So you are trying to give love to miners while at the same time combating inflation. I think the currently proposed solution is an extreme over correction and too much change too fast. There is an entire aspect that you are missing which I will try to explain briefly.

Traditional PvE ( missions, complexes, anoms etc. ) earned isk two ways. One was to create new isk, this would be bounties and mission rewards generated by the server. The other was in selling loot, salvage and LP which was just moving isk around from player to player and not creating new isk to inflate the isk pool in the market thus driving prices up.

Incursions hit the scene and it's mostly just bounty payouts. A mission runner probably spends about half his time creating isk and about half his time looting, salvaging, sorting through loot, melting and selling etc. Incursion runners are full time isk printers. They speed run incursions and print new isk all day long. Further with the loot salvage people there are multiple points in that path where the server removes isk via taxes and transaction fees

Miners on the other hand earn all of their isk from other players and create no new isk by mining.

So your solution is to completely remove drone compounds and make it so that drones only give bounties turning the drone regions from a regions that could only earn isk from other players into regions that can only print new isk much like incursions but without the LP so actually even worse

At the same time that you are removing the drone compounds you are also removing all meta 0 drops which from what I can tell will be another huge removal of minerals. From my best estimates mining will have to more than double it's current output to break even system wide.

In this virtual universe the only real commodity and therefore the only absolute way to measure the cost of anything is time. Specifically how much time does a player have to spend earning the stuff that he gets blown up. So assuming play time stays the same for a given player if you double the amount of time it takes him to earn stuff that haves the amount of game time he has to loose that isk ( PvP )

While you have done some things on both sides of this scale I don't think it's balanced. I see prices going up and isk earning potential going down. This means players will need to spend a higher percentage of time mining and mission running as compared to PvPing. As a carebear I'm fine with that. I'm just wondering if you realize that this patch is a PvP nerf ?

Once again, employees at CCP are not listening to what some of the players are pointing out and making the drone region not so good place to live in the game anymore.

I see all the cons and with no pros, with this change being done. things like.

- salvage is avg stuff, you can any in any other space. (Good)
- mining is the same in any other space. (Good)
- no sec increases for killing them (bad), you get this in any other space.
- they don't drop any type of loot, (bad) you get this in any other space.
- balancing of the space is off as well, bad tbh - I wondered if you threw dirt's at a well with maps of drone regions why drinking. what areas will have no good systems in game.

I'd still like to see a response on:

• Why incursion site de-spawning in terms of mothership kill & influence drop not been altered or even hinted to be changed?

The system currently is clearly broken with 4 hours of influence pump from 0 % to 100 % blue capsuleer influence.
Was this even something you considered or is it in your (read: CCP) eyes not broken/not needing a change?

Or was this already answered and I am just being ignorant?

I know quite a few people who LOVE mining, but rarely do it due to the extremely low profits you get from it. I gave up because it was easier and more efficient for me to use a salvage/looting alt to loot all my sites and refine the drops to get minerals for me to play industrialist with, simply buying the minerals I lack on the market.

All those people will end up going to full time mining the way they like to do once this hits(they are all already gearing up to do it) and as such will provide a fairly sizable influx of new minerals into the system, which should balance out the removal of drone poop.

Glad I love my mining buddies and so I trained that alt into orca/rorqual pilot after I got perfect salvage and scrap refining skills set up, now I can just tax them 10% of the haul for my services.

I am just being ignorant?

It was mentioned in the blog that there was hope that the decrease in the rate at which VG's could be completed would help to decrease the rate at which influence was gained, though who knows how much of an impact that will cause.

I *LOVE* all these "CCP isn't listening wah wah wah!!" posts. No, they *ARE* listening. Carebears have been pointing out for ages how destabilizing drone poo was, how drops were better sources of minerals, etc. Granted, CCP could very well be going too far in the other direction (as has been pointed out numerous times in this thread, drones ARE getting wailed on pretty hard, and it's not as if CCP hasn't overcompensated before), but all this 'not listening to players' seems to be coming from drone residents who are displeased about their lollies being taken away. I was both surprised and pleased to see this:

I *LOVE* all these "CCP isn't listening wah wah wah!!" posts. No, they *ARE* listening. Carebears have been pointing out for ages how destabilizing drone poo was, how drops were better sources of minerals, etc. Granted, CCP could very well be going too far in the other direction (as has been pointed out numerous times in this thread, drones ARE getting wailed on pretty hard, and it's not as if CCP hasn't overcompensated before), but all this 'not listening to players' seems to be coming from drone residents who are displeased about their lollies being taken away. I was both surprised and pleased to see this

Any increase in mining yield will be utilized where it have always been utilized, to mine the most valuable ore available.

One "Plan B" for them would be to "fix" some of the null-sec ores which are still pretty bad, like Spod and Gneiss.

go buy them in jita you nitwit

0.0 belts don't have infinite amounts of every ore. Once all the ABCM is gone, it's gone until the belt respawns (2x a week?). If the values of other ores are worth undocking the Hulks for, they'll get mined.

0.0 belts don't have infinite amounts of every ore. Once all the ABCM is gone, it's gone until the belt respawns (2x a week?). If the values of other ores are worth undocking the Hulks for, they'll get mined.

someone still has to put em in Jita for sale, oh wait, that would still be the big alliances who have unlimited access to the resources, so the prices are still going up.

so yeah big alliances still have the game in control

"The overall goal of all these changes is to make the drone regions more economically balanced, and to reduce the downward pressure on mineral prices from the drone regions so mining becomes more profitable." (CCP affinity)

I have yet to see where the pressure on mins is downward, they have been steadily going up.

Has CCP ever considered the idea of "ingots"? Create a Trit, Pyer, Mex, Iso Ingot BPOs (Low ends) that has no waste at all. Allow it to compress minerals into "industrial ingots", then Null can export these from high-sec and reprocess them out in Null using Scrap Metal skill. The compression need not be any better than the current methods used. The resulting ingots can be quite large since freighters and JFs are the usual transportation. 10 million trit compressed into blocks the size of what ever keeps parity with current methods, 425s ring a bell.

SERIOUSLY CCP: Why in the world do you need to now change the security status to crap? These regions arent supposed to be LOWSEC, this is not where you bring your bastard child, Faction Warfare, to feed on the carcasses of dead capsuleers!

CCP Goonscale (as I believe I shall now dub thee)
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Oh how great are the scales that work in the favor of all things Goon. Balance is not achieved here, balance is thrown out the window in favor of ... what exactly? The loss of Drone Alloy was a celebrated change. Finally CCP was getting it together and seeing the light of balance. The loss of Alloy was a balance in itself, one that was easy and agreed upon by most everyone, including those who would be losing out because of it. We could all deal with low loot drops for drones too, even the possibility of not gaining security through them. But to then cause all those nice drones to disappear as well? This is unacceptable
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CCP Goonscale, the only question I have for you directly is pretty straightforward: Why is the only region that has everything in it the one that isnt getting nerfed? Such a region provides too much of an advantage. The way it has been outlined to us the players is that there should be reason for us to fight over regions, not to fight over only one region in the game. I would fight for good bounty only drones, I would fight for the best deadspace loot, I would fight for the best mining region, and I would fight for a region which was horrible except for its tech moons. But. that last region shouldn't have good loot, good mining, great truesec, AND tech moons. If it should have all that, then the balanced thing to do is to give every section of nullsec one (or more, as the goons have it) of these perfect regions.