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I'd settle for acknowledgement that grav sigs and the associated probing skill battle between miners and hunters is a gameplay mechanic used by miners that don't fall into the category of "nullsec alliance miner" or "Highsec AFK carebear". Eliminating that skill battle kills, or greatly reduces, every other mining gameplay except those two.

Sorry I'm coming across as entitled when the game mechanics as they are right now are 90% why I even mine. Mining is boring. Mining with an astrometrics/scanning skill battle for survival with other players is fun. Constantly getting attacked by player ships with ease with almost no strategy for me to avoid or escape brings it back to boring again. I just want fun mining, not safe mining.

That's great everywhere but in a WH. Right now, the scanner list doesn't update until you do something that makes it update, like switching filters, turning anons on/off, etc. A new site also takes 30 seconds to show up in the sky and the list, even if you do those things to make it show up. 30 seconds is more than enough time for someone to enter a hole, and get in position to take out a miner. The miner can only count on luck that they hit dscan at the exact moment between gate cloak and covops. That only works if the hole is within dscan range, otherwise even that option is gone.
That is more risk than anywhere else in the game, and the increased rewards don't come close to making that even.

That's true, though the OP was talking about WH mining. It's pretty balanced in other areas of space, not so whatsoever in WH space, which was the point of the thread.

Hopefully they fix the switching-filters and 30sec delay issues, but 30 seconds is still underestimating the amount of time it would take. The K162 will spawn when they warp to it, not when they land on it, so it's possible you'll see the sig before they've even gone through the hole.

Also keep in mind that you probably won't be mining at 0 in the grav site, so an attacker will either need to warp twice to get to you or fly to you once they land.

Personally, I intend to anchor small warp disruptors with decloak cans at the center of the grav site, and then never mine near it. Problem (mostly) solved.

I was one of the first and most vocal people to claim this would destroy WH mining back when it was originally announced, but new sigs showing up on your scanner for free mitigates most of that.

And while now you and CCP tell miners to "get clever", there was already "clever" ways to find miners without alerting them on Dscan. I've been hit by a few people who were genuinely amazing at narrowing down ship locations using a combination of narrow d-scan and saving probes to the last second. Hell if I just lost my ~50 mil barge, but I still wanted to shake their hand on a job well done. That's skill, and that's fun. That you look at the mechanic as flawed and an "unlevel playing field" instead of a challenge for you to overcome is absurd hypocrisy given what you've been telling everyone who's disagreed with you to do.

Requiring PvPers like you to be the clever ones is actually balanced, because while being parked in a grav sig is somewhat in the miner's favor, once you get to the barges, the odds are extremely in your favor. Requiring miners to have all the cleverness in starting (or avoiding) a fight AND be extremely outclassed in the fight seems unbalanced.

You tell me I need to be more clever with my mining strategies? Why don't PvP barge hunters need to have clever strategies at all in this upcoming update?

First of all I blame nothing on the cartels, if anyone is to blame it is the developers for leaving the loop holes for you to find. I LMAO when the GOONS made trillions of isk off the faction wars exploit. I would have done the same thing had I been on the ball enough to see the loop hole myself.

Even so, regardless of whether a megacyte cartel would be possible, i admit it was a far fetched idea. Null sec mining by small solo operators, or multiboxers will be a thing of the past, at least outside of the big blue bubbles.

Nobody mines in low sec currently, even though it contains some of the most valuable ores currently. Why? Because mining in los sec is just to dangerous.

The fact that Arknor is available in any upgraded sov space is meaningless if it can not be mined without getting the mining ships destroyed. This is not an issue deep inside friendly space belonging to the big alliances, But for small operations like mine, it is a big problem.

I do not have access to systems free from roaming hostiles and neutrals. When i mined in null I did have access to upgraded sov space, with hidden belts containing Arknor. But we were far to small to make those systems safe. The systems we mined in constantly had neutrals and the occasional hostile passing through. However we were able to mine somewhat safely using the tools available, such as watching D-scan, because most of those passing roamers did not carry probe launchers,. When they did we would see the probes on D-scan and safe up. This, although far higher risk than mining deep inside friendly space, was an acceptable level of risk for the rewards from mining A,B,C ores.

With the Changes coming in Odyssey this is not longer possible. Any passing roamer will be able to warp directly to the ORE belt without the need of probes or time to scan. This is the only issue I have with Odyssey. Obviously this is not a problem for you, as any miners in your space will know about any incoming threats thru intel long before they get to the mining system. So if you know a way for me to continue mining outside of protected alliance space please enlighten me.

This is the basis for my argument. Post Odyssey Null sec mining will have risk levels far worse than low sec mining has now. At least currently in low sec you still have hidden grav sites pop up.

The current risk level in low sec is high enough that nobody mines there, dispite the abundance of high value ores. H,H, & J are 3 of the top 4 ores right now. It does not matter if the A,B,C ores are available, if you can not mine them without getting blown up, they might as well not be there. Post Odyssey the only place these ORE's can be mined safely is deep inside friendly space. i.e. only available to the residents and renters of the large alliances.

As far as keeping sites open, as of last week I was still able to keep sites in high sec open by leaving an uncloaked ship in them. They fixed it so it no longer works with cloaked ships, but non cloaked ships still seems to be working. Perhaps anomalies are different, I only tested signature sites I scanned down that had nice ore deposits.

As an MMO, the game is all about player interaction. Mining in particular offers itself as a more cooperative social aspect of the game, rather than the action-based combat play that sets one group of players against another. That's half the fun right there, and pretty much the only reason I and the people I play with in the game go to High-sec.

