EVE General Discussion

Tada!!

But :effort:

Aww. Did I mine out yoo full shiny new ice rock in thwee minutes before yoo even managed to mine two blocks from it?? I sorry

Hi!

I actually run a "locust fleet" myself (first time I've heard it called that, but I'm using it from now on) - Orca, Freighter and 11 Skiffs in my case. Unlike many (but definitely not all) of my fellow locusts, I don't use ISBoxer - I run all my accounts manually. Also unlike many (but, again, not all) locusts, I used to use the same setup with Mackinaws back before Kronos, for their higher yield - I even skipped the Damage Control on the Mackinaws, because even with vulnerable ships like those ganking cost less than 2% of what I was mining, whereas lowering yield would have a significantly higher opportunity cost.

One thing I'd like to point out is that while the combined income from my fleet is obviously a lot higher than that of a solo miner, the per-account income is about the same, as is the per-account effort. The only advantage any one of my miners has over a solo miner are a dedicated hauler and booster, neither of which are that hard to get without multiboxing - pretty much every hisec based PvE corp seems to advertise Orca boosts, for example. My combined fleet will get the ISK for a single PLEX in less than 1/11th the time it takes a solo miner to get there, but then I need 13 PLEXes to keep my whole fleet going, so that's not so much of an advantage. On the other hand, if I can easily get those 13 PLEXes every month (which I can) there's no reason why a solo player can't get their 1 PLEX in much the same amount of time and for a fraction of the effort I put in to running my entire fleet.



You're missing several points, I think. First, there's never likely to be a huge diversity in mining ships... well, anywhere, really, because mining is a very simplistic activity which doesn't vary much, meaning there's always going to be a "best in class" which will see massively disproportionate use. Once upon a time, before Odyssey, that was the Hulk (except in the specific field of ice mining, where it was the Mack) and it was all but unheard of to see other mining ships in use, aside from the Retriever for those who hadn't trained into Exhumers yet. Odyssey stratified the barges and exhumers a lot more, weakening the Hulk's tank while buffing the mining on Skiffs and Macks, as well as giving them their signature tank and ore bay focus, and the overwhelming response from miners was to switch to Mackinaws, because their yield and tank were "good enough" while their ore bay made them superior to other ships. In response to this, Kronos gave us some minor adjustments, including buffing the yield on the Skiff to make it even to the Mackinaw, and now the Skiff is widely considered "best in class" as its yield and ore bay are "good enough" while its tank pushes it ahead of the others. This all applies equally to the T1 versions, of course. The important thing to bear in mind from this is that if you want a situation where you see an equal breakdown of all the mining ships in a belt at the same time... it's never going to happen.

Second, while clearly it says something about game balance that miners are overwhelmingly choosing to fly the worst of the mining ships (Skiffs having an equal yield to a Mack, but worse ore bay and flat-out lower yield than a Hulk), I disagree that the message you should be taking away is "Skiffs are too strong". I'd say it's more likely "The other barges are too vulnerable to ganking by throwaway ships" or perhaps "Cheap ships like destroyers which are very quick to train into for new characters are too effective against barges". Clearly miners - myself included - are opting for survivability over raw income and doing so almost unanimously. I'm not sure that an "obvious solution" in that case is to nerf the Skiff's survivability.

Third, it seems that you're coming at this whole thing from the perspective of "everything should be getting ganked", thus seeing Skiff fleets that aren't being ganked is a problem to you. Obviously, miners have the opposite perspective - "I should be able to avoid ganking", more or less. Neither of those extremes is ideal for the game as a whole though, so a balance between them needs to be reached. What you're proposing is just shifting things further in favour of the gankers and against the miners.

Personally, I think there is a need for a ship like the Skiff - an OK miner, but definitely not the best in the game, but which does offer its pilots a large degree of safety from gankers. The fact that people are overwhelmingly choosing such a ship as opposed to the better miners suggests that either ganking itself is too powerful or at least that the other mining ships are too weak - their advantages in actually mining not being sufficient to persuade people to use them and risk loss. Providing a carrot in the form of higher yield for non-Skiffs (or perhaps a larger ore bay for the Hulk) would likely do rather more to encourage their use than making Skiffs slightly less hard to gank.

Finally, for all that you seem to be upset that you personally cannot gank Skiffs, they are themselves far from ungankable - groups like the New Order gank them regularly, indeed I know of one NO member who ISBoxes his own fleet of Catalysts large enough to gank a Skiff. If it's that big a deal for you, maybe you should try and recruit some help from other players so that you do have the numbers for a gank. Alternately as others have suggested, bumping is a fairly viable tactic, especially against ISBoxed fleets.

This. This is a good answer

We ran out of tears.

