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Ask Aryth to control the price of Bhaalgorns.
Even in drone lands players are not slaves. You cannot force them to use alliance buy orders, especially for such lightweight items. Courier contracts would take an enormous amount of work to inspect, and wormhole connections just cannot be controlled unless you are the Bob himself.
And please, tell us more about ignorance - it's so funny.

Lets see if I can explain this whole mineral price crash thing to you...

So, miners are primary producers, they make goods and their income is directly tied to the value of those goods, as opposed to belt ratters, incursion runners, L4 Mission runners, and everyone else who works for a more or less fixed income in raw ISK provided by game mechanics.

For example, no matter what happens to the rest of the Eve economy my Carrier ratter friend out in Null is going to keep making 55m wallet ticks.

This is not the case for miners. Also a lot of other people, but miners more than anyone else because their income is directly tied to a single thing, the overall price of minerals. This means that if the overall price of minerals in the game drops by 50% then the income of a miner drops by 50% as well.

Now, this is likely to cause a lot of goods to drop by about 50% because those goods are directly tied to the price of minerals, so it may look like the buying power of the miners remains the same. This only applies to goods that are pegged to the price of minerals though, and there are a *lot* of goods that aren't, PLEX being the biggest one. This means that the ability for someone mining to PLEX their account goes down as the price of minerals falls.

The reason this isn't just a return to some year or other's mineral prices is because the rise in mineral prices over the last 8 years or so has been largely driven by inflation in the Eve economy, so the buying power of an hour of mining has remained more or less constant over that time.

So, why won't this just cause an eventual drop in Rorqual mining? Because of two things. The first, and I would argue more important one, is that Rorquals are *way* more Multi-box friendly than ratting Carriers, Dreads, Supers, or Titans. This means that if I'm an old-bie player with 12 accounts I can put a Rorqual 'toon on all of them and have all of them bringing in several hundred million at once in raw minerals. In comparison you can successfully multi-box *maybe* 3 or 4 Supers before the micromanagement required starts to put more of a dent in your income per ship than it's worth.

On top of this we have a weird quirk of Null Sec Corp economics. Most Null corps of the size that could protect a Rorqual allow you to purchase ships with raw minerals plus a relatively small amount of ISK for time and other costs. This means that even if the price of minerals crashes quite a bit it may still be worthwhile for someone looking to buy a Capital, Super, or Titan to mine rather than rat for it because these ships cost a fair bit more than mineral price normally. This creates a multiplier on the value of mining time for these players that isn't reflected in the price of ore on the market.

This same sort of multiplier applies to a lot of high end industrial work that derives a large chunk of its profit from the difficulty and skill intensive nature of high end manufacturing, rather than the cost of the raw inputs. For example someone showed me their in-corp price for a Super right now is at around 17-18B, with 12b in mats required, which means there's a roughly 50% profit on each Super built and sold, and that's just in-corp prices, not public market.

TLDR: People will keep Rorqual mining long after they've nuked the mineral market because of multi-boxing and because of Ships for Minerals programs.

Another random thought:

The PANIC nerf might feel like a minor nerf to instant anom respawn in practice. Some (not all, probably not most) players may just decide to stop mining and do something else when a belt gets close to the end rather than risk the time on grid without being able to PANIC.

Not most of the time, not large multibox fleets, but some players some of the time. And then other players might be reluctant to cycle the belt for the same reason.

The net effect could be another smaller behavioral shift that lowers mineral supply. Which again, in concert with everything else, could help stabilize the market.

These are the words of truth. Fozzie's vision of "mining foreman" can never be further from the harsh reality. The world of mining is governed by min-maxers. If they were multiboxing 20 exhumers, they will multibox the **** out of any new toys CCP gives them. Even if Rorq yields 10% more ore than exhumer, there will be 20 multiboxing Roqs. If it means additional risk, they'll manage it. For them, mining 10% less than theoretically possible means losing in EVE. If the risk turns out to be too high, they'd rather quit the game than downgrade.

Now I'm not saying that it's good or bad. But if the goal was to create "mining foremen" then CCP should've taken a very different approach. There should be diminishing returns. It could be considerable increase of effort. Or it could be resource depletion. We've seen both methods earlier: the former for carrier ratting, and the later for ice mining - and they work... well, to some extent. CCP could go inventive and show us something new. But nerfing yield is just a band-aid and in the long run it gives nothing.

If the ore wasn't infinite, it would of been mined out by now after years of game play and your only source of mineral would be refining NPC drops. The price of everything would rapidly skyrocket as replacing them would be next to impossible. Everybody would have to gun-mine for minerals and you ebtter do it with drones/T1 lasers if you ever want to make progress because building ammo to shoot at more rats would become counter productive fast.

Wow, I didn't take this statement the same way you and others did. Yes, belts respawn after downtime. I took it as an attack on being able to endlessly roll ore anomalies in null.

It's a quality of life thing for the Rorqual to be able to mine massive amounts of ore per hour when there is a limited amount of ore per system, per day. Personally I loved the idea of being able to clean out quickly and then move on the other things in-game.

It seems the problem is when you can mine at that high rate 23/7 in a system or two, not the high rate itself.

No? The rorqual is a ... what's the word... ah right CAPITAL.

"capital dps doesnt need this kind of reduction because its different" The only difference is its "PVE" which nobody gives a **** about. It is a capital. It is a step up from subcapital mining. Go figure it's balanced around that.

"without a compelling reason there's no need for change"

EXACTLY! YOU GET IT! There is NO reason to nerf something then using shallow flimsy logic, good for you cade!

Or, Are you *only* meaning that for pvp? Which would be deliciously hilarious irony. What i suggested for cap changes is EXACTLY what they did to "ore yield" over the past 6 months.

