Player Features and Ideas Discussion

This is when your post becomes a trolling post.

You do know that when the value of your Ore drops post nerf, (back to normal levels, if it ever does), you'll be complaining that it simply isn't worth doing right?

What are you; some kind of grind monkey?

Why would you want to lose ISK/profit on your ventures? The whole idea is that, when you do something, you do it because it is worth doing, profitable, and doesn't require all your time just to earn a living. As it is, it already takes almost all your time to do that; so now you want what, an extra 12 hours a day required to make the same amount as you could have made before in the first 12 hours.

Right, nerf minerals. From now on, Ore will simply yield 50% of pre-existing numbers when it is refined. This means it takes you twice as long to gather the minerals required to build anything.

..I wonder what that will do to the mineral market?

Thing is that in nullsec you have opportunities outside mining that you do not have in highsec.

Have you ever looked at how much things sell for in the open market in nullsec? Most corps or alliances aren't going to allow you to truly gouge your own corp or alliances with pricing, but there's still some VERY nice opportunities to BOTH help your corp and make isk by the shovelful. Some corps or alliances will not allow you to place on the open market at all, but you can certainly create contracts for your people to buy.

Then there are the 0.0 moons and planets. They are... significantly better than what you find in highsec/lowsec. Your corp or alliance is most likely going to lay claim to the best of those planets and moons, but there's still plenty of room for you to make some serious ISK passively while you are mining. There are very few corps or alliances that won't pay you well for fuel blocks, which are a bit of a pain to set up the first time, but with good notes, you can recreate a fuel block assembly line pretty quickly.

In essence, the isk for pure mining is really not that much different from null to highsec, but the opportunities for other income is MUCH better in null if your corp or alliance doesn't lock you down completely on what they let you do.

Just remember that when the **** hits the fan, the multibillionaire industrialist will be expected to crack open their wallet and help the corp, then lose a few ships fighting if need be.

Perhaps I'll see you out in 0.0 some day. I'm looking for a place out to nullsec myself right now, twiddling my thumbs and coasting in highsec mining belts in 0.9 and farming crappy highsec planets to learn about PI.

this is all created by the players anyway

After much consideration ... No don't do this.

1. You shouldn't be losing retrievers to belt rats. If you are then you/your corp/your alliance are doing it wrong.

2. If you can't make money mining ABC ores in nullsec then you/your corp/your alliance are doing it wrong.

3. .... oh, you get the idea.

I'm now primarily a PVP pilot. I do have decent mining skills though, from earlier in my life, and occassionally resort to it when I'm semi-afk. I fly retrievers too, haven't lost one in the last couple of years, and make a reasonable profit when mining. Here's how:

1. Mine in fleets with gang bonuses. Preferably with Rorq bonuses.
2. Mine grav sites not belts.
3. Kill the rats with drones, you're in fleet afterall, or tank the smaller ones.

The key really is not to lose ships. If you can't get a fleet together don't mine. Instead shoot rats, its much more profitable.

Oh one idea might be:
high-sec -> only normal ores here
low-sec -> can have +5% ores
0.0 and w-space -> can have the +5 and +10% ores.
Probably not enough but will make mining veldspar in 0.0 worth more in terms of isk/hour.

I agree. 0sec minerals need to be consumed more.

In the last few days, I've compared the current ingame T1 BPO material requirements with the last data dump. CCP HAS increased the material requirements.
Nearly none of the manufacturing websites have yet updated to the new material requirements and so I was surprised by it. CCP increased the mat requirements by about 10% for most ship modules and much more for the new, rebalanced frigates. I assume that this trend continues with the announced rebalancing of cruisers and other ships. Especially Tritanium and Pyerite requirements were increased alot.

I assume this increase has been made to balance the increased mineral production caused by the last barge buffs and an influx of new miners and general yield/day.
I personally can safely semi-AFK-mine most of these minerals in highsec and buy the other needed 0sec minerals for cheap. So from my point of view, highsec mining got buffed. Is it the intention of CCP to have everyone but a few miners work in highsec? Wouldn't that increase the already large botting problem?

I say we should aim to bring miners to low- and nullsec by making it more lucrative than having a 23/7 mining bot running in highsec. This would increase player interaction and pvp in low- and nullsec by giving miners, pirates and home defense fleets something to do apart from the big blop fleets.

Not all hi sec miners are are in it for profit. My small corp has a few POS's in lo sec and we mine ice in hi sec for fuel. Now that ice mining is nerfed we have to spend twice as much time mining. It's almost to the point that's all we doing. almost all lo sec time now is spent fueling and supplying POS's. No time to run around in lo sec.

Some of us actually don't find it boring at all. I enjoy it, its relaxing. I pvp when I want excitement. Welcome to the sand box, where there are players of all types in game.