The key word there is "determined". If "determined" gankers spy a convoy, it doesn't matter whether it's one skiff or 20 with a supporting defense gang. There is a way to smash it. Saying "Nerf the skiffs!" is only going to make it more convenient to the pirate PCs who can't get enough of their company online, or buy as many accounts by their selves, and will only make it more difficult in turn then to the legit miners who don't have 20 accounts.

If you're absolutely convinced they're alts, send a message to CODE. Hell, even if they're not all alts, forwarding the location of competition to hostile third party elements is a tried and true method of warfare, economic and otherwise. Or, if your corp has a military wing, maybe they can all fit up some cheap cruisers/frigates and make the attack themselves, with you and some buddies waiting to scoop up the wreckage.

In short, working as intended.

Wrong. If you nerf the skiff, miners still have reason to use the skiff over the "ships that bring in more over time" (the hulk you mean, it's the only one). If they adjust skiffs to take five T2 catalysts to kill, that doesn't mean everyone will switch to hulks. Because hulks are greatly easier to kill and will be die a lot more often than a tanked skiff. I would say if a skiff user wants to run 3 ice harvester upgrades and no damage control, then 5 T2 catalysts should be able to take him out. If he uses a damage control, he probably will be left alone unless he really pisses someone off. Even without a damage control, most people won't have an issue with ganking, just the ones who **** off the other players (be being greedy and mining with 10 or 20 barges).

So in short, no, if they nerf the skiffs tank, people will still use the skiff, because it will still be by far the best chance of not being ganked and it will still have a yield as good as the mackinkaw. Only the hulk is better, but very few people will use them in empire anyway because they have paper defenses.

Nerf the skiff HP. A 3x ice harvester upgrade skiff should be killable by 5 T2 cata pilots. If such a rare occurance as 5 gankers coming together at once scares you, fit a damage control and you'll not have to worry about gankers at all, all for a small yield loss from fitting the damage control. Or take a chance and don't fit one. Or do like you said, and switch to the highest yield ship, the Hulk. I'm sure locust fleets everywhere will be switching to Hulks immediately if they reduce Skiff HP a bit.

Personally i think the way that ice spawns is the issue here as It helps those players involved in botting and RMT.

Heres what happens in Talidal, Ordion and Misneden. The ice belt spawns, 30-50 bots log on within 5 minutes and mine it out, they log off for 4 hours, rinse and repeat. This goes on 24 hours a day, every day.

It would be useful if a dev would monitor these accounts to see if they log on other accounts or characters in diffrent ice systems between each ice spawn.

Let me rephrase what I was saying there NPC alt.

If Skiffs get their tank nerfed such that their tank is on par with that off a Hulk, miners will just use hulks. Bringing in more material per hour means making more isk per hour. This is it's own defense against gankers.

If Skiffs don't get their tanked nerfed that far and still offer the best protection out of the three, then you won't see any difference. You will still see fleets comprised of a hauler, orca, and a whole bunch of skiffs. So what would be the point? Just so it costs you less to gank them? You want real pvp, go roam low/null/wormhole space. Stop having a detriment effect on the game's economy for everyone including yourself.

everyone in this thread is being really silly. the ice is there and someone has to take it, if you care about the economy of eve you should know it runs on ice, cheap ice. extracted by people who NEED to sell it and sell it fast.

now on to the profitability of ice, highsec anoms spawn every 4 hours and each contain a maximum of 2500 ice cubes. considering the most expensive ice goes for 300k a cube, each anom spawn yields 750m isk.

lets say he has a job and so he only gets two anomalies a day, assuming he gets home waits for spawn, gets it, then waits 4 hours and gets another. that would average to about 6hrs of eve a day. the next spawn would happen at the 10hr mark in average. lets also assume there's no one else there so he gets all the ice every time.

at current plex price of 780m, he would need 15.6b a month just to plex, that's 21 consecutive ice spawns. or 10 days of doing nothing but mining. he would then get 20 days of doing nothing but mining to get another 30b worth of ice cubes... whoa what a rich man! now you seem to have a problem with that... but what about the effort in obtaining it? hes investing SIX HOUNDED AND THIRTY HOURS A MONTH. that's a second job... if you play eve as a game, good for you. that guy whoever, doesn't. let him play eve the way he wants to.

if you have a problem with a guy who does nothing but mining 6 - 10 hours a day how do you feel about the guys who do nothing but scan ships looking for targets for 10 hours a day, or the bumpers, the CODE people or the random pod killer/tornado ganker? its the way they play this game what makes it what it is. and if you don't like it how he goes about it, then do something about it. and if you cant, then ask for help, this is an MMO after all. and you will find that multiboxers don't necessarily get along or approve of the stupidity of some of us.

whoever i have to warn you, if your "target" is some guy mining after work, you wont get help from multiboxers that matter, only the socially inept smartboming retards will answer your call.