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An analysis of nullsec mining changes in Odyssey

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Mara Rinn
Cosmic Goo Convertor
#161 - 2013-05-28 07:56:55 UTC
Iosue wrote:
i like the concept of depleting ice spawns, but hate the idea of locust swarms in empire. though i spend most of my time in NPC null, having access to hi-sec ice belts helps offset the cost of running my towers. i'd be much more partial to some type of random spawn of the ice belts in hi-sec, so we actually had to explore for them in various systems. this would be much more in line with the theme of exploration as opposed to showing up at the know system and waiting for a timer.


Regardless of whether the ice appears in anomalies or grav sites (which in Odyssey longer exist, all grav sites are "ore site" anomalies as of the Odyssey patch), it's the lack of supply that will lead to "locust swarm" mining. You (just like everyone else) will be competing for a scarce resource. So you can't have your depleting ice spawns and access to the ice on your own schedule.

losue wrote:
the mechanism for obtaining this valuable resource will be one of the most dull and unfun activities in game: waiting on timers. instead we should try to make the ice miners do something besides just mine ice. make them look for it or pay someone else to find it for them, as opposed to just waiting around in system for ice to spawn.


I agree that having the ice respawning on a four-hours-to-the-second clockwork timer will make life frustrating for people who don't start their stopwatches the moment the previous belt despawns. Having the ore site anomalies be exploration/discovery/whatever sites instead, with an average respawn time of about 4 hours would be much more satisfying, especially if those sites spawned somewhere in the constellation, not always the same system. But you will still get locust swarms, and there will always someone else who gets there first.

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Mara Rinn
Cosmic Goo Convertor
#162 - 2013-05-28 07:59:25 UTC
Danni stark wrote:
people probably fly a covetor or a hulk because if they are in a fleet then tank and cargo are both as relevant as a fruit cake is to a venus fly trap plant.


Even a hulk has a 14s align time. So either you're flying aligned to a celestial and retargeting ice as you move past the previous block, or you get ganked.

Try it sometime before Odyssey. Head out to an ice field with a max-yield Hulk fitted with Ice Harvester IIs Lol

Day 0 Advice for New Players
Mara Rinn
Cosmic Goo Convertor
#163 - 2013-05-28 08:18:54 UTC
mynnna wrote:
There's also the point pmchem made. As CCP does more and more to de-emphasize top down (eg moon) income as a source of alliance income in the future, bottom up income, including mining taxes, will be more and more important. Right now buffing the Rorqual would be a means to evading those taxes more easily, thanks to how taxation works. Now if we want to discuss changing how mining taxes are collected (say, automatically at point of collection; I'm sure we can come up with a reasonable lore based explanation), then I'd be happy to talk about and advocate for compression buffs.


Rather than collecting product or fees, what about a simple report of units extracted (you know, just like we already have in the fleet loot report which is so easily exported to … oh nevermind)? This then gets handled by the treaty system to be converted into an ISK or percentage, which is then contracted back to the local baron as part of the periodic repeating tithe.

What's that you say? The treaty system was never finished or implemented? Oh snap!

mynnna wrote:
As to the respawn timer, there should be about 650 nullsec anomalies by my count, compared to the ~100 that will exist in highsec. Those ~100 will supply 80% of the game's ice, which means nullsec would be capable of supplying about 500% of the game's ice, even if those belts are only 2500 block belts. That number goes higher, of course, if the block count climbs. So, I don't really see the need for them to respawn instantly.


It would be nice if the respawn timer was "about four hours" instead of "exactly 14400 seconds".

mynna wrote:
Jita Bloodtear wrote:
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.")

The timezone imbalance in the ore sites is a good point here.


The obvious solution is to move belts to anomalies too.

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Mara Rinn
Cosmic Goo Convertor
#164 - 2013-05-28 08:23:25 UTC
CCP Fozzie wrote:
The oversupply of ice is so significant that to bring supplies into some kind of balance through reduced refine yields we would need to make each block of ice yield less than 1/2 of a unit of isotopes.


By "oversupply" do you mean "amount of ice available to be mined" or "amount of ice actually mined"?

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Mara Rinn
Cosmic Goo Convertor
#165 - 2013-05-28 08:28:35 UTC  |  Edited by: Mara Rinn
Iosue wrote:
great analysis. i only have a couple of questions regarding your assumptions. can you elaborate on two factors that might mitigate the need for rorqual compression altogether? 1) the use of station refining in null and 2) the use of POS refining in null. I'm really interested in 2. since my understanding is that POSs can refine ice at 100% with the proper chars and equipment. thanks.


