Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Do you ever wonder why asteroids in belts stand still? Why they not floating with different speeds like in real asteroid belts?
Smaller asteroids fly faster and bigger fly slower. This implies that:
1. Ships need to approach target asteroid and keep it in range, not just slowly crawling along the belt.
2. Mining barges can not reach small asteroids and they can be mined only with frigates.
3. When someone lands uncloaked on a miners he must accelerate and reach them, allowing them to react and escape.

Of course, there is some technical challenges relating generally to grid:
1. How asteroid belts will be located? Will they points in space like now or they will be really dispersed volume of asteroids filling entire orbit?

If they will be spread out they must be scanned down before anyone can reach them.
But this means new players without relevant skills/ships can not reach that places alone.
However, I prefer this way. EVE is social game, so for newbies there can be special easily located spots of asteroids, where they stand still like now. They can reach them with on-board scanner.
But if you want to mine really large volumes of ore you need either prepare for that or call for help.

2. Asteroids leaving the grid.
They will be moving things, and asteroids will be moving things too, so they can leave belt's grid. This means this asteroid can never be mined or it must be scanned down again. This will eliminate "perfect" cleaning of asteroid belts and leave an opportunity to everyone for mining even before downtime.

Asteroids don't fly apart from eachother and move all over the place because it would create undue complication and hassle without adding anything beneficial to the game. For the sake of realism, in an asteroid belt, the asteroids are travelling together, as a group. The velocity of your spaceship is all in relation to an object. In this case, considering asteroids are the only thing on grid with you, it is reasonable to consider that when you are not moving, that that is relative to the asteroids, and so you are travelling together with them at the same speed, therefore there is no reason they should be flying apart in different directions.

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