Player Features and Ideas Discussion

As we all (should) know by now, there are some changes in the pipeline for refining that make miners the "go to" people for mineral procurement.

I don't think that CCP is going quite far enough with NPC stations in highsec (possibly empire as a whole).


Ignoring standings requirements for tax evasion, you need 5/4/3 (Refining / Refinery Efficiency / Ore Processing - though R.E. and Processing can be reversed) or 5/4/4 skills to refine at 100% in any 50% base station in New Eden. This takes about 1.5 to just over 2 weeks for a fresh noob (no implants / respecs).

Post patch, you will require 5/5/5 AND Cybernetics 5 to get the equivalent of "100% refine" today; which only adds a mere 60 days of training time for the typical hisec belt ores (Veldspar, Scordite, Plagioclase, Omber, and Kernite). With the assumption that a not-insignificant number of multiboxers are already in the process of getting their skills "up to par", we might not even have that long before we're right back where we are today.


To combat this, I propose that CCP nerf hisec stations further.

I see two ways to go about this:

1. Simply remove refineries from non-mining / refining stations (stuff like "Federation Navy Logistics Support", or "Ishukone Warehouse"). This is a less elegant option, as the "mining" stations are few and far between, and will probably cause more trouble than it is worth -- really just mentioning it because it "is" an option.

2. Knock hisec stations down below 50% base -- hell, take them all the way to 30% if necessary (gradually -- say over the next 10 patches). POS will provide massive refining boosts (hisec = 52% refine), thus forcing certain types into player corps if they want to keep burying the market in cheap minerals. Furthermore, this will help keep POS relevant in HS, because while "oh yay, 2% more minerals" is nice ... 20% more is a very strong draw to spend the X million/month on a tower.

Yes, this would **** off a lot of people who've relied on the relative safety of NPC corps for the last 11 years ("it's not fair!") ... and it will make being a newbie harder overall, but I believe making "NPC Life" for miners as hard as possible will be positive for New Eden as a whole in the long term.


TL;DR -- The changes to mining are good, but the skills gap is trivial to overcome and will likely end up only being a short-term solution if NPC stations continue allow for "perfect" refine.

ed -- fixed minor things I got wrong due to lack of caffeine before...