Science & Industry

The new ice changes have the effect of turning a relaxing night of mining into frustrating repeated 4hr downtimes - which means players will log out and go play other games. "The high sec anoms contain 2500 units of their racial isotope ice." The estimated time to completion of these belts was given to be around 45 mins for 30 highsec miners. This means for the timezones that people play they'll be able to mine for less than 16% of the time. Friendly group mining with corpmates will become competitively inhibitive and discourage the formation of player industry operations.

This is stated to be a means of throttling the supply of highsec ice into the game, but is believed to be an anti-bot measure. The new system is making mining operations miserable for everyone in order to mildly inconvenience mining bots. Bots don't care about mining during off-hours, but real players with busy schedules will no longer be able to mine at all when they get home. In short, the 4hr respawn timer on ice belts is not a good idea.

Right now a perfect low/nullsec ice miner pulls in 90 blocks/hr. After Odyssey the ice mining yield will double up to 180 blocks/hr. A necessity of low/nullsec ice mining is compressing the ice so you can ship it to empire for sale. Right now the rorqual can compress ore fast enough to keep up with 20 perfect ore miners. But right now it can only compress ice fast enough to keep up with 4 ice miners. After Odyssey the rorqual will ONLY BE ABLE TO KEEP UP WITH 2 ICE MINERS. This is highly detrimental to the goals of shifting ice mining into low/nullsec.

Comparing the new ice anomalies to the nullsec ore belts. In terms of manhours needed to complete each belt we can see a startling difference in size. Even if CCP upholds the small 2500 ice fields in empire, the nullsec ice fields need to be expanded in size by at least a factor of 4x-8x to remain on par with other nullsec mining activities. An increase in nullsec ice field size would also go a long ways to moving that desired 20% ice mining out to low/nullsec. Likewise, the 4hr respawn timer for low/nullsec ice fields makes little sense because the location you're attempting to throttle is highsec only.

There are also concerns that nullsec miners will be forced to mine terrible "highsec ice" rather than the nullsec variants, just to force a respawn of that ice belt into something worth more.

The nullsec ore belts actually do have massive timezone imbalance issues because fresh belts will only spawn during downtime. Which means that the euro players are able to consume all the valuable ores long before any other timezone even wakes up. During the question answer session at fanfest it was stated that the new nullsec ice anoms will maintain their current variety of ice types. The demo from the presentation showed an ice anom as "Pristine White Glaze field" rather than a more generic "Medium Ice Field" which implied a homogeneous assortment of ice inside. But many quotes since indicate that each ice anom will contain many mixed types of ice ("The best ice anoms found in the lowest truesec in all areas of space will contain all three non-racial ice types.");

It seems that the intention is to force nullsec miners into mining the racial variants of ice by placing it as an obstacle to harvesting the ice of true value. This will vastly hurt the profitability of nullsec ice miners and discourage them from mining at this greatly increased risk, when they could just mine safely in highsec for the same profit.

"We want to make sure that for those miners and industrialists that do want to move to nullsec, they have available opportunities that support their playstyle."
Right now the nullsec ice miner play style is being hurt significantly by the proposed changes.

Summary:

• The 4hr respawn timer on ice fields will hurt all players clustered around the two peak primetimes of the game (EU and US) and make mining an unavailable activity for anyone within those timezones.
• The size of low/nullsec ice fields needs to be increased by an order of magnitude
• Rorqual ice compression needs to be increased in speed by a factor of 10
• 4 hour respawn timers on low/nullsec ice fields do not make sense and are counter-productive
• This will force nullsec miners into mining racial ice at highsec income levels. The risk/reward balance is not balanced.

Why should the Rorqual get better in compression? Isn't the whole point of those changes that the minerals/ores/ice should be used localy rather then shipping _everything_ to jita?

Same with HS Ice belt, those are not there to **** of botters, the change is made so people in 0.0 start mining it more for their local demand.

high sec cannot supply 100% of null sec's isotopes, let alone high sec on top of that. therefore ice isn't being jumped to jita, at all. it's being umped FROM jita, and it'll be refined and in jfs and totally irrelevant.
OP only wants increased compression speed on ice, which is perfectly reasonable.

Null sec ice needs to be drastically increased. Everything will grind to a halt if we have to constantly run around to find ice products all day long. T2 stands to take a huge hit from this since moon mining requires a tower to do.

Compression times are far too long for ice. Anyone that's ever done it knows this and it's not really a point of argument.

Read the forums and dont make silly assumptions

How much ice will the nullsec ice belts contain, though?

Also mixing all the non-racial ice types in nullsec anoms will mean that people will just let the anoms wither on the vine until they respawn with the ice they want to mine.

Your analysis is a variant on the usual 'I want more yield' request as far as I can see. Regarding your comment that we should be looking to disconnect the economies in high & nul sec is daft when CCP is looking to link DUST and EVE together into an amazing web.

The prices of high sec obtainable minerals are currently falling and the price of ice products are increasing. These are both both correct statements but as your analysis states miners want to mine whatever makes the best ISK. Most miners mine to make ISK so nul sec miners will continue to target rocks heavy with Morphite, Megacyte, Zydrine, & Nocxium. The Spod will still be last on their list if mined at all. Once the changes come in on June 4th high sec miners will look to mine ice only as much as possible as the prices for ice products will have risen further by then. As a result of all of this the prices for high sec obtainable minerals will rise back up and maybe even go above the previous higher price levels.

So basically we should expect the following for null-sec ice mining?
- Ice miner scans for ice anomaly
- Find anomaly in system x
- Grabs barge/exhumer and starts mining for 4 hours or less before it is exhausted
- Go fleet up for pvp, rat, exploration sites, P.I., etc instead, or log

That's easy to grasp/accept, I suppose. Now, If the ice anomaly ship/fleet isn't in your system you:
- Don't bother mining until an ice anomaly shows up in your system [or]
- Fly your ship(s) to the system with an ice anomaly
- If the number of jumps to reach system x is excessive, grab cyno and carriers to run fleet to system x
- Now jump Rorqual to system x, because you can't use gates to just run to the systems two jumps over [or]
- Use an Orca, slowboating it to the system or use a command ship/T3 booster instead, sacrificing bonuses for mobility

This would make ice mining much closer to what someone mining ore gravimetric sites in null would experience, correct?

Of course, if you choose to mine ore in null sec, you can eventually hope to get the Giant Spodumain Rock o' Doom, set up shop, and mine happily for a day or two before it pops :-P

Would it be bad to have ice fields merely deplete and respawn, like current asteroid belts do? And then perhaps offer ice sites that could be scanned out? Or be have ice be part of what can be generated through the industry upgrading that can be done to null systems?

Emphasis mine.

I really appreciate your posts regarding industry, as I'm not an industrial expert and I feel like I've learned a lot by reading your words. My gut response to the bolded segments, however, is this: Why does hisec have to "function properly"? It seems that what CCP is trying to do with these changes is to shake up the way that hisec and nullsec interact, so maybe a drastic change is just what they want.

I do agree that the removal of hisec ice belts is probably not going to help the botting situation at all, but maybe CCP has some trick up their sleeve that we don't know about yet.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't you assuming that there would only be one ice anom active at a time per system?

In null it is not uncommon to have multiple grav sites in a single system. In sov it is possible for an upgraded system to have many respawning anoms simultaneously.

Do we know that each system will have only one respawning ice anom? They could just as easily have two or three, no?