The other half of the fun (because honestly high sec gets boring after a while) comes from the risk of having someone come and attack us, but (and here's the important part), being able to escape the encounter without losing our ships. Barges alone can't defend themselves if they land on top of us; we're already dead if it gets that far. So it goes to Dscan as our only way to survive the risk of encounter: avoid the encounter. And since the actual activity of mining doesn't lend itself to paying attention, what else is there to do but mash dscan and identify potential threats?

If you want to make mining engaging in non-highsec, make the mechanics of watching/identifying/evading threats more proactive. Well, I guess, first give us a mechanic for watching/identifying/evading threats now that local has effectively become the new Dscan, then make it more proactive. Or make barges (or a new class of mixed-use ship) have some kind of additional offensive/defensive options that aren't as much of a joke as warp core stabilizers and 25 m3 of drones, so the only option isn't evasion. And for all of space, make the actual task of mining more than just watching lasers cycle for 3 minutes. All of these options, though, emphasize players fiddling around with their own keyboards and mice interacting with the game instead of interacting with nearby miners and doing hilarious stupid things with ships that mining currently is, which I think is something that differentiates EVE from other games like the X-series or FPS multiplayer games on consoles. I think that's a good thing, but everyone can have a different opinion.

In any case, making it easier to find miners in ships that were already sitting ducks by design doesn't accomplish your goals of making the activity more engaging. The activity is still the same, nothing is added that wasn't already there, but now there's less options for survival or even avoiding a confrontation before it gets as far as weapons firing. Lopsided fights are only fun for the winners who like that kind of thing, and barge vs PvP fights remain just as lopsided.

Herein lies the problem, double standards. So a miner having to scan down a grav site, then set up mining with D-scan constantly surveilled is somehow far too easy, yet when a PvPer comes into the same system, scans the same site down with the intention of ganking said miner, it is too hard... WAAAA! Also, that evil 'free intel' Local clearly only works one way and doesn't alert PvPers to potential targets in the system. What a ridiculous statement.

With this system, the balance that existed is thrown unceremoniously out of the window and mining becomes suicidal. 'Easy mode' is apparently only bad when it applies to non-PvPers, now anyone who wants to gank miners can do so without expending any effort at all.

Seriously, PvPers have such a skewed perspective of mining and industry, and really have no idea what drives industrialists at all - Fozzie is the wrong person to even touch anything remotely related to industry.

CCP, you may as well relabel Odyssey as Nerfyssey or Dumbyssey, since that's all that seems to be contained within this fake expansion.

No one on either side is going to convince the other, so rather than pursuing this tired line of argument any further, I propose we just let the markets show who is right. If you, and indeed everyone in this thread claiming that people will just stop mining are correct, high ends ought to spike through the roof, maybe even back to the old pre-drone region levels; zydrine at about 4500-5k, and Megacyte at (as I recall, it's been awhile) 10k or so. Though, there are other effects that could cause that, so perhaps getting CCP to comment on mining numbers before and after would be best.

Engaging : tending to draw favorable attention or interest
This is the definition I'm using when I say "mining should be more engaging." I mean it should, at the very least, require more attention in a compelling manner, even be fun and interesting if that's possible.


Again, I think making the actual task of mining should be the interesting part. Relying on danger to make it interesting means that in highsec (or that much lauded "super deep nullsec"), it's still rather boring, and you never did explain how your scheme does that.


Our dear Dmitri was attempting unsuccessfully to argue that the supposed "skill game" involved in a hunter racing against the clock to catch a miner before he warps out makes mining interesting. That makes arguing that the miner also has to scan down the site a rather apples to oranges comparison, as the miner has no such time limit. And, noting that probing is more difficult and local/dscan is easy was not meant as a whine, but rather to ridicule the idea that it's a "skill game" or "competition" as he was trying to imply.

Of course...



With a childish attitude like this, I'm not even sure why I'm giving you any attention at all.

Mynna, clearly your definitions of fun differ from mine. That's cool. But what isn't cool is the part where you discard other views and playstyles just because they aren't your own and you can't relate to them. It wouldn't be such a big deal to me, because hey, you can have your playstyle and I can have mine. Allowing for a diversity of playstyles and definitions of what "fun" is makes for a successful MMO, after all.

Except that you are part of CSM, the fan delegation meant to provide fan input to CCP. And Fozzie seems to have the same attitude, and he IS CCP. Why even have mining in this game if you are all about combat being the answer to everything? Why not just change it to Gratuitous Space Battles Online?

For what it's worth, you still don't understand that increased combat will not and will never make an activity like mining "more engaging" when the ONLY strategy available to mining ships, by design, is to flee instead of standing their ground. Mining ships, even with an escort, can only flee from and avoid danger, and that is the entire game of mining outside of highsec. By increasing the risk of combat without also giving some sort of neat and cool mechanism for miners to play their evasion game, or even just leave the current probes-on-dscan method alone, miners will flee the entire profession back into safer space instead of just the ore belts when danger comes near.

Also, I'm not trying to be rude or entitled or a know-it-all, I'm trying to have a civil conversation here in defense of a part of the game I actually like. Referring to me as "Our Dear Dmitri" and then telling everyone else they are the ones being childish is just ridiculous. Which, hey, fine, this is the internet after all, but I thought a member of CSM would have more tact in discussions rather than being condescending to everyone else with different opinions.