Player Features and Ideas Discussion

this is just a bad idea. there are always mining options even in systems where the standard belts are completely mined out...

+1 There's the solution right there.

CCP just needs to make it more evident that you aren't going to find a ton of rocks in high-sec, starting area systems. I don't know how many serious mining ops happen in these systems when all of the money (in high) is in 0.5 and 0.6 systems.

Not needed at all. Just make the asteroid belts in the rookie system have very poor quantity. The botters/serious miners will go somewhere else.

It wasn't such a long time ago, that I went through the tutorials to recount my experience with the mining one...

The mining one is the easiest for me to remember, as for the first time upon entering a destination area, my overview wasn't cluttered with a million things that I didn't know what they did or meant. It took me a while to find the belt, and when I got there, it was completely empty. The space was empty, the overview showed nothing in sight, and for a while I thought the rocks were in the background picture and I tried to spot them in the clouds hoping they would pop in there, somewhere. I had fun warping around the belts, but as they were all empty, I didn't do much else.

I quickly realized that there were no asteroids, they weren't blended into the background and I turned to the channel to ask for the location of the asteroids, then I was told that 'someone mined them out'. This was a hard concept as I could only imagine what the scale of that meant, as I had not even been able to see what a belt looked like. I imagined it must have been a great feat.

I ended up buying my veldspar from the market.

I ended up doing some other missions, and I remember I was in my Velator and was equipped with the mining lasers they gave me and came across a veldspar rock in a deadspace mission there and I went, whoa, this must be important. I hauled 100m3 (or so) at a time, until the rock gave way at I think 7000 Veldspar and I thought I had amassed a small fortune. I felt very proud of my work.

It took me a while to get on to the tutorials, but I was now flying an Atron and what I thought was massive cargo space (compared to the Velator) when I got to see what an actual mining belt looked like. There were many yellow ships there, and they seemed quite small compared to my Atron and slow, and as I was orbiting the asteroids I couldn't help but giggle as I thought about how "tanky" I felt in my awesome upgraded Atron and these yellow ships all mining around me must not know what they are doing as I went back and refitted to mining lasers and mined enough to add to my greatly increasing stack of Veldspar.

Then they gave me a Venture.

Then they gave me another Venture.

I wasn't using the ship, because it had only 50m3 cargo space. I didn't understand why they kept giving me Ventures.
Then, eventually I was alerted to the second cargo bay, when they threw another Venture my way.

I nearly fell over my chair.

I spent the rest of my time at rookie camp giving bookmarks to other newbies who found the belts empty as I did, after I figured out how to move around a bit. But my time mining in an Atron, orbiting like mad in a Veldspar rich belt, amidst Ventures, thinking they are doing it wrong is a memory I will always remember about EVE.

I felt like there was a sense of co-operation to EVE and I liked that, everyone pitching in to mine. It brought a sense of population to the space, not so much emptiness, that I miss about the rookie system.

Then I wrote a really long essay about what I thought was wrong with the game.

I do feel that something should be done about belts being mined out completely on the whole, not just in rookie systems.

My solution is to significantly increase the gap between plain ores and bonus yield ores, then fill the anomalies with mostly bonus yield ores (in limited quantity), and flood the main belts with nearly limitless amounts of crap ore.

I would change the yield variants from +5% and +10% to +20% and +40%. The base yield of the ores could be reduced to compensate for the average yield increase this would bring, but on the other hand I think a higher yield on scarce asteroids would actually be a big help toward encouraging miners to remain active.

Yes, barges and exhumers should be disallowed to mine from the rookie systems. Orca support not so much because you can always offer it to rookies. However, strip mining the system of resources is unacceptable. Some of these players know about as much about the game as a 3 year old...terrible comparison but its true, they need to have an environment to familiar themselves with the game mechanics before going out into other systems. A retriever pilot has been in the game long enough to survive in 0.5 and 0.6 systems, if nothing else to survive in 0.7, 0.8, and 0.9 systems. The rookie systems should only allow rookie ships and ventures to mine there. Save the asteroids for those players who do not even know about other systems let alone how to get there, survive, and mine it.

There is no need to amend any tutorials to spawn asteroids to mine especially when the asteroids are already in the system. These barge pilots need to get the heads out of their candy ass and go mine in a 0.9, they hide in rookie systems to avoid gankers. Personally if I ever see a barge or exhumer in these systems I will burn them, they have accumulated the time to train into those ships and know enough about the game to go one system over in a .9 or something and leave the belts to rookies who are still learning.

I agree with the disallow strip miner mechanic though. I kind of like that idea, it doesnt prevent barges or exhumers from passing through or something and prevents them from disrupting new players.

The more that I think about this, the more I favor the suggestion to disallow the activation of strip miners, and I would also extend that to warfare links. Really risk averse non-newbies can still take their Procurer out in any of the (many other) 1.0 or 0.9 or 0.8 security systems.

Rookies cannot activate or fit those two types of modules anyway, so they lose nothing, but will face less problems with asteroid exhaustion. Asteroid exhaustion isn't really an issue anywhere else in the game so it isn't like it's a mechanic people need to learn early.

That 5 year old inexperienced player can mine in their Skiff in a 0.9 system that isn't a rookie system. As a ganker, I can guarantee you that I would *never* bother with ganking a Skiff in a 0.9 system unless the pilot had really, really, really made me irate at them specifically.

It's just like inexperienced mission invaders (even ones that have played EVE for less than 6 hours ever) are expected to move to a different system to practice their trade.

Wrong... It takes about 5-7 days to train into a mining barge depending on remaps and implants. You should only be in the rookie systems to do the tutorials and get out, not to sit there your whole career. I was out of the rookie system after day 2 and never returned.

Also, a new player shouldn't even be flying a mining barge as it likely falls under rule 1(Don't fly what you can't afford to lose). So how does this hit a new player in the wallet?