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For those who say no one cares about mineral prices, there are thousands of miners in high sec who were screwed by your rorquals. There are people mining in ventures, and not a few of them. I started playing about 14 months ago, mining in a venture, trained barge and then exhumers, got 2 more accounts, cause it's stupid to have just one exhumer and an orca, managed to finish the boosting skills few months ago. Just in time. When rorqual buffs were announce, it felt like a joke, 1 rorqual mining as much as 12 exhumers, I actually knew it would come to this. People in rorqs in the bottoms of null sec, no one bothering them, making billions every day. And the price of minerals down the drain. All the miners in hisec were affected by rorq buffs, I used to mine about a belt a day, it wasn't much isk, now, the last 2 months, i think i've mined about 5 belts alltogether. The little isk I used to make was cut in half. By your rorquals! Check the price history on veldspar, scordite, plagio or minerals. It's half of what it was 4 months ago. I can't even sell my omber, no one is buying it. You're talking about killing the game? I've read every post in here and all I see are a bunch of whiners who got their cookie taken away. What rorq buffs did was making rich people richer and poor people poorer. Cause a lot of people start eve with mining. I'm pretty sure most of you did the same. How about those thousands of people, don't they matter at all?
You want refunds on isk you spent to train and buy the ships? How about I get refunds on half a year training for exhumers, drones and orca boosts? Or even better, how about you all refund all those billions of isk you made in your iceblock rorquals?
Everywhere in null sec and even wh, where I go, rorquals everywhere. Sure, they're no worth being used. Why are there thousands of them out there? If my math is correct, only Jita sold 20k excavator drones the last 4 months. How many ships does that make?
I didn't test the ship, but I'm pretty sure the 2 hulks comparison is bullshit. It was mining as much as 12 exhumers when it came out, drones got nerfed 33%, and now 25% more, not even close to 2 hulks. Say it will mine as much as 2 hulks. That means you're mining as much as 2 and a half hulks now and you're fine with it? Give me a break. You made billions every day for 4 months, have other billions in stashed minerals and ruined the economy on top of that, and now you're complaining? Get the hell out of here, you punks! Take a venture and go mine for days, see how that's like.

BTW, no one uses P.A.N.I.C. to protect subcaps, in my alliance at least. if cheeky scrubs try and bomb our covetors and hulks we prelock and capital shield rep them. this works very nicely. For a large incoming fleet they need to leave.

Back to the cost/performance of the drones. I'm sure it's been suggested already that a lower performance T2 variant would solve some of the problems with both yield and market demand. The capital outlay for a fully fitted rorq is 10Bn or so. This is a significant barrier to entry. Say there were T2 excavator variants that mined the same as the proposed nerf for actual 'excavator' drones for a few hundred million? I think most people would take that in much the same way as few people bother with 'augmented' drones for ratting. The cost of losing them is simply too high.

My two cents: I see the PANIC module as a hard counter to Hot Drops from Covert Op Hot drops. But if u make the requirement to have an active target lock on anything -- wont that just mean the attackers will use an attack that breaks all target locks first?

This would just make the fleets as vulnerable as before?

since killmails can list the closest celestial to a kill, why not just check if an asteroid belt is closest celestial?

I don't usually bother sticking my oar in, leaving it to CCP to make decisions. But my, what a terrible 'fix'.

Regardless of the new mechanics behind PANIC/core invulnerability to ECM, you're still leaving the rorquals vulnerable in certain situations my peers have already pointed out. Not good.

Now, from a personal point of view, I'm all in favour of reducing the effectiveness of rorquals as impromptu carriers, but there are better ways of fixing this. Increase jump timers and tie PANIC modules to jump reactivation timer are 2 that spring to mind. I mean, in what sort of mining situation would you jump into a system and spend 15 mins mining before jumping out? Farcical.

As for the yield itself and the other changes that are intended, the only people this will affect are the small scale miners. The players out there with 5 or 10 rorquals will still be sitting on a mint, while the small scale miners will be wondering if the 11 billion isk ship they're risking will be cost effective in comparison with an exhumer worth 3% of that that can still mine 50% of the yield.

As for the asteroid distance changes, that will put paid to rorquals being able to assist each other in belts. Out of range for remote caps and reps and out of range for drone assistance. Or perhaps you expect them to all mine the same asteroid?

You've taken a ship you made viable after years of being useless and made a mockery of the changes we hailed as insightful and necessary.

As far as 'balancing the market' is concerned, what a load of tosh. Finally ships that were beyond the reach of many capsuleers were becoming a possibility, and CCPs response is to deny them that upwards progression.

Shame on you CCP. I'd finally forgiven you for the sovereignty fiasco and now this...

