Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Greetings,
A concept for an addition to Mining to reward active participation.

When a barge is mining with strip miners, valuable flakes or chips of the asteroid are cut off.

These chips act like slighly slower torpedoes and are picked up by an active, high capacitor module like a net that has to run over the chip to pick them up (ie get within 500m or 1000m).

The chips only last a short time (<1 minute or 30 seconds), so players have to sit next to the asteroid and chase the chip down when it happens like one would decloaking people at a gate. The net module is something that needs to be balanced against mwd capacitor, so no ship able to do this is cap stable.

The chips are not able to be targeted, so would not be easy to bot. Setting a ship to orbit the asteroid might work, but would not be particularly effective.

This would make it possible to make money off afk miners and ninja other players stuff - encouraging conflict or diplomacy/teamwork on belts - and reward active miners with multiple accounts with something to do between laser cycles on the barge. I imagine this as a starter profession.

I think this would work really well in nullsec mining fleets with large alliances that have newbie training corps, as it would give them useful skills in decloaking (useful anywhere gates are used, actually) as well as something to do other than flying a hauler or a low yield ship in the fleet.