Eve’s Future: Professional Industry Corps?
by A scientists life in Eve on Apr.20, 2012, under Eve online
Lots has been said about the upcoming changes to drone mineral drops and removal of Meta 0 drops over recent weeks.
In response, Kirith Kodachi over at Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah wrote a post predicting the return of hardcore mining Corporations. The prolific Jester has added his thoughts in his post System Shock.
From my experience, the Corporations Kirith predicts are already happily mining away, I just guess the increased profitability of mining will increase recruitment and spawn further Corporations eager to sit with three blue lazors shooting rocks and dragging icons from one window to another to fill an Orca.
The K162 space blog illustrates the talent and innovation that exists within the Eve community. His work on his wallet manager app, and the good looking screenshots, demonstrate how serious some Corps take things.
For our Corp, we’re very fortunate to have a talented programmer working on making everybody’s life easier. As an industrial Corp, we have miners and ratters, and also people collecting Planet Goo. Previously, contracts were turned in for Ore and accepted, kept on a spreadsheet and payouts done. To improve things, it evolved to loot logs being exported and him then parsing it via Excel to generate a payout report. He’s improved things somewhat.
He’s now developed a system that imports the contracts and loot log information and, with pricing information updated from Eve Central’s API, it automatically generates the payout report (and various other reports and more importantly for me, graphs) on a website, which I can copy and paste the figures from and do the payouts. I can even click “complete” to reset the payout counter and then allow week by week comparison reports to be looked at.
We’re doing this. K162 is doing what he’s doing. There are other systems out there like Mining Buddy. How many other developers are there in various Corporations developing similar things?
The infrastructure is already either there, or being built. With the profitability starting to reach levels where more people might consider the benefits of being able to earn ISK while doing other in-game activities, this sort of thing will hopefully continue to develop and make the organised industry Corps much better at what they do.
Let’s face it, if you believe some of the graphs and data out there, around 40% of all the mineral supply in Eve is due to reprocessing Meta 0 items from missions/rats and reprocessing drone compounds. 40% is a big number. Yesterday, we had a mini-mining op with two Orcas and 5 Hulks (one Orca as static warehouse giving bonuses, one Orca to shuttle ore to store). If we represented the 60%, we’d need to increase from 5 Hulks to just over 8 Hulks to provide the other 40% of minerals.
So, as a supermarket giant in the UK says, for all these tools that talented community programmers are developing, “every little helps” with what will be a difficult task to keep New Eden supplied with sufficient ships and modules to come and AFK camp our system to stop us mining, or to Black Ops hot drop us to destroy our mining fleet. Oh wait… what?
Keep destroying our Hulks, I’ll just build more. I’ll also build more ships for you to asplode us with, but I’ll have to just charge you a bit more as mineral inflation is quite bad at the moment, and I’ve got to cover my losses so need to eek out a bit more profit. Never mind, you seem honest enough, I’ll give you a small discount for repeat business 
If CCP is making such wide reaching changes to industry in an expansion supposedly solely centered around war, I am filled with both dread and excitement to see what they might come up with when they (as they promised at FanFest they are going to do) start giving out details of the industry expansions for the future (or harvesting and crafting as our activities are going to be reclassified to so that the rest of the MMO world can understand us).
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I think the point which people forget is that if mining is the only source of minerals, than mining will always be profitable, even taking into account the cost of replacing mining ships.
In fact, the more dangerous and uncertain mining becomes, the higher the profit.
The only uncertainty is whether hulks become unprofitable to mine in(possible), there is enough differentiation between good and bad miners (don’t think this is likely).
People should also not forget the various faction mining cruisers out there. Easy to get into, and with cruiser 5 being a requirement for a lot of other stuff, they can actually be quite efficient.
I have a cloaky mining vexor stored in null. With good skills I can get about half of what a good hulk pilot can pull iirc. It’s about 1/50th of the cost, so if it gets asploded, it’s no big deal….
In other words, pretty much every one should be able to contribute, even the leet Pee Vee Pee’ers…
So instead of gatecamping lo-sec with Titans – does this mean Pandemic Legion will go mining in them instead? Chribba might get approached to run their Capital Mining Fleet ?????
ROFL – that is entirely the opposite of cost effective as you are well aware…
I can’t believe you’re suggesting such a thing.
Carriers with flights of 20 T2 mining drones are obviously the way to go….
Well now that Super Carriers can’t use normal drones, I guess the most you’d get (with racial Carrier V) would be 15 Mining Drone II’s?
I was suggesting a Titan, as mining ships tend to be too easy to gank, and it would probably be easier to tank your Titan than carrier to avoid being suicide ganked during Hulkageddon
The thing is it’s not just the removal of the 40% of minerals that come from meta 0 modules. All the other changes (drones moving from compounds to bounties, Sreegs war on bots) stack up enormously. I don’t think if you were to pick up the slack you’d be upgrading from a 5 hulk fleet to an 8 hulk fleet. It’s more like 12-15.
One of the biggest factors may be the war on bots. People who gank a lot of miners have estimated 80% to 90% of high sec miners they gank are bots. Even if you allow for a little exaggeration, if that gets completely cleaned up then the shortfall is utterly massive.
In addition DUST514 will drastically affect planet goo. At the moment farming planet goo is a sleepy form of passive income. When DUST comes in our PI is their destructible content. The game could reduce PI extraction by half easily.
Stuff is going to become very expensive.
Yep… and that will attract people to mining. It might also mean that the industrial upgrades get used in SOV space more (unsure if there are many at all tbh).
If the null sec alliances want renters to pull the ore/goo for them, well they may have to drop their prices a little.
Alternatively, they may actually have to provide some protection to their mining corporations.
Lastly, I can see high sec becoming more reliant on logis/RR for further risk reduction in L4s.
EvE is hard – as it should be. But the bots (and I guess the drone goo) are skewing the playing field. It will be interesting to see how it looks once the changes go through.