Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Whenever I undock my Loki and go scanning for Radars and Mags and 3-4/10s, most of my results are already grav sites and WHs.

No thank you, weeding out all the grav sites onto my ignore list already takes long enough. Don't clog up my results with even more.

Additionally unsupported because it doesn't actually fix anything. It just moves the bots to grav sites instead, where they're harder to find and bump and possibly gank if someone feels like dealing out EULA justice.

Bot, you keep saying that. I don't think it means what you think it means.

A bot is a robot. In EVE a bot is a program/macro/etc that is designed to auto-mate a task while the user is away (ie: warp to belt, lock closest rock, mine it, lock next belt and mine it when the first one pops, and then warp to station and unload when hold is full). All botters are AFK or losely monitoring.

Now, if you are talking about people who go out, mine Ice while doing laundry, dishes, watching a DVD/Netflix, etc.. while checking their character and then warping to station to unload then repeat, that is a semi-AFK player. Not a bot.

I know what semi-afk means, and what a bot is, but the average "HS and it's activities must be changed/nerfed/purged/Nuked/whatever" -Scrub often claims that all Semi-AFK miners must be bots.. otherwise, I can't explain the endless ammounts of stupid postings which claim that mining is broken while it isn't.

Edit: The whole point of my post was to show the results which will occur if you drive people away from mining ;)

A suggestion I put forth about 3 and a half years ago was a bit different, based more on how space mining worked in SWG.

The more you mine, the more "noise" you make, the more rats it attracts - a top end mining ship would find itself in scramble mode from mining at top performance and more than 1 such ship could easily be destroyed by the swarms of rats they'd summon. Rats don't spawn at all without mining. It's the mining that attracts them and they keep coming the more "noise" you make blasting chunks off of asteroids.

Either tone it back or bring escorts to deal with the rats and escorts would be kept very busy by a decently skilled mining ship. (let's see you "rat your sec status up" if it requires mining ships to get rats to the belts. - fit a mining laser? ...)

So you take a fleet of mining ships out with an orca and go high-speed. You'd best bring an escort group that watches you and rats the area while you do that but getting an escort shouldn't be too hard being as that's the primary attraction for rats.

This avoids the only task in the game more boring than shooting rocks with lasers - watching someone shoot rocks with lasers. Instead they'd spend their time running around popping and looting rats and 4 exhumers with a fleet bosting orca could keep a couple or so combat pilots very busy just clearing the rats out.

Such a method would also gut multi-box style botting and high-yield mining being as they'd pull so much ore so quickly, the rats would destroy their mining fleet if it didn't have enough of a protective escort.

The idea wasn't so much to mess with botters and miners. It was more to find a way to encourage combat pilots to seek out miners and defend them. Not by forcing players to defend other players but to encourage it with a higher potential income stream than they could get doing missions - keep the miners safe = profits from ratting.

With swarms of NPC's coming in, that's a solid income source across all areas of space and having a sufficient escort for a gang of miners makes mining in low and null far more doable than these days with the combat type pilots off doing missions or such while miners are off doing their own thing.

Again, not by forcing players to go along but by providing a different income stream that grows as you guard more miners. They get popped, there goes the rats because rats don't spawn at all -- only when miners are mining.

Just picture it in local "anyone miners need an escort right now?" -- now that would be a question few, if anyone, in EVE has probably heard and one that most vets would probably smile at in the future - especially if that local were lowsec with a ganker needing their sec status brought back up quickly... A ganker guarding miners. One hell of a twisted situation but quite possible if the need is there.

Mining isn't broken? Explain to me how logging in at 5pm AEST requires me to jump up to 10 jumps to find a decent place to mine in High-Sec whilst others in a more 'optimal' time zone can login after work, with fresh roids ready to go and have the 16 hour advantage?

That's not broken. And don't give me the 'move to low/sec null speech'. I'm a casual player that enjoys making ships, doing missions and having giggle with other corps.

I read this at the weekend and thought it was brilliant. I guess there's a possibility of ridiculous bounty farming but........oh how I liked the concept.

It really depends on how it would be balanced and yes belt ratting in null already matches and/or beats L4's for income if done right. Now crank up the speed of the rats spawning and such ... Toss in the accelerated spawning also causing officers to spawn more readily in that area...

For highsec? It might get close but I'd doubt it would meet or exceed the income via trashier rats. Yet if they added a weaker class of officer type rats in highsec to make things a bit more valuable and challenging? ...

What you would find is L2, 3 and early L4 pilots might just get into this far more than trying out for L4's as main-stay income.

This isn't like incursions - any ship that can fly can help out and simply finding a belt with miners would mean a steady stream of rats to help deal with the issues. Once people do start working in teams, it's generally easier to keep that going vs the first steps of getting them started doing teamwork efforts.

Again, it was an old idea and it didn't go anywhere back then. :-)

the idea is interesting, but i cannot see a way to make baby sitting barges interesting and profitable enough for combat pilots without infringing on a more dedicated combat based career system (missions). its either too easy and low pay, or ur barges have to bail or get alpha'd.

When you manipulate your probes to scan for a site and get them in range at 20% for example, you need to narrow down the field which will often involve changing the view-able area of your screen to gain a greater understanding of where to position your probe to gain greater strength.

Given a BOT can only "SEE" an X and Y (Horizontal and vertical axis), attempting to manipulate the probes to get them at a higher strength would involve moving each probe, one at a time, along each of the axis attempting to get a hit within the Red Rings - which as you know is dynamic at all times - and calculating the position required for each of the Probes.

Now whilst I'll be the first to admit, emulating mouse and keyboard movements can be done; the simple fact remains that automating the 'red ring' find functions, really isn't that possible. A bot can 'SEE' the bubbles of the probe. It can 'SEE' the red rings but how do you tell it to put all of the probes in a patter to create an overlap that will cover the red ring? Not possible.

Factor in 4 probes required, likelihood due to error and the inability for what's "SEEN" by the bot to grasp where the location might be and you're back at needing a hook into the eve client to figure it all out.

Otherwise I like the respawn points except the last one. Pretty sure CCP removed decent roids from Missions because we were all farming them like mad XD 4 missions at once could turn a really good profit, even before orca's XD