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Aegis sovereignty actually did nothing to change how densely you can pack space. The ore anomaly spawn mechanics that are in place today have been in place for longer than I've been playing this game, and today's ore anomaly asteroid composition has been in place for nearly two years.

What changed was the removal of AFK carrier ratting in the Citadel expansion. Suddenly, the most scalable method of making money in nullsec was gone. Mining was the next thing in line after AFK carrier ratting was removed, due to its largely hands-off gameplay mechanics. We were already mining a lot in barges and exhumers, and then Rorquals were released, significantly over-tuned at release. It's only natural we and others would go whole hog on them.

The existence of skill injectors exacerbated this problem, as well. Without them, you'd have seen a much more gradual ramp up to today's Superfund-style mining operations, as multiboxers et. al. slowly trained pilots up the long way or competed for a tiny slice of available Character Bazaar offerings.

Mistakes were made, but let's be sure to attribute them to the right sources. Aegis sovereignty, for all its faults, wasn't responsible here.

Fozzie said, earlier, that proximity checks are considerably more expensive than locked target checks. Don't expect them to relent on that.

I'll check that thanks.. I'm not sure i believe it though. the number of Rorquals hitting the Panic button has got to be a very very minor fraction of the killmails being generated every second however, and they do a prox check for those. (unless the check is done by zKill somehow, which might change things).

Plus how many overviews have the asteroid belt on them with distance indicated? Mmmmm .. Naw ... I dont buy the expensive Argument, they may be more expensive per call than a target lock, but the total bandwidth/CPU cycles is very low do to not happening very often. Just my opinion.

I scanned down a wormhole, avoided being seen by whole corp, found two Hulks and a Rorqual. Went to suicide my Hecate to kill one of the hulks before their fleet formed to kill me.

Hulk down into structure and suddenly stops taking any damage whatsoever! What a rubbish feature - please remove PANIC.

Thank you for the civil and intelligent discussion, it's been a refreshing change

I sort of agree with this and at the same time I don't.

I'm going to avoid getting into the whole "Incursions are OP" thing, because I disagree and that's an argument for another thread. Sufficed to say that there's a ton of logistics, planning, and organization that keeps incursion groups running, and that I can say from experience that no where near everyone out in Null has an Incursion alt. Same with Faction Warfare and various other activities.

The actual major issue here, that I think separates the Rorqual from Incursions and Carrier ratting and Level 5 missions and even Factional Warfare is that when something breaks the mineral market is has massive and far reaching implications. When someone decides to Incursion instead of Carrier rat they're actually choosing a bit of safety over generating more ISK, so they're not even causing inflation.

When someone decides to Rorqual Mine instead of Carrier rat though they're increasing the supply of minerals in the game, and when a ton of people choose to do that it can cause a major swing in the mineral market, which is what we're currently seeing. That mineral swing is going to have a pretty significant impact on anyone doing production in the game because it pushes down their ability to make ISK, and it's not really pushing down the value of other goods along with it the way changes in the money supply in-game tend to.

What this means is that this massive shift towards Rorqual mining is going to price out a lot of smaller producers who were previously able to easily PLEX their accounts. It's possible that the shift will push some people out of Rorqual mining as well, but since without a yield change the number of mining hours required to build a capital ship remains the same the relative attractiveness of swapping away from mining to other activities is a bit skewed. This is especially true when you consider that the people mining in Rorquals are also often old enough to just stand up a production alt if they don't have one already, so they can turn those minerals into ships, especially Supers, and bump their profit margins significantly. I think the profit margin on a Hel right now is something like 5b profit on 12b in minerals.

That's why I don't think the current state of the Rorqual is healthy, even if it's pulled in people who might otherwise being doing other activities, or other activities elsewhere. Personally though I think most of the people it's pulled in would be Carrier or Super Ratting, not running in other space. Super ratting is a similar cost investment to a Rorqual and drones and pays in about the same bracket, where as the general average for Incursions is a bracket or two down, generally between 90 and 150m before LP.

That said, I would fully support more group-oriented and higher reward PvE in Null. Something like Rogue Drone Infestations or something where you'd need to gather up a combined Cap and Sub-Cap fleet and run things as a group for big payouts of some kind, because I absolutely agree that people should be encouraged to use the space they occupy, and I also think that there should be incentive to spread out a bit more than currently.

I also don't like that end-game Null PvE is solo, and CCP have expressed a similar sentiment, so there's that too.

The main thing though is I don't think the amazing Rorqual mineral faucet is a healthy way to draw people to an activity.

it's also the lack of micromanagement compared to carrier ratting, coupled with the massive capacity of the ore anoms which can comfortably fit up to a dozen rorquals. fade is stuffed to the gills with VNIs so it's maddening to carrier rat there. rorq mining is really chill in comparison because it's easy to get your own good sized nice nug to nom on.

I would tend to disagree wholeheartedly. They are causing inflation by earning 80% of the ISK at 0.001% of the risk. They are dumping wealth into the game that has no opportunity cost.

It's a hilariously unjust double-standard. The moment nullsec has a grip on an economy they should dominate, things are adjusted, but it's been OK for incursions to literally stomp out so many other economies. I cry foul.

At least not without a really good reason at least.

Also knowing what celestial you're near is pretty easy, you just need to iterate through the list of celestials and you can do that quickly with an oct-tree since Celestials don't move or change. Asteroids do though, so what would have to happen is that every time someone hits a PANIC module it basically searched through everything in a radius around it until it finds an asteroid or hits a range limit, which probably requires building an oct tree and checking each object in it as you get further from the ship to see if it's an asteroid.

It's *mostly* unlikely that this performance hit would matter too much, but on the flip side every little bit helps, and if hitting PANIC causes a bit of a lag spike then you might get someone hitting like fifty of em to try and induce TiDi or something.

some Ideas that probly work better then just nerfing the rorqs.

1. What about making the rorq's have a min distance they have to keep from other rorqs in a belt when core mode is active? This would spread out rorq mining and make it still have a good Isk to reward while at the same time giving those players that have 10 rorq miners work harder for that ore. Spreading out 10 rorq accross multi belts/systems would differently slow down the amount one person can mine and balance off the market.

I would say rorq core min distance from another rorq in core would be a great idea if it had not been nerfed so much in the past giving a very bad balance risking 12B ship for crap yield.

2. Or better yet nerf the heck out of rorq mining yield and just boost the heck out of the mining links so others in the belt mining more to balance the risk of having that 12B assets out on the field for others to injoy. Say bye bye to the 40man rorq fleets, get those barges back out on the field .

The great thing about the rorq was it would boost others mining making not just one person want to play and injoy mining but make large grps come together to mine. So when you have costly assets on the field let it do its job and boost others and protect others all while the rest of the fleet is mining more and having a good time as a grp.

add a hull bonus (or to the panic module):

Due to its specialized features the Rorqual :

- can't fit entosis module.
- can't fit ewar modules.

just like intreceptors with the entosis restriction.

Now both point #1 and #3 are taken care off, while point#2 is still wide available (i don't see how #2 is a bad thing)