There has been a huge amount of feedback given to CCP Games following the announcement of the new refinery system, you can read the announcement here.
CCP Fozzie posted a quick Q/A on the thread, which many of you will find interesting:
———–
Hey folks. Thanks for the feedback and questions so far! I’ll be doing a larger Q&A response at a later time but for now one quick answer to a question that’s coming up a lot:
We currently plan to phase out siphons since they don’t really fit with the new system (there will be much more direct ways to steal moongoo). Siphons were a solid attempt at achieving a worthy goal, but for a number of reasons that particular implementation was doomed to extremely niche status. We think that overall direct spaceship interaction will be a more fun way of engaging in guerilla attacks against moon mining infrastructure.
———-
Q: What will happen to Siphons in the new system?
A: We currently plan to phase out siphons since they don’t really fit with the new system (there will be much more direct ways to steal moongoo). Siphons were a solid attempt at achieving a worthy goal, but for a number of reasons that particular implementation was doomed to extremely niche status. We think that overall direct spaceship interaction will be a more fun way of engaging in guerilla attacks against moon mining infrastructure.
Q: Will Rorquals be able to dock in the large refinery?
A: Yes. The medium refineries will have the same docking restrictions as Astrahus and Raitarus, while the large will allow those ships plus the Rorqual thanks to dedicated Rorqual docking facilities. Non-Rorqual capitals will not be able to dock in the large refinery however.
Q: What types of ships will be able to mine the new ore spawned by moon mining events?
A: The new ores won’t require special ships to mine. They’ll be minable with the normal ore mining ships that are available today (including Rorquals).
Q: Will the new moon ore require new types of mining lasers and drones to mine?
A: Our current plan is to use the same mining lasers, strip miners and mining drones that currently mine the existing types of ore. We are interested in hearing what the community thinks about this however, and are keeping our options open.
Q: Can this new moon mining mechanic be expanded to include highsec and wormhole space?
A: As we mentioned in the blog we think this general mechanic has potential in other areas of space, but we’re not currently planning on opening up collection of T2 moon materials into areas beyond lowsec and nullsec. We’ve run the number and we don’t think diluting the sources of T2 materials across more areas of space would be beneficial to the feature.
However in future iterations we would be very interested in investigating expanding this same “scheduled mining event” gameplay to all areas of space using different resources. These might take the form of new resources or allowing the collection of existing resources such as normal minerals or T3 gasses.
For the first release we need to keep a reasonable scope so any expansion of that kind would need to come later if it comes. That also means that if we expand this gameplay to other resources in other areas we’ll be able to integrate the lessons learned from the first release.
Q: Will starbases (POS) be removed when this feature is released?
A: No, the removal of starbases will be a gradual process and even with the release of refineries there will still be major starbase functions that are not yet replicated by new structures (cyno beacons, cyno jammers and jump bridges). We will have some news on the next steps towards the starbase phase out soon.
———
If you have a question you would like to submit to CCP Fozzie, make sure to add a reply on the feedback thread.
