To hear it from CCP Games itself – and likely from its playerbase – mining in EVE Online isn’t in a really good place right now after the adjustments made in the Equinox update. The devs have heard the complaints and are finally responding to them in a deep dish dev blog that ultimately explains adjustments coming in both the near and far term.
Half of the post effectively explains the design intentions for Equinox’s changes, but then closes with admittance that they led to several problems and that communication about what was changing was poor. “Access to many of the toys you had previously seem reduced and we have effectively introduced a new efficiency puzzle that yields less favorable results than the previous one which naturally feels bad,” the post reads. “Hindsight is 20/20 and we can totally see where we made our missteps.”
In terms of what’s being done, there are several adjustments scheduled for March 12th, including balancing of ore anomalies generated by Tier 1 and Tier 2 prospecting arrays in nullsec space, new Tier 3 upgrades for sov hubs that promise “much larger rocks,” a slightly increased refinement rate for mordunium, a new module to limit mercoxit mining waste, and a higher gas cost for metenox moon drills.
Plans for mining later down the line include capital ship-sized mining, improving mining in places other than nullsec, the chance for ultra-rare “jackpot” rocks to be found, ways to make waste mechanics more interesting, and the potential for improvements and expansion of salvaging. This portion of the dev blog does point out that some of the ideas are “things [that] are very real and in our near future, and some [that] are just discussions that [the devs are] having internally, but it should give rock crunchers some ideal hope and food for thought.
In other EVE Online news, CCP has confirmed that tickets for this year’s EVE Fanfest have competely sold out and is seeking testers to kick the tires of a new GPU rendering system; the Singularity PTS will be open starting at around 12:00 p.m. EST and stay online all weekend.
