Player Features and Ideas Discussion

No, I get it — highsec belts are even more useless for making money than nullsec belts. The tradeoff is safety in both mining and getting your product to market. People very willingly accept a lower isk/hr to leverage that safety. Nullsec, being far less safe, needs the goose to actually get people into space with their nuts in the wind. Highsec currently supplies lowends to nullsec because there are far, far more people in highsec than nullsec. It isn't because of static belts being mineral manna from heaven — it's because the thin resources there are more savagely exploited due to the much higher player count.

This is the dirty secret of highsec static belts — they contain even less ideal mixes of ores, but the safety of mining the ores you do have, the wide, wide net from which to mine (all of empire space!) and literal afk hauling to market means you have a much larger plate from which to take.

Meanwhile, nullsec has no safety at all except that which we claw out; hauling is near suicidal without a JF (and then, fatigue,) and an individual nullsec pilot has far fewer places from which to mine. (Not all nullsec dwellers belong to the Imperium!)

Additionally, you are dangerously misunderstanding the reason why highends were (prior to the speculation rush) garbage. When drone poo was removed, a massive low-end faucet was closed. Low-ends became the mining bottleneck, causing high-ends to swirl around in the toilet of the market. Furthermore, since high-end bearing ores have to be mined to cycle the ore prospecting sites, those few still mining (habitation? autism co-morbidity?) continued to railroad more and more highends onto the market.

Also, this is worth requoting:

Uh, zones in eve have NEVER been equally valid. Nullsec has larger risk; so follows larger rewards. If all zones were equally valid, why would anyone live in nullsec when you could have CONCORD watching your back? In nullsec, you can get SNIPED at any time.

Hi, highsec incursions called.

The rebalance as itself looks nice. With the current market prices for minerals is it a nice increase in Isk/h for 0.0 Mining.

I made a spreadsheet with the new 0.0 Ores & Belts here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hgOipMOuTaDLAJLeCH-q6zFq-vir9DL-waaUGx9sPtk/pubhtml [Sorry that it is in german, but most of the things should be clear [Refiningfaktor means how much you get and Steuern means taxes. Gewinn pro Hulk is how much ISK you do with a full skilled T2 Hulk [212.000m³/h].

Fozzie, could you briefly expand on this? Do you think that this balance pass will result in greater local null production but retain some dependence on other space?

Itsatrap. ( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°)

I'd like to see nullsec have its hand held less by CCP. A real fix for nullsec mining is making it much harder to import materials.

Everybody gets stuck on trade hub values because you can stuff a huge quantity of minerals in a near-0 risk ship and nearly instantly have those minerals in your home sov. Give mining some real value. Things that make my idea great! Nullsec would actually need more than 10 null miners in a 1000+ person alliance. Highsec gets nerfed because null stops bulk ordering their minerals. We collect null tears because all of their mains and alts can only fly supercapitals and ishtars which are both only good at mining for the lols.

Minerals prices are already falling jita.

I know that I'm probably cheating a bit by posting a copy of what I just put up on Reddit, but:

One very interesting change here is Mexallon. It used to be very hard to get in null sec. The best ore for it (Plagioclase) simply didn't spawn in many null systems' regular belts, and there was a very limited amount of it in 0.0 anomalies. It was also widely available in high sec, and it was nearly impossible to avoid importing it if you wanted to build in 0.0.

With these changes, the best ore for Mexallon suddenly shifts to Gneiss. And not just by a little bit, either. On a per-cubic-meter basis, Gneiss out-performs Plagioclase by a whopping 57% in the production of Mexallon. For comparison, it currently produces 30% less Mexallon (per cubic meter of ore) than Plagioclase.

Null also overtakes high sec in having sole access to the best-performing sources of Isogen (now Dark Ochre, where it used to be Omber) and Nocxium (now Crokite, where it used to be a very close race between Hemorphite and Jaspet). Null sec also becomes the sole source of all Zydrine (mostly in Bistot) and Megacyte (mostly in Arkonor) in the entire game. This was largely true before, although there was a token amount of Zydrine in low sec Jaspet, Hemorphite, and Hedbergitie (as if anyone was mining there).

Basically, high sec's advantages will now be limited entirely to Tritanium (Veldspar is still the best source) and Pyerite (Scordite). The high sec advantage for Tritanium has shrunk a bit. Veldspar used to be 69% better than Spodumain in terms of Tritanium production (again, on a per-cubic-meter basis), but now it will be just 19% better.

Oddly enough, the high sec advantage for Pyerite actually increases with these changes. Scordite used to be just 11% better than Bistot in producing Pyerite. Under the new system, Scordite will best it's next-nearest competitor -- Spodumain, followed closely by Bistot -- by 53%. In this case, however, there will still be plenty of Scordite available in all regular belts throughout null sec, and the amount that will come from the anomaly-provided Spodumain and Bistot will likely be sufficient for most manufacturing.

In short, a pretty big nerf to the isk/hour of high sec mining, especially in the regions where Plagioclase is widely available.

Mineral market showed a massive abnormal volume spike for Zydrine and Megacyte starting Apr 1st in Jita/Amarr.
If this change is posted on the 14th and had not been leaked through any other means (i.e Twitter etc.) 2 weeks EARLIER, then you may want to check where that leak is with IA.

Mining changes were first announced during Fanfest, on March 19th. That's when I, personally, got in.