Some Quiet Mining

With the announcement of the mining redistribution plan… mineral starvation round two… and the subsequent spike in mineral and ore prices, a bunch of people have been rediscovering asteroid mining.  At some point this month CCP will release the update and resource gathering will change, radically in some ways, as asteroid yields are adjusted and minerals are allocated to specific regions of space.  Each region will get its own exclusives, which will be:

• Hisec – Tritanium
• Lowsec – Isogen and Nocxium (sort of, see below)
• Nullsec – Zydrine, Megacyte, and Morphite
• Wormholes – nothing

If you want tritanium you will need to mine in high sec space and so on.  Sort of.

There are also explicit mineral exclusions per region, which are planned to be:

• Hisec – No Isogen, Nocxium, Zydrine, Megacyte, and Morphite
• Lowsec – No Tritanium, Zydrine, Megacyte, and Morphite
• Nullsec – No Tritanium and Nocxium (except in anomalies)
• Wormholes – No Tritanium, Nocxium, and Morphite

Much has been said about this plan, and I’ll supply some links at the end of the post if that interests you.  But this post is more about the immediate response to the plan, which has been “quick, go mine some of this stuff before it is all gone!”

I got out an alt I had not used in quite a while that had a Procurer mining barge set to go in Amarr and set to mining in high sec.

Out in the belts again

It has been a long time since I mine in high sec.  There was a whole segment of my EVE Online career training up mining, starting in an Osprey and eventually graduating the the Hulk, the apex exhumer of its time.

My Hulk back in late 2007

I set out and found a system not too far from Amarr with an Athanor setup for public use, so I could reprocess ore cheaply, and had a security rating that meant some decent asteroids to choose from.

I initially set out to just scoop veldspar, but then figured that tritanium would still be the high sec thing after the change.  So I set my sites on pyroxeres, an ore that contains a bit of nocxium, the soon to be exclusive to low sec mineral that seems to have more people worried than any other element.  The price of that more that doubled when the dev blog came out and, even though it has settled down some, it remains pricier than before.  I figured laying in a supply of that might be a hedge against the future.  We shall see.

Locked on to some rocks

I had forgotten how peaceful mining in high sec can be.  You just have to keep an eye on your mining lasers to make sure they are still cycling on something and that your ore hold hasn’t filled up yet.  It is quite conducive to listing to a podcast or an audio book or writing a blog post or editing screen shots.  The wide screen monitor I am working with right now makes it all the easier as I can have something else up front while the game client pokes out to the side revealing enough information at a glace to know what is going on.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I didn’t do much in the war last week.  I spent some of the time sitting around mining instead.

Of course, I am not alone out there.  The annoying NPC miners show up in my belt every so often and start stealing the ore I wanted to mine.  But you can’t do much about them.  Another fine CCP feature.

And then there are the bots.  I see them every day.  Some days they are doing better than others.  My first day out they seemed to be having a problem as they all clumped up on the Raitaru where they seemed to live.

High sec mining bots tripping over each other to get to the belts

They are mostly annoying because they go mine for a bit, picking at this rock then that, after which they warp off, unload, and land on another belt, leaving a bunch of half chewed rocks in their wake.  That can be a pisser.  I should probably take off a bit of the tank on the Procurer… I have it fit to mine in null sec… and put an ore scanner on it.

But it has been kind of nice doing a bit of mining again.  It will never be a serious vocation for me again, but a bit of ore is okay now and then.

As for posts about the Resource Distribution plan, here you go:

• The Nosy Gamer
• Dunk Dinkle
• Evehermit
• Yadot
• INN (shit show post)
• INN (Bad money after bad post)
• INN (CCP trust post)
• INN (transcript of the developer live stream)
• The Meta Show (cross faction discussion of the changes)

Radical Rock Reductions in New Eden

Someday, if someone asks me the day I knew it was all over. It was today.

-Aryth – CSM14 member, Jan 31, 2020

As I noted in the comments on Tuesday’s post about the February updates, I think I may have buried the lede.  I was mostly on about the events CCP announced and the new implant set and only later got to the part about changes to mining, which I will repeat here:

• High Sec Asteroids:
  • Pyroxeres, Omber & Kernite quantities reduced.
• Low Sec Asteroids:
  • Veldspar, Scordite, Pyroxeres, Plagioclase, Jaspet, Hemorphite & Hedbergite quantities reduced.
• Null Sec Asteroids:
  • Scordite, Omber, Kernite, Jaspet, Hemorphite, Hedbergite, Gneiss, Dark Ochre, Crokite & Arkonor quantities reduced.
  • Bistot quantity increased.
• Ore Anomalies spawned from Sovereignty Industry Index upgrades:
  • Level 1, 2 & 3 respawn times adjusted.
  • All variations of Crokite in all levels replaced with the equivalent yield variation of Kernite.
  • Gneiss, Dark Ochre & Spodumain quantities reduced.

