Player Features and Ideas Discussion

You didn't read it either. He mentions heavy nerfs to passive mining, in fact it's one of the main focuses of the article.

It's mentioned several times throughout the article; just because you can't find it by searching the document for the word "nerf" doesn't mean it isn't there.

Neither post has even been edited. They don't have an edited by remark at the top. So any lack of grammatical errors is original.

I am in no way going to comment on grammatical errors as the combined gods of hypochrisy and touchscreen keyboard errors would evaporate me in an instant...

That's already how mining is, afk means the likelyhood of being CODE squished and is much less effective than active mining

+1 Im not a miner in any way shape form or fashion and i hate everything industry related but I think this would be a great addition to the game.

That sounds to me like playing scratch off ore tickets, in an automated manner.

For a competitive game, anything automated cancels out as a means to compete with.

I am thinking we could use a reactive interface that offered a chance to convert time and effort into results above those from simply time invested alone.

Heck, it would be a cool spin if we could adapt this into a combat aspect. Imagine, studying the shield patterns of an opponent, and being able to focus fire where they were weakest? Or defensively being able to reinforce areas facing opponents?

I like these ideas, but it doesn't seem like they significantly address any issues with risk/reward problems in lowsec and wormhole space.

I wrote up most of an OP but figured it would be better to start here with the stuff I'd like to see, since it's somewhat related to this. Here you go.

Mining is unlike most of the recently updated features in eve such as exploration in that more thought and activity has very little effect on mining output; as of late, this issue has been exacerbated with the relative improvement of highsec ores over nullsec and lowsec ores. Arkonor, supposedly the greatest ore in the game, is now second only to omber in its worthlessness. There is almost no difference between a person idling in a skiff in highsec pressing f1 every 5-10 minutes and a person actively watching and waiting for his cycle timer in a wormhole system. The only "advantage" of mining in nullsec are refining bonuses, since hedbergite, the current best regular ore, spawns in highsec anomalies and is not even as valuable per cubic meter as fiery kernite; mining in lowsec is almost entirely pointless. There is something wrong with the risk/reward ratio of mining when some three-month-old mining character in a 1.0 system mining massive scordite can make as much money as someone mining hedbergite in an unsecured wormhole system.

This coincides with the (currently mostly irrelevant) fact that the ore composition of asteroids is abysmally low; the best untouched asteroids I could find in highsec belts in terms of volume had an ore concentration of approximately .04% to .1%, while the worst were the largest veldspar asteroids with concentrations as low as .00000037%. In spite of these incredibly low concentrations, a veldspar asteroid with three trillion cubic meters takes only about twelve minutes to, with perfect accuracy, extract the 120,000 units of veldspar and vaporize the other 2,999,999,880,000 cubic meters using 480 gigajoules of energy, the equivalent of approximately 80 barrels of oil. This doesn’t seem to have any basis in reality.

It seems reasonable to add a factor of volumetric efficiency to mining income instead of only increasing the amount of ore per asteroid as security status drops. This would significantly improve the importance of mining in lower-security systems as even consistently bad ores like omber become profitable enough to mine, and would increase the amount of risk being taken even in highsec, as expensive exhumers would move into the higher-efficiency .5 and .6 systems. The ability to tweak the general increase in ore concentration would also allow CCP to easily balance highsec with lowsec, nullsec, and wormhole space and allow ore sites in highsec to become more relevant again, since most of them spawn common ores. Of course, this would require a vast increase in mining laser volume and a vast decrease in the volume of asteroids to have this make any sense, or an efficiency multiplier for mining lasers that multiplies the effective density of asteroids and can be improved with skills, modules, implants, and boosts. Other changes, such as giving regular mining lasers (not strip miners) a bonus to their production efficiency, might help to keep balance and relevance among the various mining modules.

Mining minigames have been suggested since ages past, but the argument that passive mining should be possible usually dampers any significant traction with such ideas. I believe an optional minigame could be accomplished with the introduction of a new, specialized mining ship that can fit a unique precision laser that can carve off and destroy pieces of asteroids with uselessly low mineral concentrations with some kind of minigame, improving the ore concentration. It would also allow the user to vandalize the asteroid belts of enemy alliances in a short amount of time, though this would need some kind of counterweight in highsec to prevent the destruction of entire systems, such as a cooldown that increases with security status and the prevention of usage in starter systems.

Also the ability to see the volume of and concentration of ore with a scanner. Make this a thing.

+1 for that.

But the idea of vein mining is kind of redundant i think. Deposit mining would be enough for a form of interactive mining.
They both are the same approach. Scan for better ore, extract only that. No need for two versions of this.

So a differentiation between regular mining (like it is now) and PI like interactive mining (heat map) would be the best approach to this, in my opinion. Not overly and unnecessary complicated, but enough interaction for the non-bots.

Bump for the only real big improvement that I personally want to see in the game