While I am not here to shoot the messenger, I do feel it is a terrible shame that CCP as a team could not predict the impact of the original rorqual buff to the game. This is made much worse because to invest in the change people have spent a lot of time, isk and real money to buy in. I do understand their anger, I truly do.

It is clear that the situation does need a fix though. What I really hope is that instead of all rorqual pilots being stuck for months in downward nerf spiral that you guys go ahead and get the fix right. Please listen to the feedback from players and work with us to do so.

I can remember when the original buff was announced. I read the post with dismay, while noting a sense of excitement from others. I knew that in any of the settings that my industrial characters had been that deploying a rorqual in that space/with those people would likely mean death. Maybe in a day or a week, but death for certain. Only in the biggest alliances with decent support fleets would the risk/reward be viable for me. I forgot about rorquals for a while, and became bored with eve. Sometime later I joined GSF to play with some friends and quickly realised that my industrial pilots could indeed be useful and actually make a decent income for once, albeit with a huge isk investment and some training. This doesn't mean that I didn't see the nerfs coming, as I am sure most people did. Unlike supers and capitals sucking on an isk faucet the ever increasing armies of rorquals are drowning on a mineral faucet and affecting the market as a whole.

Much like the booster changes, I see a one fix fits all approach to dealing with some of the current concerns, and again I see that the proposed fix will be disappointing in other areas. Until this announcement, my rorqual made around 2/3rds of a decent ratting super for around the same ratio of cost. However the super is aligned and relatively safe if the pilot has any idea of what s/he is doing and the rorquals are stuck in place. The price of the rorqual is not due to the cost of the hull and fit unlike the super, it's inflated due to the cost of excavator drones. High costs partly due to demand but also due to the fact that many of those parts drop in one region of space which surely has been heavily manipulated. It is a shame that this problem wasn't tacked in the last adjustment, people would be less angry if they hadn't had to invest huge amounts of isk to purchase the extremely squishy drones.

I am by no means an economist, but the amount of ore being offloaded into Jita is crashing the mineral market, so is there a way that this issue can be addressed without too many more nerfs to the rorqual. With the composition of null sec mining anoms you have already created an issue with huge amounts of excess trit and pyerite. Again this is something that you could address. I hope that you do look at it when the nerf bat is put aside. I appreciate that you already have plans for the future of eve that you are working on and that you could chose to tackle the current situation with harsh adjustments to the rorqual but for the sake of the player base and everyone invested in this I hope that you are wiser and more committed to improving the situation as a whole.

Perhaps you could also look at ways of making the export of huge amounts of compressed ore into high sec something that is much less appealing to the null sec rorqual miners. This isn't something that I know a lot about, but one idea would be to increase the size of compressed null sec ores. especially the spodumain. Another option is to reward mining in ways which are not directly related to the mineral faucet, so that these nerfs hurt less and improve mining as a whole. Perhaps something like a mining ESS or some kind of high/low/null sec missions which reward LP or isk, so that mining doesn't have to fall back into being the worst income of any profession in eve in all regions of space. It wouldn't hurt to buff the miners and their income without destabilising the market further. Just ideas from the top of my head, I'm sure many players have better ones.

As for the panic module, I can see why the 'locking of a rock' is an option, but I do not like the vulnerabilities which spring up. I'm sure many people see them and would be ready to use them. While invulnerable, I feel that a rorqual should have very little capability at all. It's intended to be the last stand. Entosis modules shouldn't be able to be fitted alongside panic on a rorqual. Panic'd rorquals shouldn't be able to activate ewar, at this point they should be awaiting their reinforcements while taking care of the mining fleet. This may mean more work for CCP but I urge you to make the best fixes and tweaks that you can and not be limited by the easiest possible fix which will open up more issues.

Basically locking Rorquals into one system and reducing impetus to travel with them, Player Risk aversion kicking in, something CCP has never fully understood.

As to Fozzies mind set on the game, Well when he nerfs the WETU cargo size all will be revealed. Gate camp low life ganker at his very best.

I see your T2 mining drone usage and raise you one "micro Industrial Core" that fits on the Orca (and maybe even the Porpoise). Give us compression, bonus to boost range, and maybe reduced versions of some of the other bonuses.

Re: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=6841782#post6841782

At this point I'm ready to throw in the towel on the Rorqual and look forward to fielding something in the 1B to 2B price range which mines less ore and doesn't have PANIC but costs much less and provides similar functionality.

Okay. Let's give a little bit of history before we talk about this. Many moons ago, Hi-Sec was the place to mine. There were literally caravans of freighters being titan jumped to null to build super caps and titans. Minerals just came from hisec, there was little reason to do mining in null. What did it take to reverse this? It took mineral buffs, Aegis-Sov, industrial structures, and Rorquals to really give null an edge - an edge they should have. If players put the time in to literally build, maintain, and defend an empire, there should be rewards. Likewise, the convenience and safety of Hi-Sec should come at a premium. Basically, crashing the mineral market was the best thing that ever happened - it made EvE, EvE again, where where was actually a risk/reward paradigm.

