The first dev blog associated with the summer expansion has been out for a few days and as is my custom, I’d like to talk about this dev blog and what I think of the feature. That dev blog is about the future of reprocessing.
I love almost everything about this dev blog. Almost.
I’ve been bitching about mineral compression going back almost to the beginning of this blog. I’m quite sad that it’s taken three years to fix this problem but I’m quite pleased to see it’s finally going to become a relic of EVE’s former era. Now this change isn’t 100% positive. I recognize that this change hurts EVE’s solo capital producers, who have come to rely on a single jump freighter full of large rail guns to feed their industrial empire. But the addition of viable mineral compression should go a goodly way to addressing their woes. In addition, when the potential of this change was brought up at a CSM Summit, I pointed out that module reprocessing at one time was a decent portion of the income of beginning EVE players. That’s going to be hurt as well. Matter of fact, between this and the ubiquity of salvage thanks to data and relic sites, it’s going to make most L4 mission looting no longer worthwhile. That’s a pity.
Mineral sources as a thing deserves a closer look:
This is an old graph and I’ve lost track of who originally produced it. But it shows — about three nerf generations ago now — where the minerals that were used at that time came from. As you can see, only about 20-30% of most minerals came from mining (the gold numbers). And for every mineral except morphite, the majority of minerals came from either loot reprocessing or drone compounds. Since then, as I mentioned, there have been three major nerfs:
So call this the fourth and probably final nerf of this cycle. We don’t know what percentage of EVE’s minerals comes from mining today. CCP guards that data jealously. But we know one thing for sure: it’s going to be the large majority of minerals from now on. So this change is rather an epic buff to mining’s importance.
What remains to be seen is whether it will be an epic buff to mining. It’s famously one of the most preyed-upon, least interesting portions of EVE Online game play. Even its adherents can think of no greater praise for it than “it’s soothing.” But it’s about to be where all of us get all our ships and modules from, with nearly no exceptions. Will more players partake? Or will this be an effective buff to mining bots? We’ll see. Hopefully the Security team will be on their toes once this is implemented.
One last thing: I think the new mineral compression mechanics are a great idea but I do consider it somewhat unlikely that the Rorqual is going to benefit much at all thanks to the POS compression module. When choosing between flying around a large ungainly ship to do compression — which takes special skills, lots of ISK, and involves… you know… risk — I suspect most players are simply going to use the POS module. That, anyone can use without special skills or undue risk. It also has the benefit of being awake no matter what time you’re mining. So the Rorq is going to have to rely on its other use cases and to their credit, the devs recognize it:
Also, we do know the Rorqual needs more love to be a more viable ship, and that is being looked into, but chances are this won’t make it in EVE’s summer expansion.
So call me a “hold” on Rorqs for now.
And that’s all for now! Big changes afoot, and we’re going to have to wait a while to see how they shake out. But overall, I’m optimistic about this one, particularly for you null-sec miners out there.
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