POS refineries are capped at 75% regardless of skills and implants. They also take 3 hours to refine 200,000m3 (i.e.: 67k m3/hr, compared to 45k m3/hr from a single strip miner module), and can only handle one type of ore at a time. Oh, and with a POS refinery oniine, you pretty much have to take everything else at the POS offline.

Fixing POS refineries would go some way to helping build the "farms and fields" that certain nullsec folks were talking about during CSM6.

Edit: see next post, by Carniflex, for correction on POS refinery ice yield.

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Carniflex
StarHunt
Mordus Angels
#166 - 2013-05-28 09:01:40 UTC
Mara Rinn wrote:
Iosue wrote:
great analysis. i only have a couple of questions regarding your assumptions. can you elaborate on two factors that might mitigate the need for rorqual compression altogether? 1) the use of station refining in null and 2) the use of POS refining in null. I'm really interested in 2. since my understanding is that POSs can refine ice at 100% with the proper chars and equipment. thanks.


POS refineries are capped at 75% regardless of skills and implants. They also take 3 hours to refine 200,000m3 (i.e.: 67k m3/hr, compared to 45k m3/hr from a single strip miner module), and can only handle one type of ore at a time. Oh, and with a POS refinery oniine, you pretty much have to take everything else at the POS offline.

Fixing POS refineries would go some way to helping build the "farms and fields" that certain nullsec folks were talking about during CSM6.


Last I looked (which was a long trime ago) POS refinery refined ICE at 100 %, even the crappy 35% yield one so you dont need the 75% refinery for ice. As far as ORE goes yeah, its pretty much pointless to refine ORE in a POS refinery unless you are particularly desperate (in a wormhole without Roqual, perhaps).

So if your desire is to refine only and only ICE you are better off with these small refineries. For the same amount of resources as the large one you can get 5.71 of the small ones online giving you ~228 k m3 of space against 200k in the large one, plus your refine cykle time is 3600s vs the 10800s in the large. So they are a lot better for ICE refining if that is the only thing you want to do with them.

Ofc in reality you would want to have about 6 of them online for each large refinery you have at slightly higher CPU cost. You cant anchor only 0.71 of the refinery after all ;) With the rather short online times on these things you can keep em offline when not in use. Hell you can even unachor them and hide them away if you are ninja-refining without your landlord knowing about it.

Here, sanity... niiiice sanity, come to daddy... okay, that's a good sanity... THWONK! GOT the bastard.
Danni stark
#167 - 2013-05-28 09:07:36 UTC
Mara Rinn wrote:
Danni stark wrote:
people probably fly a covetor or a hulk because if they are in a fleet then tank and cargo are both as relevant as a fruit cake is to a venus fly trap plant.


Even a hulk has a 14s align time. So either you're flying aligned to a celestial and retargeting ice as you move past the previous block, or you get ganked.

Try it sometime before Odyssey. Head out to an ice field with a max-yield Hulk fitted with Ice Harvester IIs Lol


i'm lazy as ****, so i mine with retrievers. also i can't be bothered to completely refit my hulk because for some ****** up reason ice modules use more CPU than ore ones so your already tight fitting tank has to be completely refit as well as your mining modules.

also i went and suicide ganked a miner the other day because i wondered just how hard it would be... turns out, it's easier than i thought. after the kill i thought "surely concord should be here by now?" it was rather eye opening so there's definitely no way i'd sit an already paper thin hulk, with a reduced capacity to tank due to being ice fit in a belt where people are likely to come looking for targets.

besides most hulks will have a fleet booster, is that 14 seconds with the skirmish warfare agility bonus?

Ice Mining Skill Plan.
Felicity Love
Doomheim
#168 - 2013-05-28 13:12:03 UTC
Christ, I love this game.

The misinformation and propaganda spins are always amusing; soooooooooo....

EVERYBODY buy ICE because it's obvious the "Can't Be Arsed" factor is about to soar after the Oddysey arrives. P

"EVE is dying." -- The Four Forum Trolls of the Apocalypse.   ( Pick four, any four. They all smell.  )
Vincent Athena
Photosynth
#169 - 2013-05-28 18:30:26 UTC
CCP Fozzie wrote:
You make an excellent point about the non-racial ices Jita, and it's something we're keeping in mind as we work on the composition of the 0.0 ice belts.

One quick note I want to respond to however:
Jita Bloodtear wrote:

We should instead be rebalancing the refined product yield for each type of ice. If the supply of highsec isotopes is too high then the rebalance should reflect this by lowering the refined supply slightly

The oversupply of ice is so significant that to bring supplies into some kind of balance through reduced refine yields we would need to make each block of ice yield less than 1/2 of a unit of isotopes.

I find it quite hard to believe that ice miners are mining 600 times more ice than the game needs.

