Crime & Punishment

Other ships are being used, outside of the ice belts Skiff's are not used any where to the same degree, its just because you chaps focus on the ice belts and certain systems.

Before I respond to any specific points I'm going to point out that new players can get into a procurer in a week, and procurors are almost as tanky as a skiff. You keep acting like skiffs.procurers are only available to veterans. New players can fly procs, they just don't choose to.


Skiffs are not actually economically immune. The isk return on a gank is dependent on the modules used (something you never acknowledge) A faction fitting skiff especially one using a faction strip/ice miner is extremely profitable to gank. Thing is nobody in their right mind would ever use a expensive fit on a exhumer or barge, because of how insanely vulnerable miners are.

Also extending your reasoning almost all ships are economically immune to ganking, the exception being ships fitted with enormously expensive mods or that are carrying expensive crap in their hold.


There is zero data to support this. Ore prices aren't behaving in the way you describe.

If you look at the price of ore going back to the barge rework you'd notice that the price of ore seems to be directly related to the amount of warfare occurring and nothing else. For instance the price of ore has noticeably decreased since the end of world war bee. Granted "noticeably decreased" when talking about ore is actually very minor. So really if you wanted to help new players then you should go **** off some nullsec alliances and get another war going.

Oh and before you respond with the idiotic "but if I gank miners I'm increasing the price of ore because new barges have to be made!" I will point out that the amount of destruction even at the peak of highsec miner ganking is insignificant compared to the amount of destruction caused by even the smallest of low/null wars. Plus the profit loss that a player suffers from losing a ship easily outweighs any pathetic price increase that might result.




No. Highsec mining pays poorly because production is limited by the availability of megacite and noxcium. Also you're massively overestimating economic effect of multiboxers. Even if you count all of the multibox accounts, multiboxers still only comprise a small portion of the highsec mining population.



The problem with your post is you have a vendetta against multiboxers and are bending the topic to justify that hatred.

Yes multiboxers like skiffs. So does every solo miner and most fleet miners. Heck this entire thread could be rephrased as "why can't CCP make hulks and mackinaws profitable enough to justify their non-existent tank?" After all the reason everyone uses skiffs is because the yield increase of macks and hulks does not surpass the profit loss from exploding.

I specifically said this, most recently in my last post.

For the fifth(?) time, the fact that the Skiff is extremely safe or that a new player can fly a Procurer is not the point. The point is that the economic immunity of the Skiff, along with its resistance to bumping and high tank, make it impossible for another player to disrupt. There is no counter to a Skiff fleet which is the question the OP asked and is the topic of this thread.

You can claim this fact is somehow good for the game, but you cannot deny this provable, and admittedly intentional on the part of CCP, reality of the game mechanics.

They are. Sure, there are the odd ones that are faction fit or have half-a-dozen PLEX in the hold you can claim are profitable to gank, but the typical T2- tanked Skiff that the game is balanced around is hilariously unprofitable to gank. Not even just unprofitable as most miners are to gank, but so costly you lose more than your opponent leaving you with nothing you can do to inflict more damage on your opponent than you lose.

The fact that a few percent of the Skiffs out there are so badly fit does not help the OP and his desire to clear out a typical Skiff fleet from his system. If they are in the NPC corp, for which there is no game reason they shouldn't be, they are economically immune to him.

There is plenty of data to support my assertion that ore is oversupplied starting with the terrible ISK/h a highsec miner earns. What does a max-skill, boosted Hulk ice miner earn in highsec today? 30M ISK/h? That is pathetic compared to the income potential of almost any other profession, and in reality, a solo newer miner is probably getting closer to 20M ISK/h. The only way this becomes acceptable as an income is if you are only spending 10% of your time paying attention to your game client and the rest watching Netflix, or if you are multiboxing 10 or 12 clients in parallel. Neither of these situations are what most game designers would consider ideal.

Last year, CCP banned ISBoxer in an attempt to lower the hard cap on the number of clients players could run at one time. This year, they explicitly started enforcing the prohibition on tiling multiple clients on a single screen that was so favoured by cheating multiboxing miners to boost their efficiency. Just because mining has always been this way does not mean there isn't a serious problem with the game design when the only way to compete is to multibox more Skiffs.

Have some imagination. It doesn't have to be this way even if it has been this way for so long. There are many fixes that can be put in place to boost the viability of single account miners and do away with the tedium of multiboxing mining fleets and make a better, more engaging game for everyone. Certainly, I am sure CCP is unhappy with the current meta of the invulnerable Skiff fleets piloted by a single veteran taking so much of the profit and leaving new and solo miners with so little.


Lol, Vendetta. I have no problem with multiboxers who play by the rules (although, it should be noted that miners are notorious for using methods to cheat such as input broadcasting, client tiling and straight-out macros) but that doesn't mean there isn't something wrong with the game. I notice you did not refute any of my points illustrating how difficult it is for a new or solo miner and this is a problem for CCP who are desperately trying to get new players into the game. Something has to give, and with Drilling Platforms on the horizon, mining is due for a shake up.

Given the current trend of CCP cracking down on multiboxing, I wouldn't be surprise if those Skiff fleets will just be remembered as part of a bygone era as they are nerfed into irrelevance, or surpassed with newer, more profitable forms of mining accessible to solo account players. Don't worry, I am sure you will have plenty of time to sell your Skiff fleet and adapt to the new mining age that is coming. Who knows, you may even like not having to run so many accounts and being able to make a decent living with just a couple.

So are you saying the dominant gank catalyst should be nerfed into line with all other destroyers? I missed your whine post on the OP and dominance of the catalyst. Could you link it please???

Hey, I am just telling you the reality whether you like it or not. When Drakes were the only battlecruiser that was used they were nerfed into the ground. For a time Eve was Ishtars online until... the Ishtar was (incrementally) nerfed into the ground. Long ago the Hulk was almost the only miner used in the game so CCP rebalanced them so they would all have a role and be used. For a time the Svipul was the overwhelming choice for everyone to fly and well, I am sure they'll get around to fixing that some day.

If Skiffs are the dominant miner they will be tweaked to be less attractive during the upcoming rebalance. That might mean nerfs for the Skiff, or it could mean buffs to the underused ships, but CCP is going to try to put the use of the ships back into some balance.

As to Catalysts being the dominant destroyer, that may be true for ganking but I see plenty of other destroyers flying around and being used for other purposes in the game. If some are in fact underused, I see no problem with CCP buffing their DPS or other stats so that they find more use by gankers and/or others.

No ship left behind I say.

The Drake was used by big fleets due to large tank and decent range with reasonable damage, they were also used a lot to do level 4's and belt ratting for the same reason. For smaller gangs the Hurricane with its twin neuts and better damage and flexibility on ammo was preferred. The Ishtar was a whole different ball game and was based on the mechanic of the FC being given the control of all of the drones effectively.

I don't gank all the time, but when I do, I use a Catalyst.

Otherwise, I wouldn't touch that ship with some other person's 10 foot pole.

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