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CCP backpedals on some mining nerfs

Upwell Moon Mining

It’s been a very tiring week for EVE Online fans and CCP. These past few days have seen the EVE community fanning the flames of outrage over proposed nerfs to various aspects of industry in the game. The changes to mining and planetary interaction are very heavy-handed, and players were unhappy. The resulting protests in-game, and Reddit chaos, let CCP know just how much the player base hated the proposed nerfs.

The tenor of these alterations is that CCP is pushing back plans for more disruptive systems, and reducing their overall impact. The original system was very much designed as a time sink, and players hate it. I said it in my previous coverage, but enforced tedium isn’t fun in any video game. CCP looks to be actually listening to feedback on this.

It’s not all good though. CCP has doubled down on the mining crystals in their attempt to force players into their shortsighted playstyle idea. The notion that players will spend their time mining as an offensive strategy is asinine, but CCP seems committed. Shhh, no one tell them that attacking refining assets is much more likely to be used as a war tactic than “offensive mining”.

Anyway, on to what CCP is doing to address concerns over these mining nerfs.

Mining Waste

The Mining Waste was probably the most controversial aspect of the mining nerfs. CCP has changed it so that Mining Waste is much more manageable. They clearly want you using certain tech, in a targeted nerf to Rorqual mining. Without wasting too much time, the original system made it so that tons of ore and resources were lost to extraction cycles regardless of what modules were used.

Here’s the new breakdown of Mining Waste percentages from CCP:

  • Tech I Modules – 0% Waste
  • Tech II Modules – 34% Waste
  • ORE Modules – 0% Waste
  • Tech I Drones – 0% Waste
  • Tech II Drones – 34% Waste
  • Augmented Drones – 40% Waste
  • Excavator Drones – 60% Waste

Moons and Goo

One of the oft-requested features in the compression of moon refining resources, as well as gas products, is finally coming. But the slowdown inherent to the way CCP initially proposed the idea is getting a lot of flak. Rightfully so as well, as the community has pointed out how absurdly slow the process is. The time to compress even a partial load of valuable R64 materials is hours-long, even for a max-skilled Rorqual pilot. That’s too long.

CCP has decided to push the feature back until sometime in 2022. Ostensibly, they want to return to the drawing board and come up with a less time sink design. They made it clear that they do plan to return to the idea: “We want this to be a feature of the Industrial Command Ships, but we also want the user experience to be good, too. To that end, the update to compression will be delayed to early 2022 as we re-evaluate the implementation. Until then, existing compression methods will remain unchanged.”

Specific Ship Overhauls

Another area of contention for many players is the stripping of bonuses to the Rorqual and other mining-focused ships. The power curve in terms of mining yields has been altered to center around use of the Industrial Core buffs. The idea is that on-grid boosts can now make a Hulk rival a boosted Rorqual in output, post-nerf.

Though these changes being reversed as they have is good, it’s not enough. The reduction in negatives still represents a suppression of the ability to produce goods. It’s true that players have more ISK and will be getting more ways to make it, however, in totality; these changes still will have a net negative on the ability to mine in-game. The general idea of removing ISK from the game is an admirable goal, but hurting player’s ability long-term is much more chaotic, and clearly a hated approach.

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