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[Kronos] Mining Barges and Exhumers

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Weaselior
GoonWaffe
Goonswarm Federation
#21 - 2014-04-01 15:57:10 UTC
Anhenka wrote:
I'm in support of buffing the Hulk, but since you are planning on bundling these changes with the summer indy prepossessing changes that will result in a substantial drop in refined minerals, I really don't think it's a good idea to bundle in changes that result in a significant yield drop in the typical mining vessel of the vast majority of players.

you mean the changes that do no such thing? the ones that keep the yield of highsec mining exactly the same as before?

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Zakarumit CZ
Zakarum Industries
Forgers United
#22 - 2014-04-01 15:58:40 UTC
I really hope this isnt an April fools joke, as those changes seems actually very well thought and could bring in a lot of additional fun and pvp into low sec and wormholes.
Menor Minayin
Hedion University
Amarr Empire
#23 - 2014-04-01 15:58:52 UTC
So targeting range goes up, what about the survey scanner?
Vincent Athena
Photosynth
#24 - 2014-04-01 15:59:11 UTC
Changing the mining bonus to a duration based one is of some help to the issue I will bring up. But the Skiff, and to some extent the Mack still have one big disadvantage compared to the Hulk: fewer strips. To see the issue consider:

Most miners target a roid and let the miner run its full cycle. If the roid is small some fraction of the cycle will be wasted. With the Hulk if one of your strips is on a small roid you will lose some small fraction of your yield, up to a maximum of one third.

But with the Skiff you could lose up to a complete cycle by targeting a small roid. As the single strip takes so much ore in one cycle there is a greater chance the roid will pop and you lose part of the cycle.

The result is under most practical uses, the Skiff mines much less than your table of numbers would indicate.

How to fix? I see three methods.
1) Redo the models so all mining ships have the same number of strips.
2) Make the strips on the Skiff cycle faster (but still produce the same cubic meters per minute). Of course the player can do this manually, but it just makes mining even more of a click fest.
3) Make it so if you mine a small roid the miner starts its cycle part way through so its timed to end just as the roid runs out of minerals. (This would fail if there are two strips on the same roid. But that is a rare case anyway).

#2 is the only one that can be done by just changing stats. The others require more coding.

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El Drottningo
School of Applied Knowledge
Caldari State
#25 - 2014-04-01 15:59:14 UTC
So when do we get to see a change to the range of survey scanners?
Anhenka
Native Freshfood
Minmatar Republic
#26 - 2014-04-01 16:02:10 UTC
Weaselior wrote:
Anhenka wrote:
I'm in support of buffing the Hulk, but since you are planning on bundling these changes with the summer indy prepossessing changes that will result in a substantial drop in refined minerals, I really don't think it's a good idea to bundle in changes that result in a significant yield drop in the typical mining vessel of the vast majority of players.

you mean the changes that do no such thing? the ones that keep the yield of highsec mining exactly the same as before?


For the most organized players with POS's and such, the reprocessing changes will be of little effect. But remember that not everybody has POS's or perfect skills/standings, and these people will still continue to refine a significant amount of their own ore postpatch under the "My mined minerals are free" mentality.

Not everyone has their act together. Oddly enough, most people that do are not miners. Super low effort profession is frequently coupled with things like not putting much effort into things ingame.

Can you or I refine at equal or higher %'s postpatch? Sure. Will there be enough people refining at a lower yield than current? I think so.
mkint
#27 - 2014-04-01 16:02:21 UTC
Weird... what do you think is going on in the market to call for 2 different mining nerfs? One to barges, one to ores. Mining nerfs don't hurt miners, not really. Mining income will always balance out based on income/hour compared to other sources of income, adjusted for pain tolerances. The only things an across-the-board nerf like this one does is hurt people who consume the minerals (as in lose ships to PVP), since now they'll have to spend that much more time paying the miners.

There are things seriously broken with EVE. Things that limit how long the game itself can continue to survive. Things that makes recent subscription:activity ratios both an embarrassment and alarming. And this kind of pointless tinkering was the best you could come up with?

