Announcement: OF Mining Bonuses

[Karst]

Hello, miners.

Official Factions with mining bonuses can mine better than their indie IDs. That much is straightforward enough.
The way this has been handled so far is problematic, however. For two main reasons:

- A jump from a 3x bonus to 4x bonus is a balance issue. A 33% increase in mining speed is simply not what the economy is designed for, and way too much of an advantage over the indie IDs that should also be viable.
- The way in which these bonuses have been handed it out is extremely inconsistent. Some factions had to roleplay, some didn't. Some got two bonuses at once. And a lot of them just have no documentation at all, and it's unclear how or why or when they got them.

So for simplicity, fairness, and balance, we're going to change this setup.

From now on, all mining-capable official faction IDs will have a flat 0.5 bonus on everything their standard ID can mine.

These bonuses are not meant to be "perked" higher up and won't be adjusted except under exceptional circumstances. For most official factions, this will mean a lower bonus on their primary ore, but a higher bonus on all their others.

The changes should be live upon the next restart. Thank you for your attention.

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[Sally]

These bonuses are not meant to be "perked" higher up and won't be adjusted except under exceptional circumstances.

Changing the terms afterwards would be fine if at the very least these officials were compensated with another perk that they've just magically lost, and I'm not seeing anything about that in this announcement.

How are officials that have lost this bonus as a faction perk being compensated now?

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"I suppose many people will continue moving towards careless computing, because there's a sucker born every minute." - RMS

[Kauket]

every ofl has 3.5 so nobody really "lost" anything, its; just that the buff is not as high.

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[Deterrence's Conclave]

Hello there.

To be honest, it is just a 0.5 "loss", it's not a big drama anyway, no one will die because of it (most probably).

[Lythrilux]

Sad to see it go but makes sense. It was never balanced in terms of econ. From another angle, did seem a bit unfair to indies. I prefer the idea of something being a bonus rather than an outright advantage.

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[Sally]

every ofl has 3.5 so nobody really "lost" anything, its; just that the buff is not as high.

Point flying right over your head. Factions that had these bonuses requested such as a faction perk when they made the official faction request, which is now meaningless as even mining factions that never requested such as a perk are getting this bonus tweaked in. This is being adjusted now after there was an agreement between officials and the staff and my question is whether factions can get that perk back or they'll have to suck it now, as the announcement doesn't clarify that.

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"I suppose many people will continue moving towards careless computing, because there's a sucker born every minute." - RMS

[Shulsky]

- A jump from a 3x bonus to 4x bonus is a balance issue. A 33% increase in mining speed is simply not what the economy is designed for, and way too much of an advantage over the indie IDs that should also be viable.

Can we get any specific examples for this problem occurring?

As far as I can tell, generally speaking Bristol Indie mining was completely viable and OF mining simply a step up from that. Despite the advantage, there's still been difficulty at times to supply our own bases with the necessary ore for platinum and heavy water. So...where, exactly, is the "too much" part about it?

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Operation Have Sea

[Kauket]

it's not meaningless because it's still a buff,

and i'm speaking as someone who was an ofl that requested a mining perk bonus. although tbh i dont think there was any point in reducing the 4.0 buff. the demand for ore is still high

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[Karst]

These bonuses are not meant to be "perked" higher up and won't be adjusted except under exceptional circumstances.

Changing the terms afterwards would be fine if at the very least these officials were compensated with another perk that they've just magically lost, and I'm not seeing anything about that in this announcement.

How are officials that have lost this bonus as a faction perk being compensated now?

Well, they haven't really lost anything in the sense that perks don't cost anything material. They don't really cost a lot of effort, either, since most of them are just "this is our primary ore, we want this buffed" "yes okay".

Game mechanics sometimes make old requests obsolete. It's the same with old tech cells, a lot of the perk archive is tech cell requests that are completely irrelevant now because the whole system has been overhauled multiple times since then.

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[Amba]

I'd have just removed them altogether but I guess this is fine too.