There was also a follow on dev blog about CCP’s plans for mining, which will hit moons next.  We are in what they are calling the “shortage phase.”  This phase is said to be a requirement for gathering data.

None of that meant much to me initially, though I admit I didn’t stop to look too hard at it either.  I have not mined in ages.  I still think of mining anomalies as something “new” in the game and nearly every second I have spent in one has been in a combat ship, either shooting miners or shooting people who were shooting miners.

When I think of mining anoms, this is what comes to mind

But there are plenty of people who do mine, and they were quick to start calculating the level of the nerf that hit mining on Tuesday.  A post on Reddit by Alcoholic_Satan of Pandemic Horde showed not only a reduction in the quantity of asteroids available, but also the amount of ore each asteroid held.  The top comment is an estimate that this represented a reduction by a factor of 1,000, and assumed it had to be an error, that being such a drastic change.

But the comment has an addendum, a link to a screen shot of a statement from CSM member Sort Dragon who was authorized by CCP to let people know that this level of change was not a mistake.

A clip of the image mentioned for posterity

So when I wondered if we would see some impact from this on the February Monthly Economic Report… well, now it seems almost certain.   This level of “shortage” will cause mineral prices to rise, but probably not enough to offset the reduced amount or ore being mined, so the values harvested per region will likely also fall noticeably despite any boost in price.

Left untouched for the moment was moon mining output, which led the Imperium to change the harvest cycle on public moons, currently running on a max duration pattern, down to seven days to get in as many mining opportunities as possible, because CCP is coming for moons next.  According to the CCP dev blog for Moon Mining, we should expect the following for moons with the next release:

• Complete removal of all basic ore types from all moons
• Adjustments on ore volume extracted per day, per moon
• Adjustments on moon ore type yields of basic minerals

So we can expect minerals to become more rare when that hits, all of which seems like a pretty radical approach to the problem of mining, whatever that problem actually is.  CCP has been regularly nerfing Rorquals and mining anomalies for over a year, and that has had some small but noticeable impact.  Now, however, they are going for a huge strike against mining game wide.

And I am left wondering why the hit needed to be this big.

As I have said before, mining is not an ISK faucet the way NPC bounties are.  All of that ore mined doesn’t add any ISK to the economy, save for the few people who run mining missions, and agent mission rewards are tiny, falling a distant fifth out of six faucets, even when rewards and bonuses are combined.

The desirability of mining ought to be based on the market price of ore, with an over abundance leading to a reduction in price below a point where it is worthwhile to undock Rorquals.  Or so it would go in a real world economy.  However, in the New Eden economy, where there is no real costs to running a Rorqual unless you lose it or some of the drone, there is likely no price point so low that people would stop undocking.

Furthermore, there is a price floor on minerals.  There is a point where you can take your mined minerals and build something like a Charon freighter, insure it, have somebody blow it up, and turn a profit.

So I get that CCP cannot really expect the market to adjust itself based on cost and pricing as there are artificial elements, like the apparently infinite resources of Pend Insurance, which will keep people going.

Instead though, they seem to have charted a course for a fresh new Chaos Era, this time focused on industry in New Eden.  Minerals are the life blood of production, and introducing what could lead to huge shortfalls and accompanying price spikes which will no doubt have an impact that will be felt by all.

And some people are pissed.  In the forum thread for the release the horrible red dot is getting more immediate attention… another ill-considered UI idea, though the appear to have muted it for the moment… but some industrialists are clearly at a boil.

CCP says they are keeping an eye on things:

It is understood that the changes that will go live throughout phase 1 will affect the macroeconomic environment and the market reaction will be closely monitored. Predictions have been made and the readiness to take measures is in place.

But they also said similar things over the summer, and it took the game a couple of months to recover from that.  We might be in for more interesting times as this is all likely to get worse before it gets better.  This and the red dot certainly seem to have swept away whatever resentment was left over selling skill points.

As for the quote at the top of the post… it is clear that the CSM was informed about this plan in advance and I suspect that tweet may mark the day it happened.

Related posts:

• Marius Tesoro – A Not So Rocky Road
• Marius Tesoro – Moon Mineral Distribution
• Dunk Dinkle – CSM Update – Week 33
• Evehermit – When tweaks make an impact
• The Nosy Gamer – EVE Online’s February 2020 Patch

A Minor Venture Adventure

I had the desire to do something in New Eden.  Unfortunately, that desire hit as my main and my alt sat in laden ships in a citadel half way through a trip home from a deployment.  I could have jump cloned one or both of them out, but I wanted to make sure I was there and ready to go.

Time to get out another character.  But which one?

