Retrievers mine faster than covetors and hulks? I wasn't aware they changed that in the new patch~

e:


If this was directed towards what Masumi and I were talking about then I'm just going to go out on a limb here and say I don't think many hulls are made out of ice.

But that is more or less the reason I'm taking up mining.

Ice prices are not currently affected at all by supply, because supply is so high it might as well be infinite.

We're adjusting the supply to have a fairly mild (but noticeable) affect on prices.

Completely unnecessary analogy:

Currently since supply is practically infinite the ice market has no restrictions at all except people's desires to participate in the market.

After the patch we're giving the market some gentle supply restriction, like tying one wrist to the bedpost loosely with soft silk rope. Just enough to make things a bit more exciting for the market, not enough to make a safeword necessary.

And, of course, your statement that ice belts won't be around when people get home is too strong.

You also discussed in various places the effort that people will have to go through to mine out fields and get them to respawn, like this quote: "an obstacle to harvesting the ice of true value. This will vastly hurt the profitability of nullsec ice miners and discourage them from mining." Yet, we do not know where prices will settle. Given supply (constrained) and demand (growing), it may be likely that the nullsec miners will be happy mining ice of any variant, because over a period of X days their expected value for the aggregate activity may be high. Kinda like ratting and finding faction/officer spawns. Not everything can be a faction spawn.

Bad yield that makes a low-income activity even lower. If you don't have the skills (or isk) for an exhumer then fly a covetor at least, jesus.

e: Not to mention that there just isn't currently enough low-ends to do any meaningful production in 0.0 without importing tons. This is getting helped along quite a bit with the next big patch.

Why would anyone fly a Covetor or Hulk when a Mackinaw has a far better tank and a huge ore bay meaning fewer trips back to station (with or without an Orca booster in the belt)?

Do you even harvest ice?

i like the concept of depleting ice spawns, but hate the idea of locust swarms in empire. though i spend most of my time in NPC null, having access to hi-sec ice belts helps offset the cost of running my towers. i'd be much more partial to some type of random spawn of the ice belts in hi-sec, so we actually had to explore for them in various systems. this would be much more in line with the theme of exploration as opposed to showing up at the know system and waiting for a timer.

the mechanism for obtaining this valuable resource will be one of the most dull and unfun activities in game: waiting on timers. instead we should try to make the ice miners do something besides just mine ice. make them look for it or pay someone else to find it for them, as opposed to just waiting around in system for ice to spawn.

people probably fly a covetor or a hulk because if they are in a fleet then tank and cargo are both as relevant as a fruit cake is to a venus fly trap plant.

There's also the point pmchem made. As CCP does more and more to de-emphasize top down (eg moon) income as a source of alliance income in the future, bottom up income, including mining taxes, will be more and more important. Right now buffing the Rorqual would be a means to evading those taxes more easily, thanks to how taxation works. Now if we want to discuss changing how mining taxes are collected (say, automatically at point of collection; I'm sure we can come up with a reasonable lore based explanation), then I'd be happy to talk about and advocate for compression buffs.

As to the respawn timer, there should be about 650 nullsec anomalies by my count, compared to the ~100 that will exist in highsec. Those ~100 will supply 80% of the game's ice, which means nullsec would be capable of supplying about 500% of the game's ice, even if those belts are only 2500 block belts. That number goes higher, of course, if the block count climbs. So, I don't really see the need for them to respawn instantly.

The timezone imbalance in the ore sites is a good point here.

The oversupply of ice is so significant that to bring supplies into some kind of balance through reduced refine yields we would need to make each block of ice yield less than 1/2 of a unit of isotopes.

great analysis. i only have a couple of questions regarding your assumptions. can you elaborate on two factors that might mitigate the need for rorqual compression altogether? 1) the use of station refining in null and 2) the use of POS refining in null. I'm really interested in 2. since my understanding is that POSs can refine ice at 100% with the proper chars and equipment. thanks.

POS refineries are capped at 75% regardless of skills and implants. They also take 3 hours to refine 200,000m3 (i.e.: 67k m3/hr, compared to 45k m3/hr from a single strip miner module), and can only handle one type of ore at a time. Oh, and with a POS refinery oniine, you pretty much have to take everything else at the POS offline.

Fixing POS refineries would go some way to helping build the "farms and fields" that certain nullsec folks were talking about during CSM6.

Even a hulk has a 14s align time. So either you're flying aligned to a celestial and retargeting ice as you move past the previous block, or you get ganked.

Try it sometime before Odyssey. Head out to an ice field with a max-yield Hulk fitted with Ice Harvester IIs

You make an excellent point about the non-racial ices Jita, and it's something we're keeping in mind as we work on the composition of the 0.0 ice belts.

