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I was just getting ready to think I could agree with you, and then this.

You lose credibility when you say a widow pilot jumping into a fight and an industrial pilot share the same risk, if we are looking for chuckles why not say the rookie ship will fare as well as the widow while you are at it. Everyone who plays the game knows you are full of what falls out of the south end of a north bound bull.

Every pilot in EVE should know that whenever they undock they could go pop, nature of the game. However people train and go to great lengths to have a chance to make someone else go pop first , again nature of the game. CCP needs to respect the realistic expectations and yes, hopes of all their subscribers, not just the ones who want everything going pop all the time.

I personally have very little sympathy for players who afk mine, travel, or anything else in space. Why play the game if you are not playing the game, or have time to play the game, in my humble opinion.

That being said it is again that falling stuff from the north bound bull to say high sec gankers face risk for their rewards, simply not true. Should miners have their heads on a swivel and pay attention to who jumps into their high sec system? I do. Should haulers use warp stabs, a scout, a cloak when possible, and an escort when travelling through risky pipelines? I do. Should CCP say that ganking an afk miner is in any way a risk for the ganker flying a cheap dessie? No.

Some simple honesty goes a long way, CCP makes money when we have to replace ships by plex exchange because they print the plex and get the cash. Good for them it is an honest business model.

CCP needs to practice better customer service to all it's paying customers, even the boring high sec industrialists. Because if they leave in great numbers the game will perish.

Fact is most players reside and play predominately in high sec.

The CCP model of disrespecting most of the player base to cowtow to the most vocal and organized minority will eventually end poorly. If high sec folds low sec and null will cease to exist, the economics prove that without doubt.

Unless CCP is ready to cut back substantially how they staff losing the majority of players is something that would be better avoided.

Be honest, what do you think is the survival rate for pilots in combat, then compare it to the survival rate of miners ganked?

Keeping in mind in one on one combat 50% of the pilots survive, one guy wins and one guy loses. So unless ganking has a failure rate greater than 50% your position is yet again dropping from the southern end of a north bound bull. Yeah even you can't spin that fact to better your argument. Gotta love the cold hard truth!

Even the article linked to by the OP of this thread only references ganking freighters with 70 some odd T1 dessies, because they don't dare reveal the numbers about how quickly the lowest end mining ships or haulers pop when attacked by the lowest end ganking dessie. CCP is fairly spineless on this issue, which is actually quite a surprise from the lovers of chaos. If there was anything close to a balance they would be beating us over the head with it, they are not because it is grossly one sided.

You presume they will be used rarely - a subjective term at that, given different scenarios where the ship is currently and will be used.

My position is that not everyone who currently mines with Rorqual boosts will be able to after the changes. It is also that in many cases it should not be a good idea for them to try, nor should they feel robbed by using a "worse" booster.

From a design standpoint, I believe the difference in yield from using other boosting options should be relatively small. In particular when applied to less than 10 miners. It should be the mining capacity of the Rorqual itself that determines whether you put it in the belt, not the couple percent faster the rest of the fleet mines as a result. This is no different than using a Carrier instead of a Cruiser or HAC to Rat. You don't use a Carrier because it is (capable of) giving links to the ratting ships, so they can thin out tank and fit more dps. You use it because it chews through the rats. I want the Capital Industrial Ship to chew through rocks.

This would function no different than when I gas mined in wormhole space. Rather than gas mining with one character and Rorqual boosting on another, I mined on one in a venture while the other used a Ferox with Gas Harvesters and a mining link. Both of them mining with weaker boost was actually the better option. This is how I would like to see mining in general for smaller entities after the changes settle. For the new boosting ship to be a procurer/skiff with a spare high slot to run one link, with the 5% bonus listed in the blog. This should be better than the dedication of a character that does not mine sitting in a POS to provide a 25% (post change) bonused link to a handful of miners.

Personally, I feel this boost discrepancy is currently too large to achieve that effect on a large enough scale. I would rather see a 1/2/3% per level boost progression for Porpoise/Orca/Rorqual. Or perhaps even a 1/3/2% to follow the Destroyer/Command Ship/Titan dynamic of combat ships.

Finally, it addresses the issue of multiple Rorquals. They should mine enough themselves to justify commitment of multiples at a time! Rather than the current situation of one per system / 250 odd mining barges. I should want to deploy mine, even if my pilot does not have perfect skills and there is already a perfect booster in the fleet.


I built no Straw-Man. You suggested:

"To prevent the Rorqual pinnatta situation, I think that PANIC should allow the miners/industrials to attack while invulnerable. "

Attacking while invulnerable is the most literal definition of god mode. The tethering idea I replied with is actually better all around, as it presents counter play! Attacking breaks tether for the duration of the weapons timer, so the miners could be baited. The miners can also be bumped out of tether range, forcing them to respond to the attackers or suffer potential losses. The Rorqual itself will eventually run out of Heavy Water, dropping siege and becoming vulnerable. Resupplying it means breaking the camp around it. What do you see as counterplay to invincible damage dealing mining ships supported by multiple PANIC Rorquals? Killing the drones only gets you so far, since they can refit more drones off the Rorqual. Lets not forget the ship maintenance bay either, the miners can reship to combat ships (and back for another PANIC) right there in the belt.

