Prolly escaped you guys, but plenty of the highsec players will NEVER go to low sec or null. CCP will nerf high to a certain point where the time isn't worth to the highsec players and they will quit. At which point, if you look at the numbers, Eve goes bye bye.
Lots of the people in high sec are casual players. They pay a monthly fee and play for an hour or 2.
They aren't interested in you 0.0 politics or moon mining. They come on, blast a few NPC ships, and log off.
Yes by all means nerf high sec. Yes push these casual solo players out of the game. I mean it's not like CCP needs money or anything to maintain their corporation.

I really hope CCP can review the Ice changes. I think making ice and anomally you dont basically need to scan is a bad idea. Letting them spawn precisely every 4 hours in only selected systems is even worse idea.
Please, make Ice sites just another cosmis signature which people can find anywhere and that people need actually to scan.

The income from mining Arkonor could have been easily boosted by simply rebalancing spodumain to be in line with ABC in terms of high end minerals, thus increasing the total ISK/hr of mining out the asteroids in these nullsec grav sites.

..........

To encourage more miners in nullsec, CCP should remove mineral compression.

what

I can't help but suspect that while this is a step in the right direction, 0.0 industry will go from dealing with horrible tritanium and pyerite shortages to dealing with nearly as bad mexallon and isogen shortages.

Please reconsider this change, as this basically kills mining in wormholes.

Right now, mining in WHs is only barely safe by virtue of your opponents needing to get probes out to find you, and an experienced prober can still find you with the probes only being visible on dscan for less than 30 seconds. But that still gives the victim--I mean, miner--a small chance to spot the probes and GTFO before it's too late.

With grav sites being anoms, you have only a few seconds' window to spot the attacker (if their incoming wh is within dscan range, the short period between wh cloak and true cloak), or no window at all. There is no reasonable room for pilots to "practice vigilance" outside of gimping your yield by replacing one of your strip miners with a scan probe launcher. A 50% yield loss makes it a waste of time.

The rest of the changes look good, but mining in WHs will become significantly more dangerous in Odyssey if ore sites become anomalies.

not sure i understand the reasoning behind moving the ice from belts if they will be just as easy to locate? why not just keep the ice in belts and let them respawn on the same timers?

fwiw, i would have liked to see ice moved to grav sites that require probing to find, instead of being insta locatable. in addition, would have been nice to make them spawn at random in potentially all systems instead of being concentrated in just a few.

Yes, I am at that side. However, plotting a course from my location to Ordion results in 9 jumps

I think I must completely re-locate my stuff if I want to continue using my one-man-POS. ..... oh man that will be fun.

I can honestly say that the increased value of low sec ores would have been enough to mine in gravimetric sites, but with them going to anomalies it is still not worth risking you mining barge for.

We're quite happy in general with the increased risk associated with the increased reward. Ore sites in lowsec, 0.0 and wormholes (especially lowsec) are getting a whole lot more valuable.

1) The numbers will be out on sisi soon anyways, so I'll go ahead and let you know that the high sec anoms contain 2500 units of their racial isotope ice.

Which has been said over and over in this thread with no response.

There needs to be a place for solo miners in wormhole space. I cannot lock down a system by myself, and I am very often the only person in my corp that is logged in some evenings... My only recourse has been to pay attention, but now that will not work either. a cloaked ship can find me with no signs of their presence. I am farked... just plain farked...

there's plenty of good ores in npc null belts right now, not sure why you need to wait until Odyssey to mine those. will there be any difference between mining null sec belts and lo sec anoms after the expansion?

The only big defect of this new system is that it's a "go in and hoard all ice with 70 alts FAST, leaving smaller miners ZERO chances and 4 hours to wait again".
Every of the very few ice systems will have its 2-3 big hoard sharks, the others will just be crushed and will quit.

So i point out issues with what you say are good defenses and you reiterate them. Which is fine. And under the status quo thats perfectly understandable.

Yet the fact is, finding mining ships will become alot easier under the current proposal. No current tactics change that. And it goes back to your last sentence, from your previous post.

"All that will help. A Little. I'm not sure it will help enough."

So where do you stand? I am opposed to such a change. Not because I live in wh space, I don't anymore. But because I am sick of the "want more conflict" rationale being applied without any thought to how. Believe me I do want more conflict, but not defenseless slaughter with no recourse. It doesn't matter if its in WH or high sec.

If I paint frogs all over my barges, will you rethink this whole grav site change in wormholes?

/pretty please?
//with sugar on top?
///I have cherries...

After reading through most of this thread, it would appear that the proposed changes to mining are causing some friction.

Whilst I can fully understand the desire to make life difficult for bot miners, the proposed changes also make things more difficult for 'kosher' ice miners. To my mind, the bot miners got a huge boost by adding large ore holds to mining barges/exhumers.

If the intention of the proposed changes is to curtail bot mining, wouldn't it just be simpler to reduce the capacity of ore holds than making sweeping changes that affect the 'genuine' miners as well as the botters?

Also, I seem to remember reading that the new expansion was intended to make POS ownership a more pleasant experience. How can placing limitations on the availability of resources needed to fuel these POS's be reconciled with the intended more pleasant experience?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding or not seeing the big picture but I think if the availability of ice is restricted too much (or even concentrated in the hands of too few people), the consequences could make POS ownership/maintenance a more difficult prospect.

Thank you very much for your analysis Jita Bloodtear, I'm gonna spend some time considering you perspective and will continue watching this thread.

I'm on vacation today so I'll keep my post short, but I do want to make clear that no aspects of these changes are designed to combat botting. I leave that work to our excellent Team Security and I focus on game systems balance.

We'd rather have the challenge provided by other players than by us.

Simply because there were so many Amarr highsec ice belts that the addition of supply as a meaningful concept for ice would have skewed the market too far towards Amarr towers. When we we deciding what belts to remove we considered geography, (including across regions, often when one area of a region seems empty it's because there's an ice belt just across the border in another region) and we also considered the volume of ice being mined there over the past several months. When we had two similar ice belts and had to remove one of them, we'd generally keep the most popular one as to cause the smallest disruption possible to the local miners.