Know a Frozen fan? Check this out

Frozen fanfiction
Huttan Funaila
Caldari Provisions
Caldari State
#170 - 2013-05-28 23:14:45 UTC
Iosue wrote:
hmm, i only counted 25 systems yesterday with 30 ice fields in caldari hi-sec. this includes: the forge, the citadel, black rise and lonetrek. did i miss a region?

From the static data dump, I find 28 ice belts in Caldari high sec.

Quote:
SELECT MR.regionName, md.itemName, md.[security] AS TrueSec,
CASE
WHEN md.[security] <=0.0 THEN 'NullSec'
WHEN md.[security] <0.5 THEN 'LowSec'
ELSE 'HighSec'
END AS SystemLevel, CF.factionName
FROM mapDenormalize AS md
INNER JOIN invTypes AS it ON md.typeID=it.typeID
INNER JOIN mapRegions AS MR on MR.regionID = md.regionID
LEFT JOIN chrFactions AS CF ON MR.factionID = CF.factionID
WHERE it.typeID = 17774 -- This is Ice Field
AND factionName = 'Caldari State'
AND md.[security] >=0.5
ORDER BY regionName,itemName

For a cumulative number of Ice Fields/Belts:
Quote:
WITH Cumulative AS (
SELECT md.itemName,
CASE
WHEN md.[security] <=0.0 THEN 'Null'
WHEN md.[security] <=0.5 THEN 'Low'
ELSE 'High'
END AS SystemLevel
FROM mapDenormalize AS md
INNER JOIN invTypes AS it ON md.typeID=it.typeID
WHERE it.typeID = 17774 -- This is Ice Field
)

SELECT SystemLevel, COUNT(itemName) AS NumberOfIceBelts FROM Cumulative
GROUP BY SystemLevel
This yields:
High sec - 128 ice belts
Low sec - 139 ice belts
Null sec - 650 ice belts.
Serhii Komendant
Caldari Provisions
Caldari State
#171 - 2013-05-30 17:24:39 UTC
In short 0.0 alliances get a shitload of dirt cheap workforce cause Highsec mining will stop being profitable, even less than lvl 2-3 agents and miners will be forced to join 0.0 alliances one way or another.

What were they thinking? Even distribution of resources? Get us rare ores in Highsec then. We will mine ours to our hearts content and leave 0.0 belts to 0.0 goats.
Bugsy VanHalen
Society of lost Souls
#172 - 2013-05-30 19:57:43 UTC
Jita Bloodtear wrote:
Firstly, the various ores are going to refine into a different set of minerals than they currently do (the details can be found here). The goal of this was to provide more low-end minerals (tritanium, pyerite, and mexallon) to nullsec to help with local manufacturing. Right now all major nullsec manufacturing jobs have to import these low-end minerals from empire using compression techniques (425mm railguns, 800mm artillery, etc).

This illustrates my biggest issue. Why are these low end minerals such a shortage in null sec? Null sec static belts have all the low end ores, in much larger rocks than any high sec system. There is an abundance of massive Veldspar rocks in Null sec. Some will argue that nobody wants to mine the low end ores while high end ores are available. And this is true to an extent, but mining these low end ores would still be more efficient that compression minerals in high sec and jumping them out.

I believe based on over 2 years of living in null sec as a miner, that the real reason is the static belts are just to dangerous to mine in. Any passing hostile or neutral can warp into the belt and kill you before you have time to react. The hidden belts however take a little longer to find, this gives the miners time to GTFO.

With the odyssey expansion the hidden belts are now no more secure than the static belts. As I have said dozens of times, this WILL be a problem.
Bugsy VanHalen
Society of lost Souls
#173 - 2013-05-30 20:03:50 UTC
Mara Rinn wrote:
Danni stark wrote:
people probably fly a covetor or a hulk because if they are in a fleet then tank and cargo are both as relevant as a fruit cake is to a venus fly trap plant.


Even a hulk has a 14s align time. So either you're flying aligned to a celestial and retargeting ice as you move past the previous block, or you get ganked.

Try it sometime before Odyssey. Head out to an ice field with a max-yield Hulk fitted with Ice Harvester IIs Lol

A max yield HULK can still have well over 20k ehp. A MAX dps Talos can only do 16,000 damage before CONCORD shows up. A MAX damage Catayst can do at best about 8,000 damage before CONCORD shows up.

Before the mining ship buff you could gank a max yield hulk with a single catayst, now you need 3-4 catalysts or 2 talos. Ganking miners costs much more than it used to.
xCassiopiax
Naari LLC
#174 - 2013-05-30 23:46:57 UTC
IrJosy wrote:
Here at goonswarm we try to make hi-sec tears as much as possible. I fear ccp fozzie has bested us this time though.