Beyond that, my responses have been to point out unwanted negative side effects from what you believe would be changes in a miner's favor. A far cry from "attacking" an idea, let alone one I made up.


The reason is that first and foremost, there are negative effects to your suggestions that you did not consider. When a HIC turns on it's bubble, surprise! You -actually- want a bubble precisely where that ship is located. Activating an Industrial Core on a capital mining ship does not mean I want a bubble centered on me.

Second, the existing options take effort and resources - things that securing the use of a capital ship should take. Bubbles are not free. When you anchor them on a gate to set up for carrier ratting, it takes time to do. These are also resources in space that attackers can destroy, even if they can't get to your carrier. This is a good thing for the game. Resources like your HIC in the mining belt, if you really want a mobile on-demand bubble. If you have no problem with a dedicated booster supporting your mining fleet, a dedicated HIC on grid while the Rorqual mines should not be a problem. Especially if you firmly believe this will secure your Rorquals.

But webbing them is, so that the fleet has to choose whether to abandon the booster or sit still and peel the webs. As is bumping the booster out of range, even with respect to a neutral one in high sec. You can also jump them away with command destroyers to isolate them or a part of their fleet.

Furthermore, when it comes to smaller fleets the command processor rig comes into play nicely. You're not tanking the alpha of several hundred ships so you can give up some buffer. This results in a small gang needing less booster ships to fill links, but those boosters are not fully buffered bricks. Fitting a MJD is still a bit of a tank balance issue between armor and shield command ships, though not as much as the command processor was.

Thanks for the laugh.

Actually, quite often BOTH pilots survive and the one who wins is the guy who thought he'll lose and bailed.

Meanwhile in ganking the attacker ALWAYS dies, the defender usually, but not always. Sometimes the loot fairy says no. Other times someone else steals the loot. Sometimes your looter gets caught and dies. Sometimes you get baited. The "fight" doesn't start or end with the gank itself.

It typically starts with a pilot making poor fitting decisions. Followed by leaving said ship in space obviously unattended to get ship scanned and then ganked. What you are looking at is not unlike my results in faction warfare as a noob in a meta fit rifter. I slipped out a few times, the rest of the time I died horribly. Yet no matter how many rifters I lost, the resulting statistics are not indicative of anything. Except maybe that new players should expect to get slaughtered by off grid boosted t2 fit ships. Kind of like pure yield fit Mackinaws not at their keyboard should expect to die to CODE.

Of course you are free to discuss anything you want, I was talking about getting ganked, not getting hunted, not warping out as soon as bad guys enter the system. I mentioned in some details on how a pilot should/ could reduce the chance of getting ganked. But the bottom line is an extremely high percentage of pliots who get ganked get their vessel destroyed aka they don't survive.

In combat like the aforesaid "Widow jumping into a fight", his words not just mine, he would have a fifty fifty chance perhaps of beating another combat ship he chose to jump into a fight against. Of course if he chose to attack a cruiser in his rookie ship I'd say he will lose almost all of them, but we are not talking about brain challenged pilots ok.

Spin and play word games if it makes you feel better about your position but everyone playing EVE for longer than a month actually knows the truth, combat ships survive combat better than mining ships.

So now we are back to the real real problem, too many people are dishonest about the fact that almost no risk is taken by the gank pilot once he begins the attack unless he is incompetent and runs out of ammo before the kill.

It is not an equal risk to suicide your ship to get a kill, it is a trade off you planned when you fit the ship, undocked, and hunted down a target, and you get the reward you seek, a kill mail and the value of the destroyed vessel credited to your name. The miner loses his ship, cargo, maybe capsule and implants and gets a debit for the value of the lost items associated with his name.

Risk is not equal, reward is not equal. CCP just happens to want it that way.

There we are again with the conditional probability. A high percentage of people flying a combat ship without bothering to do anything to stay alive will die. There, that is basically the same sentence as yours. Can you see the flaw?

I'd ague it is you who is spinning and playing word games but since we probably cannot agree here why don't we just stop here repeating ourselves and let every reader decide what his/her conclusion is...

note: removed parts of quotes for readability purposes.

yes the change to your boosts that mean you may actually have to risk something to get the rewards oh the horror sorry if i find it hard to be sympathetic to your entitlement

... you do understand i'm an industrial pilot right?

Ah, okay. Fair enough.

I didn't get to fly an ol' carrier pre-changes (ah, slowcats... as a sentry-drone-loving pilot, that woulda been... fun? I dunno, people say they weren't fun, but... eh), so when you said carrier changes, I didn't think of the no-more-heavy/sentry-drones and major-changes-to-fighters changes first... as to me (from a subcap-only outsider's POV), the FAX machine/carrier ship split was more of a big deal than the way carriers do their damage changing.

But perspective is everything.