Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I think this idea is very close to gas sites.

What I've really come to say is make 5% and 10% ore much rarer but buff yields to +50% and +100%. I say this because i find 5% and 10% ores annoying but rather than remove them completely, putting super-versions of them in dangerous space could be fun.

I can't seem to see how you actually believe your Venture mines anything close to Retriever value with such a large fraction of down time, even if you were mining exclusively +10% Arkonor. Is there some new kind of ore in these sites, or is one of us completely failing at math here? It seems pretty simple: Venture mines about half what the Retriever mines, running through sites takes up at least a third of your time, so you'd have to mine ores 3x the value of Crokite to break even with me. Even if you were mining at a significantly lower profit, it could be reasonable since it doesn't require alliance logistics and the Venture is much cheaper than the Retriever (Prospect is NOT). But I'm finding it difficult to believe you make significantly more profit than mining Veldspar in highsec with a Retriever. Once again, I haven't done this and I can't find a lot of resources online to study it, but if it's just ore, the math doesn't add up to you getting some decent profit justifying the work.

Again, mining frigates are awesome and can stay as they are until the end of time.

Venture - perfect balanced and nuanced beginner and even veterans choice.

Prospect - covert ops and cyno gank mobi- errm I mean gas and ore mining frigate

Endurance - Ice mining perfection in a small swiss-army-knife.


Everything is fine.

I didn't know that, but it's not super important to the economics of gas mining. When CCP released the Venture, they gave us a huge boost to gas mining. This caused gas prices and booster prices to drop a lot. It's easier to mine gas now, but you get less profit for doing it. The playerbase balances this aspect. Gas mining wouldn't be killed at all by an ore hold reduction, it'll just become more difficult and more rewarding.

Just the same, however, I don't want gas mining to get any harder than it is, and I don't want boosters to be any more expensive than they are. But I think the solution would be to offer more options for gas mining than just the mining frigates. They already reduced the Exequror's cargohold, I used to use that ship for gas mining back when it had 900m3 base cargo. Perhaps the Porpoise could be able to use gas harvesting drones. Also if you are gas mining with a group, someone can bring an industrial--a Miasmos can hold over 6 Venture-hours worth of gas.




You might be right. I am asking nicely for one of you guys to explain to me how a Venture can make decent profit mining ore. Or at least I'm asking. Perhaps someone could give me the juicy details? So far all I've been told are vague notions of something along the lines of this:
1.) get Venture
2.) fly into shattered frigate system
3.) ???
4.) profit

The mining frigates are currently some of the best balanced ships for their respective jobs.

Move along please, nothing to see here...

Pyfa's All 5 character, both ships fit for max yield and unboosted.

Venture: 9.93 m3/s
Retriever: 19.7 m3/s

With current eve-central mineral prices, you're going to make a couple hundred isk/cycle more mining Arkonor and Bistot with a venture than mining veld with a retriever. That's it.

However, there's an exception.

Go wormhole diving with a venture hunting Mercoxit, and you're going to make significantly more money than the retriever.

And before you even bring it up, Reaver, if you know what you're doing, down time to unload the hold in a venture is insignificant. Using a close safe anchored can, downtime to unload matches that of docking a retriever. There are way to do this even faster, but matching the retriever makes a good baseline.

So, as I pointed out back on page 1. What you want is already here, you just have to go do it.

Edit: Go do this in a Prospect for better survivability, and even more isk.

Thanks for the detailed answers. I can see how the Venture can be profitable mining ore. I already knew it's profitable for mining gas--Venture/Prospect are the apex gas mining ships in the game. But I can see that mining ore in a Venture or Prospect isn't necessarily a waste of time, and I definitely see how mining Mercoxit can make good money. I wasn't aware its price was so high. Last time I checked it (a few years back), it was actually less profitable than Arkonor due to the lower volume of the yield of deep core mining lasers/strips.


I still feel that the current use of the Venture and Prospect is far too similar to mining with a barge. There's a bit more activity in hunting good sites down, but there's still a high abundance of high-end ores, and even with the Venture/Prospect's smaller ore holds, they still sit there mining for several minutes just on a single load of ore. So there's no mining opportunities really like what I'm asking for except Mercoxit, and that isn't available in many places. Where it is available, it is often not what you find. And when you do find it, it is often readily accessibly to barges, making the use of Venture/Prospect as a mercoxit miner fairly weak.



Perhaps the Jaspet in highsec and the Gneiss/Dark Ochre in lowsec could occur exclusively in tiny bits suitable for Ventures and Prospects to mine, and nullsec could have fewer large chunks of Mercoxit in trade for a relative abundance of small Mercoxit pockets ideal for Ventures and Prospects.

+10% isn't enough difference to justify the lower yield of the frigate, but the biggest reason that doesn't hold up is that I easily mine up all of the +10% ores in a barge. I can continue mining when they're gone, but I can mine exclusively +10% and never shut off the strip miners until they're all gone. There's still no advantage to using the frigate.

So no, the +10% ores do not fill that role.

A

Ah, see, there's the disconnect here. A Venture won't mine anything close to the amount of ore a Retriever pulls in, because it's a tiny fraction of the cost and risk of a Retriever. The Venture fills two roles, a low cost entry ship for newbie miners who can't afford something larger, and a low cost expendable mining ship for people who don't want to risk something larger.

If you want a fast mining ship with good yield you either upgrade to a Prospect or drop the "fast" requirement and go get a Barge or Exhumber.

Also worth noting here, the value per m3 for Veldspar and most other High Sec ores is around 150 to 180, the value for Bistot is currently at about 360, or double the higher end High Sec ores.

A maxed out Venture can pull in 511 per minute, a Retriever maxed without boosts gets 980, so going for optimal Ore in a Null or WH system a Venture can actually about break even with or even beat a Retriever.

Also, as I've said repeatedly, the fully T2 Venture is worth about 1/5th of the cost of that Retriever, and is way easier to survive in under almost any circumstances.



This seems like we're back to:



Just because it's not the most absolutely optimal thing for you doesn't mean it doesn't get used for this, or that it's not a decent niche for the ship.

Not every ship in the game needs to have an optimal use for a player with 100mil SP for it to be a good ship with a solid role, which the Venture absolutely is.

A Venture mines about half what a retriever does per second, a Prospect pulls about 80%. They're actually extremely good mining ships.