gain isk from an independent source.

Considering I'm nowhere near Jita that certainly has nothing to do with the times I'm seeing. If they're "all over highsec" I'd imagine the ones near me should qualify. That or all over highsec excludes most of highsec.