FOZZIE even said "its still the best" So... a carrier doing 2k dps would still be "the best" and a super/titan doing 2500 would still be "the best". Surely, even you, you have to see why this double standard is ridiculous. I know I know. "Muh minerals" and...well..ignoring the fact that the game has untold trillions pumped into it by inflated dps capitals.


Like it or not, the argument for the rorqual nerf could EASILY go down that "slippery slope" of a... "very limited statement" and turn OTHER capitals into... welll "still the best"

Just because it's a capital does not mean that the Rorqual's *mining* amount is in any way equivalent or comparable to the amount of *DPS* that a combat capital can put out. If you were talking about the Rorquals DPS, or tank, or any of its actual combat stats then you might have something, but you're erroneously saying that the mining yield of the Rorqual is comparable to the DPS of a Carrier or Dreadnaught, which is just ridiculous.

There is a very compelling reason to nerf the Rorqual, it's clearly visible if you look at the prices of Ore and Minerals in the game right now, or the massive drop we saw in the last economic report in liquid ISK generation and the increase in mining volume.

You don't like the nerfs, that's fine, but that doesn't mean there's no reason for them.

The general level of ISK entering and leaving the game is actually fairly stable with a very slight upward trend (AKA inflation) and that's economically healthy. The currently crashing mineral market is not, and there's 20 pages of discussion in this thread if you want to read about why that is.

There's no double standard here, because DPS is not in any way comparable to mining yield. The only thing that's ridiculous here is your flimsy and anger-driven argument...

You've show to have very little understanding on arguments being made on this thread. Perhaps you should read, then post a reply as twice now you've misunderstood and misquoted on me alone, never mind the dozens of others.

Regardless, as I said before (and I'm kicking myself now for responding to you) but I'm done trying to argue with someone as blinkered on a topic you seem to have no real grasp on. I'm getting the impression you feel you can sway the general trend of the thread with the sheer volume of nonsense you've posted.

If so, congratulations. you've won eve (forum).

I'm not sure this is going to be true, largely because of the large ISK value represented in the uninsurable 'Excavator' mining drones.

The cost of a Rorqual loss, at market prices and after insurance, is something like 1.5B ISK at the current 3B per hull price, plus about .2-.3B in fittings. The cost of the drones at current prices is around 6-7.5 B on their own. So in a Mining Foreman role the Rorqual represents a much smaller risk than it does if you use one to mine directly, but it still provides 10% more yield to all the ships it's supporting over the next best available alternative to a sieged Rorqual.

The cost swing between 10 accounts in Rorquals with 'Excavators' and 9 Accounts in Hulks and 1 in a Rorqual without Excavators is something like 90 Billion sitting in the belt vs about 4.7 billion sitting in the belt. That's a capital costs and risk increase of 19 times for a yield increase of about 3.4 times, and it's going to take you about 75 hours (assuming roughly 120m an hour per Rorq) to make up your costs with the Rorquals where as with the single Rorqual and Hulks it takes you about 12.8 hours of mining to make up your costs.

By my calculation this means that it takes 102 hours of Rorqual mining at the new Hulk mining levels (assuming roughly 3.4 Hulks yields per Rorqual) for the Rorqual fleet to mine more than the Hulk fleet. If you're ganked during that time the Hulk fleet is the better option, hands down.

It should be noted though that this uses the current prices for the Rorqual and associated drones, and doesn't factor in the Hulk's ability to mine Mercoxit, which the Rorquals can not mine. A lowering in the price of Excavators would lower the time to profitability of the Rorqual fleet, but Mercoxit would likely help the Hulks. Similarly if the value mined per hour goes down this favors the cheaper Hulk fleet as well.



I'm not sure what you think I'm not grasping here. You're certainly making no effort to correct me, which is both bad form and poor communication on your part. I think the miscommunication may be happening due to your attempt to use simile in place of an actual explanation or argument.

Your comparison of the Gila and the Carrier is both ridiculous and not applicable to the current issue. The Rorqual isn't getting nerfed because it mines more than a Hulk, it's getting nerfed because it mines too much period and there's plenty of room between where it's at right now and the mining level of a Hulk to adjust within and still leave the ship useful and powerful without wrecking the mineral market the way it's doing now.

As for why I'm here, because I really dislike when people argue badly or mistake appeals to emotion for evidence against something. If I'm arguing in favor of a change what I say doesn't really matter and I know this. I could just as easily run around being nothing but a sarcastic *** in this thread and it would have about as much effect on CCP's decision making as my attempts to guess at CCP's reasoning and explain my guesses you people like you.

Similarly yelling about how you don't like something is only marginally more likely to affect its outcome than my evidence in support of it is. Barring a mass player outcry simply yelling about how a change is bad isn't an argument against that change.

To argue against a change you need to collect evidence and present it in a coherent and logical format. Simply saying 'clearly CCP/Cade/you people have no idea about mining/industry/Null' isn't evidence, and neither is claiming that your tiny little slice of experience contradicts CCP's reasoning. Partly because that's nothing but hearsay, partly because any individual's experience is a tiny fraction of the whole and is not statistically significant, and partly because even we players have better sources of information and reference than personal experience.

Personal experience can be a guide certainly, but nothing more. It's almost never definitive and without supporting evidence it makes for a poor argument.

Everything I've referenced here, the economic reports, the ISK levels in the game, the mineral price changes over time, and even the immediately available supply and demand information from buy and sell orders, is all publicly available to players. If you or anyone else is so very convinced that CCP is in the wrong here or anywhere else then go out, do your homework, and put together a convincing argument for your case.