EVE General Discussion

There is no way we can read all the feedback here, but for spearheading the ship / mining barge rebalancing plans I will just reply to the thread as a whole.


What is the current problem with mining barges and exhumers?

It’s pretty simple; they offer no role choice in any shape of form. As part of the tiericide effort, we want to promote usefulness of ships that are currently underpowered due to an arbitrary position in a tier system that doesn’t fit in a sandbox game. The current, TQ version of the mining barges and exhumers strongly encourage progression toward the Hulk, while skipping the others completely except for a few specialized niche roles: not only is the Hulk just plain better in most attributes next to the other versions, but the skill system itself is flawed as the Covetor requires Mining Barge skill at 5, only a few hours away from its Tech 2 counterpart.


Why are we doing this?

As explained in the Dev Blog, we wanted to encourage various choices depending on the role you want to fulfill.

• Procurer / Skiff: supposed to be mainly aimed for protection, with great EHP to defend from assaults
• Retriever / Mackinaw: designed for autonomy, with a cargohold at least equal with jet cans
• Covetor / Hulk: aimed for group operations with the best yield of them all

However, while we looked at them it quickly became apparent that they were just too fragile as a whole. A properly fit Tornado delivers a volley of at least 9000 damage, which was far enough to destroy an untanked Hulk before it could react. We thus wanted to buff resilience on them a bit to make it less easy to do so, especially considering it was the most viable high-end ship available for mining.

And notice we said “less easy”, not “impossible”. Suicide ganking was, is and will remain a proper endorsed activity in EVE. However, the idea behind the “risk versus reward” motto so often used here is that it should apply to everyone – including to the side suicide ganking for shiny loot. We do not contest the profitability of the profession, nor do we deny Hulk pilots had the option to fit a tank to protect themselves (which they often failed to do indeed), what we wanted to achieve here is to give more time for them to react if they don’t fit one.

“Is CCP trying to save stupid pigs from themselves?” We are attempting to give the pigs in question a chance to react and chose a path other that the one leading to the slaughterhouse. It doesn’t change the fact the slaughterhouse still exists, that there still a path to it, and that this path is very easy to fall into, even after the changes.

Because, once again, this has proven how dangerous it is to jump to conclusions from a work-in-progress Singularity build; Mining Barges and Exhumer numbers are still being adjusted as we speak. EHP, cargohold, ore bay values are still up in the air. What we can tell though, is that when we are done with the ship class there will still be targets to gank, even if it is more time consuming and more demanding to do so - as it should be.

And all of this is without to say our player base has proven many times it is capable of overcoming any change we throw at them and fill the sandbox with creative, new ingenuous solutions. Smart players in all concerned sides, should they be suicide ganker or miner, will eventually adapt and most likely profit from the situation.

Or you could realize that the other thread that was 200 pages long got locked and he wanted to have people discuss what the dev put into it.

Ironic tears are the tastiest.

Wilkus, officially worse than Tom Gerard, i hope your happy.