One quick note I want to respond to however:

The oversupply of ice is so significant that to bring supplies into some kind of balance through reduced refine yields we would need to make each block of ice yield less than 1/2 of a unit of isotopes.

hmm, i only counted 25 systems yesterday with 30 ice fields in caldari hi-sec. this includes: the forge, the citadel, black rise and lonetrek. did i miss a region?

SELECT MR.regionName, md.itemName, md.[security] AS TrueSec,
CASE
WHEN md.[security] <=0.0 THEN 'NullSec'
WHEN md.[security] <0.5 THEN 'LowSec'
ELSE 'HighSec'
END AS SystemLevel, CF.factionName
FROM mapDenormalize AS md
INNER JOIN invTypes AS it ON md.typeID=it.typeID
INNER JOIN mapRegions AS MR on MR.regionID = md.regionID
LEFT JOIN chrFactions AS CF ON MR.factionID = CF.factionID
WHERE it.typeID = 17774 -- This is Ice Field
AND factionName = 'Caldari State'
AND md.[security] >=0.5
ORDER BY regionName,itemName

WITH Cumulative AS (
SELECT md.itemName,
CASE
WHEN md.[security] <=0.0 THEN 'Null'
WHEN md.[security] <=0.5 THEN 'Low'
ELSE 'High'
END AS SystemLevel
FROM mapDenormalize AS md
INNER JOIN invTypes AS it ON md.typeID=it.typeID
WHERE it.typeID = 17774 -- This is Ice Field
)

SELECT SystemLevel, COUNT(itemName) AS NumberOfIceBelts FROM Cumulative
GROUP BY SystemLevel

Firstly, the various ores are going to refine into a different set of minerals than they currently do (the details can be found here). The goal of this was to provide more low-end minerals (tritanium, pyerite, and mexallon) to nullsec to help with local manufacturing. Right now all major nullsec manufacturing jobs have to import these low-end minerals from empire using compression techniques (425mm railguns, 800mm artillery, etc).

Even a hulk has a 14s align time. So either you're flying aligned to a celestial and retargeting ice as you move past the previous block, or you get ganked.

Try it sometime before Odyssey. Head out to an ice field with a max-yield Hulk fitted with Ice Harvester IIs

Here at goonswarm we try to make hi-sec tears as much as possible. I fear ccp fozzie has bested us this time though.

A max yield HULK can still have well over 20k ehp. A MAX dps Talos can only do 16,000 damage before CONCORD shows up. A MAX damage Catayst can do at best about 8,000 damage before CONCORD shows up.

Before the mining ship buff you could gank a max yield hulk with a single catayst, now you need 3-4 catalysts or 2 talos. Ganking miners costs much more than it used to.

I find it quite hard to believe that ice miners are mining 600 times more ice than the game needs.

Even a hulk has a 14s align time. So either you're flying aligned to a celestial and retargeting ice as you move past the previous block, or you get ganked.

Try it sometime before Odyssey. Head out to an ice field with a max-yield Hulk fitted with Ice Harvester IIs

This illustrates my biggest issue. Why are these low end minerals such a shortage in null sec? Null sec static belts have all the low end ores, in much larger rocks than any high sec system. There is an abundance of massive Veldspar rocks in Null sec. Some will argue that nobody wants to mine the low end ores while high end ores are available. And this is true to an extent, but mining these low end ores would still be more efficient that compression minerals in high sec and jumping them out.

I believe based on over 2 years of living in null sec as a miner, that the real reason is the static belts are just to dangerous to mine in. Any passing hostile or neutral can warp into the belt and kill you before you have time to react. The hidden belts however take a little longer to find, this gives the miners time to GTFO.

With the odyssey expansion the hidden belts are now no more secure than the static belts. As I have said dozens of times, this WILL be a problem.

A max yield HULK can still have well over 20k ehp. A MAX dps Talos can only do 16,000 damage before CONCORD shows up. A MAX damage Catayst can do at best about 8,000 damage before CONCORD shows up.

The composition of these anomalies will be as follows:

Highsec

2500 units of standard racial ice.

Lowsec

3000 units of standard racial ice.
400 units of Glare Crust.

Nullsec with weak truesec (0.0 to -0.5)

3000 units of improved racial ice.
400 units of Glare Crust.
500 units of Dak Glitter.
200 units of Gelidus.

Nullsec with strong truesec (-0.5 to -1.0)

3500 units of improved racial ice.
400 units of Glare Crust.
200 units of Gelidus.
250 units of Krystallos