Don't worry, with 200+ R64 Moons getting seeded in low & Null CFC and the rest will be able to afford the jump fuel price increase P
Danni stark
#175 - 2013-05-30 23:50:37 UTC  |  Edited by: Danni stark
Bugsy VanHalen wrote:
A max yield HULK can still have well over 20k ehp. A MAX dps Talos can only do 16,000 damage before CONCORD shows up. A MAX damage Catayst can do at best about 8,000 damage before CONCORD shows up.

Before the mining ship buff you could gank a max yield hulk with a single catayst, now you need 3-4 catalysts or 2 talos. Ganking miners costs much more than it used to.
a talos puts out over 1.5k dps, at ~20 seconds concord response time in 0.5 that's 30k of damage. that'll melt your 20k ehp hulk before concord is even there.

Ice Mining Skill Plan.
Mara Rinn
Cosmic Goo Convertor
#176 - 2013-05-31 02:13:15 UTC
Vincent Athena wrote:
CCP Fozzie wrote:
The oversupply of ice is so significant that to bring supplies into some kind of balance through reduced refine yields we would need to make each block of ice yield less than 1/2 of a unit of isotopes.

I find it quite hard to believe that ice miners are mining 600 times more ice than the game needs.


CCP Fozzie does indeed appear to be conflating "amount present and available to be harvested" with "amount actually harvested".

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xCassiopiax
Naari LLC
#177 - 2013-06-01 11:59:11 UTC
Nice assessment Bloodtear, pretty much agree, also the mistake of assuming low sec ice will be mined, part of Fozzie's fuzzy math. As someone whom has mined ice forever i found that laughable at best. But i commend Fozzie;s noble attempt to fix the ice problem.
Sir Marksalot
Aliastra
Gallente Federation
#178 - 2013-06-01 15:01:35 UTC
Mara Rinn wrote:
Danni stark wrote:
people probably fly a covetor or a hulk because if they are in a fleet then tank and cargo are both as relevant as a fruit cake is to a venus fly trap plant.


Even a hulk has a 14s align time. So either you're flying aligned to a celestial and retargeting ice as you move past the previous block, or you get ganked.

Try it sometime before Odyssey. Head out to an ice field with a max-yield Hulk fitted with Ice Harvester IIs Lol


This may come as a shock to you, but it takes longer than 14s to jump in, scan, align, warp, and land.
Sir Marksalot
Aliastra
Gallente Federation
#179 - 2013-06-01 15:06:00 UTC  |  Edited by: Sir Marksalot
Bugsy VanHalen wrote:
Jita Bloodtear wrote:
Firstly, the various ores are going to refine into a different set of minerals than they currently do (the details can be found here). The goal of this was to provide more low-end minerals (tritanium, pyerite, and mexallon) to nullsec to help with local manufacturing. Right now all major nullsec manufacturing jobs have to import these low-end minerals from empire using compression techniques (425mm railguns, 800mm artillery, etc).

This illustrates my biggest issue. Why are these low end minerals such a shortage in null sec? Null sec static belts have all the low end ores, in much larger rocks than any high sec system. There is an abundance of massive Veldspar rocks in Null sec. Some will argue that nobody wants to mine the low end ores while high end ores are available. And this is true to an extent, but mining these low end ores would still be more efficient that compression minerals in high sec and jumping them out.

I believe based on over 2 years of living in null sec as a miner, that the real reason is the static belts are just to dangerous to mine in. Any passing hostile or neutral can warp into the belt and kill you before you have time to react. The hidden belts however take a little longer to find, this gives the miners time to GTFO.

With the odyssey expansion the hidden belts are now no more secure than the static belts. As I have said dozens of times, this WILL be a problem.


You do realize that rocks aren't infinite, right? They become depleted and disappear.

http://i.imgur.com/GhCGzNV.jpg - Current grav site contents. Roughly.

tip: As much as I like the change, low ends are still a bit low relative to the amount of high ends mined.


xCassiopiax wrote:
IrJosy wrote:
Here at goonswarm we try to make hi-sec tears as much as possible. I fear ccp fozzie has bested us this time though.


Don't worry, with 200+ R64 Moons getting seeded in low & Null CFC and the rest will be able to afford the jump fuel price increase P


Fuel is still inexpensive.
Anti-social Tendencies
Society for Miner Education
#180 - 2013-06-03 17:30:27 UTC
Bugsy VanHalen wrote:

A max yield HULK can still have well over 20k ehp. A MAX dps Talos can only do 16,000 damage before CONCORD shows up. A MAX damage Catayst can do at best about 8,000 damage before CONCORD shows up.


I think your math is wrong. A Max yield Hulk, (fit for Ore, not ice), won't do "well over 20k EHP".

"Patience: n, a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue." - AMBROSE PIERCE