Theoretically I have a dozen characters in EVE Online spread over four accounts.  In reality, most of them do not add up to much.  Some of them were created to grab an amusing name, like Claude Ring or Escher Alias.   Others I had plans for, but never really went anywhere, the general issue being that you can only train skills on a single character on an account at a time.  So, for example, neither of the other two characters on the same account as my main ever get any training time because I have never been done training everything in Wilhelm’s queue.

Just never going to happen.

However, I have an account sitting around with a couple of Alpha clone characters.  I tried following in CCP Rise’s steps at one point, but with all of the Alpha skills trained on him I was free to roll up another Alpha on the account and start him training.  Having a Gallente Alpha, I went for Amarr.

I have kept him training sporadically.  With the one day long queue, I put a few skills in and then forget about him for a few days… or a week… or a month… then go back and start him up again.  Last time around he had just finished up some mining related skills.  Also, he had collected a Venture mining frigate as part of some give away from CCP… was that from Christmas?  Anyway, I logged in and saw him sitting there in the Venture and decided to go mining.

The Agency doesn’t support mining missions…

I had run my Amarrian friend through the new player experience and looted along the way, so he had a couple of extra civilian mining lasers sitting in his hangar.  So I fitted those, grabbed a couple of Warrior I drones for defense, and undocked to go try this ship out.

The Venture came into New Eden long after my career in mining was over.  Back when I was at the low end of mining your first goal ship was an Osprey and you mined asteroids that looked vaguely like potatoes.

Space was different back in 2007

And you had to train up to get into that Osprey.  The Venture though, a new player gets the skills to fly that on day one.  It is small and handy and has an ore bay, something that also wasn’t a thing back when I mined as a profession.  And, if you follow the industry career tutorial, you end up getting one for free.

So I took it out to a system near Amarr, headed to a belt, and mined some Veldspar for a while.

Soon to be a post at EVE Online Pictures…

I also had the Yoiul Festival Skin for the ship, so ran with that as well.

A handy enough little ship, though the civilian mining lasers were slow.  Once the ore bay was nearly full I took off back to Amarr to look for some upgraded mining lasers.  I sold my Veldspar straight to a buy order and found some better lasers.  I thought about a mining upgrade as well, but had already set off again, so put that on my list for later.

I picked up another load of Veldspar and headed back to Amarr to sell that.  There I decided to see if that was the best plan.  The buy orders for raw Veldspar seemed okay.

Veldspar in the raw

But the rule back in the day was to never to sell ore.  The guides always said you should refine your ore and sell the minerals.  That was the way to greater profit.

However, things have changed.  I refined the ore only to find that the remaining Tritanium were worth less than I would have gotten for the ore.

Lesson learned

And that does not count the 20K ISK it cost me to refine the ore.  Better to sell the raws as a newbie these days I guess.

I took that ISK and bought a Mining Laser Upgrade I module in order to speed things up.

The third time out I dropped into a belt and started mining only to see some hostile NPCs in the belt with me.  I launched my drones and sent them after the closest of the cruiser-sized rats only to find that they were not the usual specimen of belt rat.  My Venture exploded before I could warp off.

Autothysian Lancers are bad news

Well that was bad news… not to mention yet another something I never had to deal with back in the day.  Now my Venture was gone and I was sitting in my pod.

However, things were not hopeless.  First, getting a ship destroyed is one of those new player achievements that earn you some ISK.  The payout was 200,000 ISK for losing a ship worth 160,000 ISK.  And then there was the default insurance payout.

The payout

That was worth another 106,000 ISK, which made the destruction of my Venture a profitable turn of events.  Plus I had already made a couple of Ventures worth of ISK from the first two runs.  I was able to buy a new ship in Amarr and head back out again.

Shiny new replacement Venture

I wanted to get a closer look… and maybe a few screen shots… at the NPCs who blapped me, but they had moved along by the time I had returned.  My wreck, however, was waiting for me, with all the modules still there.

Back to the scene of the crime…

If I had not been in such a hurry to refit I could have saved myself a little bit of ISK.  The modules were very cheap relative to the ship and the ISK already earned.  So it was back to orbiting and mining.

Back to the clutter of the belt

There remains a zen-like peacefulness to mining.  It is something easy to do while you listen to a podcast or an audio book or chat with people on coms.  That is especially true early ones mining career, when it takes a while to burn down a rock.  Later on, when you’re running strip miners and tech II crystals and it just takes a cycle and a half to finish off an asteroid and you’re juggling a couple of rocks and watching the scanner to see how much each has left so you can cut the cycle early and move on without wasting time… well… life does become more hectic.

So it was nice to go through the peaceful bit, if only to remember what it was like.  And it was also nice to see that even mining the most common element in New Eden was still a decent way to build up some capital to buy ships, replace old ones, purchase new skills, and all of the other foundation work that sends you off in the various ways of the game.

Not that I am going to go back to mining.  But as an activity it was at the root of all I ended up doing in the game.