Maxim 6. If violence wasn’t your last resort, you failed to resort to enough of it.
Dersen Lowery
The Scope
#28 - 2014-04-01 16:05:22 UTC
Vincent Athena wrote:
Changing the mining bonus to a duration based one is of some help to the issue I will bring up. But the Skiff, and to some extent the Mack still have one big disadvantage compared to the Hulk: fewer strips. To see the issue consider:

Most miners target a roid and let the miner run its full cycle. If the roid is small some fraction of the cycle will be wasted. With the Hulk if one of your strips is on a small roid you will lose some small fraction of your yield, up to a maximum of one third.

But with the Skiff you could lose up to a complete cycle by targeting a small roid. As the single strip takes so much ore in one cycle there is a greater chance the roid will pop and you lose part of the cycle.

The result is under most practical uses, the Skiff mines much less than your table of numbers would indicate.


Isn't that the whole point of the Hulk, to give the miner much more fine-grained control and reward his paying attention with higher yields?

Not that it addresses the twin problems that the mining minigame itself doesn't encourage close attention, and given that, the presence of gankers pretty much drives people into more AFK-friendly ships. But it doesn't seem to me like the solution is to make the Skiff more like the Hulk.

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Jelani Akinyemi Affonso
Republic Military School
Minmatar Republic
#29 - 2014-04-01 16:09:34 UTC
Put tinfoil hat...

No not me mack...NOOOO!

Oh well.. Mack is still king BABY!
Nothing beats ore hold Bear
Brewlar Kuvakei
Adeptio Gloriae
#30 - 2014-04-01 16:15:01 UTC
How about reducing all barge tanks abck down to sensible levels again, like you know when eve was good and not this brainless dross? Where going afk, botting or ISboxing was frowned upon and punished hard. You really are just milking this game dry now.
MailDeadDrop
Archon Industries
#31 - 2014-04-01 16:19:25 UTC  |  Edited by: MailDeadDrop
Why does the Procuror lose a mid while gaining a low (maintains total slot count), while the Skiff gains a low (increases total slot count)?

Edit: This seems like a rather significant nerf to the (usually shield tanked) Procuror. Intended?

MDD
TheMercenaryKing
Collapsed Out
Pandemic Legion
#32 - 2014-04-01 16:19:37 UTC  |  Edited by: TheMercenaryKing
On a Hulk - Buff the Ore bay so you can get a two cycles out of a: Rorqual boosted (with implant), T2 strip miner with T2 crystals, mining yield 3% implant, with max skills.

Otherwise if i turn my mining fleet back online and don't sell my 2nd rorqual, i am changing from macks to skiffs.

Also, assume that all low slots have T2 MLUs. I would only change that on maybe a skiff, but even then.
Jagoff Haverford
Royal Amarr Institute
Amarr Empire
#33 - 2014-04-01 16:19:56 UTC
To be clear, when the "re-balancing" took place a few years ago, dozens and dozens of responses on these forums predicted that mining would become nothing but Mackinaws and Retrievers.

There is one other thing that pushed many of us away from the Hulk and Covetor, however, that is not mentioned here -- the ability to carry enough crystals to support mining in low and null sec.

The Hulk is fine as a high sec ship, since any given belt there can only provide (at most) four different types of ore, and the Hulk can carry four full sets of crystals for its three strip miners. Everywhere else, however -- and especially in now-no-longer hidden mining sites -- there are far more types of ore available.

At the time of the "re-balancing", CCP stated that they wanted to Hulk and Covetor to be focused on group mining, and that's why they deliberately removed the ability to carry multiple sets of crystals. I never really understood how this was supposed to work, but somehow crystal carrying capacity was tied to being in a fleet. Unless you were in high sec, I guess, because then you cover the entire belt with the four sets of crystals that you could carry.

I pretty much stopped flying my Hulk at that point. It was just too big a hassle to fly to a grav site, make note of which rocks remained (I found I usually had to write this down), use a survey scanner to make sure that there was still enough Bistot left to make it worth my while, bookmark the locations of the rocks that I wanted to start with, and then warp back to the station and load in the proper crystals. Far easier to jump in the Mackinaw that was pre-loaded with a decent crystal set, warp to the anomaly, and mine whatever I landed closest too while slow-boating to the ore type that I most wanted to obtain.

If you really want to give the Hulk and Covetor a reason to be in fleet, have you considered them making them more responsive to the boosts from mining links than the other barges? That would certainly make it advantageous to use them in larger fleets.