As for manufacturing, if you are new, learn in high sec. When you get higher skills and abilities, join a nullsec alliance with a strong mining / manufacturing presence, and have a field day. Mining in nullsec is often safer than it is in high sec anyway (if any non ally pops on local, every one simply puts away their mining / ratting ships and picks up their cheap pvp ships to chase them away).

As for money, ratting in nullsec is FAR superior than anywhere else, and complexes can give damned near insulting amounts of isk. You can then buy all the pvp ships you want.


Wanting your cake and eat it too is no reason to insist that everyone else has to change their game.

I enjoy relaxing with a book while keeping an eye on my mining operation so very much agree with Zyella Stormborn's assessment. Of course I prefer doing this in high-sec as it would not really be a relaxing experience anywhere else.

Apart from that statement I would have to say that CCP are trying to work this out. What they can not do is just change it in one swift blow. They have to make minor changes in the background and mostly hope that their projections on the effect of said changes actually leads to what their wanted results are. Thus telling them to nerf/make less profitable anything anywhere in the game simply is not going to have an effect. For all you know CCP are working on it but as always, with the player driven market they can not shove their hands straight in and twiddle and, voilà, it's done.

SO, having cleared that CCP works in mysterious ways they also rely a lot on us players and on our actions.
Sure they want to have people out in null-sec plying their skills and game-time there they certainly do not want ALL payers out there. If they did why have they added things like Factional Warfare, Incursions, Events in Empire Space.

"Why not?" you might ask. Easy, if all players were in null-sec then no one would be mining the lower grade Ores and the mineral ratios would be skewered even more than they are today.
The main, and possibly only, reasons that mining in high-sec is as profitable, or even more so, than mining in low and null-sec is because of three vital and important things:

1. It is mainly in High-sec one finds the low-grade Ores yielding Trit, Pyer, Mex, and Nocx.
2. Most players enjoy the sandbox part in null-sec so there are fewer players in High-sec. As such they'd rather mine there and will increase the ratio of available minerals towards the high-end ores.
3. To manufacture things in null-sec, any things, the players, corps, and alliances there have to get their low-end minerals from High-sec.

In effect there's more high-end minerals available than there "should" be, and less low-end minerals available than there "should" be. This leads to an increase in price for the low-end minerals and a drop in price for the high-end minerals.
With the game being player driven it is in many cases not even CCP's fault that prices get skewered in the way they have been recently with the minerals, and YET they try to do something about it.
Adding low-end mineral yields to some high-end ores was a good call and one such thing.
Removing the mineral drops from Drones was also a good call as it took away from the income from all miners, from null through high-sec miners. Only CCP knows if the player driven values of the minerals were under their estimations before they did that.
Increasing minerals needed to build ships could be CCP trying to set either the mineral costs more straight or trying to do something down the line that we have yet to fathom, or maybe we do as we can see it setting same tier (tier now being Frig, Cruis, Battle) ships at more equal base costs. I know someone stated looking at the old versus new mineral costs, did you also check the ratio of minerals, not just amounts? If the high-end materials are increased with a higher percentage then that will work to increase their value as well as work to decrease the low-end minerals value.

All in all I don't agree with the OP's sentiment nor solutions. CCP can not just "nerf" something without upsetting a potentially much larger balance problem, and the same goes with simply changing things like mineral costs to build things.
For instance increasing or decreasing minerals costs willy-nilly on blueprints will have several fast ramifications:

1. If announced in advance that mineral costs are increased for some blueprints then a whole lot of Corporations WILL build a whole lot of that item at the low cost in minerals it is at before the change. After the change they will start selling these at a very much higher price than they could have before the change. Small corps and individuals do not have this option and the result will be that the larger corps will become even more powerful, separating the "rich and poor" by an even greater factor.
2. If some blueprints were reduced in mineral consumption all the items built from the old costs would suddenly have been very expensive to build and any corp or player looking to sell it later on would have to charge based of the cost of building it THEN or face a loss from the endeavour/investment. Also, considering that corps and players also like to sell at as high of a price as they can, the price for said items would not drop by even a fraction of the changed building cost of the items. That would mean that miners in general would find themselves with a reduced income (not as much minerals being bought) while facing the same prices to buy things for. Inflation basically where the same hours of working the fields wouldn't cover as much as it used to, either forcing them to try to up their prices (leaving mineral prices at an even higher level) or work more hours. That last we all know is difficult for anyone.

On top of that there are a whole bunch of future balance issues and other ramifications from changes like that, most likely things we can't even see until they happen, and then we'd all be blaming something else other than last years changes in blueprint mineral consumptions.

The game is in part about space battles, but not only. If it was there would not be mining or trading or exploring or contracts or couriers or hauling or manufacturing or inventions or... well, I hope you get the point.

My advice to you would be to find a venue where you made enough ISK with a, for you, comfortable effort, create an alt, either with a new account or on your own account, use that to make the ISK you feel you need to pew-pew in null-sec with and have as fun as you can while doing both.

Cheers