That being said, the yield did not have to be changed. The tank and combat prowess and tank absolutely did. It's supposed to be a risk/reward thing, and with the Rorqual so defensible, there really isn't enough risk using them to justify the rewards. Heck, I'd support increasing the yield if they lost a significant margin of the tank.

Except that the Rorqual's Siege makes you immune to ECM and resistant enough to sensor damps that a single sebo or lock range implant will let you lock beyond warp range.

The only way for you to have no ability to lock a rock is for an enemy to wait until you're either out of rocks or have warped away from all of them a long distance. That would require someone sitting there watching you mine, and if you're mining with a neutral in system then, um, yeah I think you're first mistake happened well before the PANIC module came into things.



This isn't really correct. There started being a fair amount of Null industry before the Rorqual changes. It wasn't anything like High Sec but that makes sense just by dint of volume of players.

What the Rorqual has done though is made a lot of people who never mined start mining, which has massively increased the flow of ore and minerals into the game. If this was just supplying Null then it wouldn't be much of a problem, but it's not just supplying Null it's actually generating more minerals than Null is consuming, even with the rush of ship and Citadel building it's created. That's what's crashing the mineral market, and nerfing the tank on these things isn't going to fix that, because most of the large groups are still mining way way way more than they're losing in value, because even getting in to threaten their Rorquals is difficult.

Also nerfing the tank like you're suggesting would hurt the smaller groups more than the larger ones, so it makes more sense for CCP to adjust the reward part of risk/reward, since Rorquals aren't being threatened nearly as much as they probably figured they would be when they first deployed the initial changes. They've also been adopted by a lot of former non-miners, which has probably skewed things even more.

This isn't really going to change though. The rock composition out in Null is better in basically every way, a fleet of Boosted Hulks in Null being boosted off a Rorqual is still about 10% better than an Orca, and a Rorqual with drones is still going to be worth about four Hulks in a belt before you add on any Hulks its boosting.

The problem we've got right now is that between the implicit discount of building your own stuff vs buying it, the relative safety a large alliance can provide for a mining Rorqual (or twelve), and the massive amounts of ore these things pull in the mineral market hit the saturation point about a month ago and now everything dropping. The only thing that's holding things down right now is the general in-elasticity of the mineral market and the expense of hauling things to High Sec.



I appreciate how reasonable and well thought out this is, but I think it runs into the same fallacy as the whole "Carrier ratting is perfectly safe argument" which is that you can say that it requires gross negligence to lose a ship, but the reality is it requires just a little bit of negligence and these sorts of losses are relatively frequent. Not so much that anyone is going to lose money Carrier ratting, but frequent enough to be balanced in practice.

A guy on reddit did a lovely analysis of Rorqual losses since Ascension which I'm going to reference for a lot of the rest of this.

The two main things that stand out to me here are that Rorquals are dying absolutely everywhere, not just outside the major Sov alliances. The recent gank of one Goon's *seven* Rorqual accounts stands out to me as a good example of this. The attackers dread-bombed him during the TZ transition and a fleet couldn't form in time to save him due to lack of pilots and FCs.

The other thing that stands out is that while PANIC is certainly powerful it's not all-powerful and plenty of Rorquals are dying with one fitted. Even more are dying without one though, and just based on what little word of mouth and market intel I've got the total losses since Ascension haven't even come close to making a dent in the total population of Rorquals or the volume of minerals they're producing.

What that's at risk of doing is pricing out anyone and everyone who doesn't own a Rorqual from being able to PLEX their account(s) through mining, which is a fair number of people. While I can definitely agree that Null should be more rewards for more risk and overall effort (especially in logistics) it shouldn't completely remove playstyles or wreck the overall economy.

Now, I can definitely appreciate and get behind that it's a little ridiculous how many people you can pack into a small area these days. There was another post on Reddit discussing how fast mining enoms respawn, and I have to agree that's a bit silly, but changing it wouldn't actually fix the Rorqual right now, because the risk vs reward is such that mining in a Rorqual has become more attractive to a lot of people than Carrier or even Super Ratting.

When you're pulling in people who previously turned their noses up at mining that's a pretty good indication the risk/reward is out of whack.

As I said previously and still stand by I think any increase in risk sufficient to reign in the major null blobs would make the Rorqual useless to anyone else, and probably make it all but defenseless without a batphone on standby. Given that, which I don't feel is an unreasonable set of assumptions, the thing that makes the most sense is to reduce the mineral output to push some of the people that have flocked to the new OP hotness out of the market. Reduced demand should also lower the price on the Excavators, lowering the amount being risked somewhat as well.