And if you could let them carry enough crystals for at least 7 or 8 different ore types, they might actually be useful again.
Vincent Athena
Photosynth
#34 - 2014-04-01 16:20:12 UTC
Dersen Lowery wrote:
Vincent Athena wrote:
Changing the mining bonus to a duration based one is of some help to the issue I will bring up. But the Skiff, and to some extent the Mack still have one big disadvantage compared to the Hulk: fewer strips. To see the issue consider:

Most miners target a roid and let the miner run its full cycle. If the roid is small some fraction of the cycle will be wasted. With the Hulk if one of your strips is on a small roid you will lose some small fraction of your yield, up to a maximum of one third.

But with the Skiff you could lose up to a complete cycle by targeting a small roid. As the single strip takes so much ore in one cycle there is a greater chance the roid will pop and you lose part of the cycle.

The result is under most practical uses, the Skiff mines much less than your table of numbers would indicate.


Isn't that the whole point of the Hulk, to give the miner much more fine-grained control and reward his paying attention with higher yields?

Not that it addresses the twin problems that the mining minigame itself doesn't encourage close attention, and given that, the presence of gankers pretty much drives people into more AFK-friendly ships. But it doesn't seem to me like the solution is to make the Skiff more like the Hulk.

Not really. If the Skiff had been designed without the idea of tiers from day one, it would have had just as many strips as the Hulk. It has one because the ship model in game had one at the time CCP introduced tiericide.

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Dave stark
#35 - 2014-04-01 16:20:25 UTC
basically, these changes do close to **** all to address any of the issues exhumers have.

surely you could have put your time to better use, and maybe come up with actual fixes.
Ersahi Kir
Brutor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#36 - 2014-04-01 16:23:26 UTC
The most exciting part of this change is the increase in targeting range.

And Fozzie totally forgot to mention the swapping of the sig radius of the skiffs and hulks.

Now to choose between the skiff and the hulk. Things that make you go hmm.
Rabbit P
Nuwa Foundation
Fraternity.
#37 - 2014-04-01 16:25:26 UTC  |  Edited by: Rabbit P
Quote:

RETRIEVER

Targeting (max targeting range / Scan Resolution / Max Locked targets): 30km(+7.5km) / 660 / 5



now at TQ, the Max Locked targets of Retriever is 4
should it be "5(+1)" ?

same case at Hulk too
Dersen Lowery
The Scope
#38 - 2014-04-01 16:25:39 UTC
Brewlar Kuvakei wrote:
Where going afk, botting or ISboxing was frowned upon and punished hard.


When was that? Big smile

Also:

+1 to bonuses being more skill-dependent.

Looks good all around. The Skiff looks like the kind of mining barge I could convince myself to fly. As long as the Retriever and Mackinaw retain enormous ore holds and mining remains a low-input activity, they will continue to cover the belts.

If you want more Hulks in the belts, the chatter in Jita Park and elsewhere about coming up with more social mechanics for the game would come in handy: it's a paper-thin, high-maintenance fleet ship now, so as long as you make it difficult or excessively risky for people to band together or cooperate, you'll only see them in dead-end sov nullsec, protected by entire regions' worth of intel channels and enough bubbles to make meringue.

Proud founder and member of the Belligerent Desirables.

I voted in CSM X!
Jagoff Haverford
Royal Amarr Institute
Amarr Empire
#39 - 2014-04-01 16:26:09 UTC
Menor Minayin wrote:
So targeting range goes up, what about the survey scanner?

Holy crap does the survey scanner need some love! And not just range, but some kind of indicator that shows which asteroids are currently locked and which one is currently targeted.
Virtutis Sahasranama
Old Spice Syndicate
#40 - 2014-04-01 16:29:55 UTC
Slightly confused. Only about a week ago now, I spread sheeted ice cycle time so that I could work out how much benefit bringing the Rorqual instead of Orca to my current cycle times. When done, I checked the results in game and cycle times matched, with and without boosts so I was fairly confident I had calculated correctly. However your post states ice cycle times will be slightly better at high end.

Now I just plugged the Mack changes in and at my current skill on mining toon which is Exhumers 3, I gain 4 seconds in cycle time after the change. Checking at max level, I gain 0.1 seconds (buggerall but it means requiring Exhumers 5 to have the same time as now). I tried then using boosts, and got the same results. After the change, around 2 seconds slower with boosts at E3, and just under a second slower at E5. How are you calculating that Ice will be slightly quicker for Mack after changes...