Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Not sure where you are looking, but LS Ore is certainly not the least valuable ore in the game. Quite the contrast, Null ores are a lot less valuable than LS ores.

And on the moon mineral stuff: Have a look into Aridia, my favorite region in the game. There's ton's of R64s, R32s and Cadmium moons. Do you see people living there? The only notable exceptions are Lowsechnaya and some pirates in Sakht.

While Low sec ores are actually the most valuable, they also appear in Null to be cherry picked from static belts by Null Miners with a brain.
However making them 'more valuable' simply wouldn't work. ABC ores are technically 'more valuable', people flooded to the valuable ores, glutted the market and it crashed.

The market will self correct when it comes to mining.

The ores in lowsec should be more valuable than anywhere else as it's the riskiest place to mine it. If that doesnt happen (or a d-scan immune mining ship) then mining in lowsec will still rarely happen


Lol wut?

Given the current state of affairs, the only way I see to make losec mining more common isn't to buff losec ores, it's to nerf hisec ones. As long as you can get all of the low-grade and mid-grade minerals from mining in hisec, losec has nothing to offer over null or WH space aside from decreased security. Hardly an attractive proposition.

I am not suggesting that CCP nerf hisec ores. That's another topic of discussion entirely and I don't want to derail this one (at least not too badly). I'm just saying that I think this is the only reason why losec mining on a large scale will likely never be profitable.


But the real question is would you make enough to pay for the Thanatos you owe me?

Moving some of the basic "must have" ores to low sec would create a demand which in turn would create activity, opportunity and (after some time) groups and a form of teamwork/symbiosis that would revive low sec and at the same time favour and reward the bold miner capable of actively interacting with others.

It would be good for miners, pvpers, manufacturers and whatnot.

You can't make those rocks more profitable than null sec or worm holes because worm holes are more dangerous and null sec you have to put in the effort to get SOV.
Null Sec then becomes safer and more profitable than low sec. Ergo, forget about low sec mining ever being a thing.

Edit: Actually, as much as I hate to say this, what you could do is make it so that mining anomolies have to be scanned down and only have this in low sec.
Then miners have a chance to hit a station or a POS when they see probes and then the risk is not so utterly terrible.

Mining anomalies should only be in low sec for null ore. Not in high or null is best solution I can see.

Still doesn't really change anything though, the population disparity will still make it redundant to interact in lowsec. As long as it is safer to mine in HS and NS people will go to one or the other. The idea of having LS function as a "bridge" between the two is not impactful enough to draw people to the area.

By taking the NS ore and putting it in LS you force people to operate in LS in order to facilitate production. Given the opportunity people will ALWAYS take the path of least resistance. Swapping ore seeding between NS and LS will bypass this as people must be active in LS to acquire certain ore types, in the same metric people must mine in NS now to acquire these ores.

The same can be said of moon minerals. The only way to get people eat out of a trough is to eliminate any other source of food around them. Or make sure the food in the trough is more attractive than the other **** nearby.

You either have to go all in, or not at all. LS is the most dangerous space in the game, and it should have the rewards for it being so. As it stands, LS is the least profitable space. You gotta break some eggs if you want an omelet

Its not about being exposed, its about the draw there in the first place. The only mineral that lowsec ores have that is comparably less common in other regions of space is Noxium. But that can be found in NS and HS with relative ease as well as more access to other minerals. Which is why you see folks occasionally day trip to LS to munch up Hemorphite or Jaspet instead of actually living in LS, there just isn't the volume of variety that NS and HS have.


Tritanium
1) HS
2) NS
3) LS

Pyrite
1) HS
2) NS
3) LS

Mexalon
1) HS
2) NS
3) LS

Isogen
1) HS
2) LS
3) NS

Nocxium
1) LS
2) NS
3) HS

Zydrine
1) NS
2) LS
3) HS

Megacyte
1) NS
2) HS
3) LS

Morphite
1) NS
2) HS
3) LS



Of the 8 Ore types best regional procurement is.
4 in HS
3 in NS
1 in LS

HS is the worst in 2/8
NS is the worst in 1/8
LS is the worst in 5/8

Until the clear regional disparity between Ore/Mineral procurement is changed, there will never be any reason for people to actively live in a region. LS absolutely needs more in the way of variety, while HS and NS both need to have an increase in scarcity.

Security is a secondary argument, because security will follow profits and necessity.

(This list is compiled based on the output weighting of each Ore found in each region, arguably HS is the best in them all because if you can't find a rock to chew, there is a high chance Jita or Amarr has what you are looking for anyway.)

So, in the end the attitude of the players needs to change in order for space to become more lively and less empty.

All 3 security levels offer all ores all over the place with some exceptions for a very limited number of ores here and there (poor Gallente). Take Amarr space, for instance: you can mine the exact same ore types in the regular belts in all of Amarr space and you get all the necessary minerals to build stuff from them. The thing is that you need to mine regular belts all over the place, not only the anomalies that you find. The stuff to live somewhere is there already and what's not there is very limited and can be imported, just like it should be the case.

What's not there, however, is the will of the players to do something.