Player Features and Ideas Discussion

So, currently the industry index effects two things. Ore anomaly spawning, and the chances of relic, data, and mini-profession sites that spawn in the system you own. Now, if we include moon mining I this, most space will have automatically 2-3 industry index that cannot be disrupted short of reinforcing the system and poses. Since it is m3 based it doesn't matter if you make money from it, all that matters is the m3 to give a larger alliance that much more defence with the new sov system, more relic site spawns, more mercoxit spawns as well.

The military index is a poor example but the way it works makes sense. You have more ratters in a system, more anoms should spawn. The problem with it is that it is really easy to grind to 5 and mantain it. yet this is really easy to shut down. Park a hot dropping alt in the system and blow up all their shiny battleships with bombers, do that for awhile and you can remove their index. Works with mining too in roughly the same way. However with that in mind it is near impossible to get it down to 0 because it is stupidly simple for a cruiser to mantain it at 3, or for DED sites to keep the index up. Granted you still won because those anoms are relatively cheap.

Now the way industry index works is, is based off of m3 mined in a system. While this is all well and good, it also makes sense. The direct benefit of the index, is to mining asteroids and besides exploration, nothing else. You station jobs don't get a bonus because of it, so why should they count to a system which is named improperly for what it actually does. I don't want to see easy mode for industry. I want to see balance.

There is a multistep way to fix this problem: 1: Change the current military lv 5 index into the lv 3 index and make it exceedingly difficult to grind up to 5 unless you have tons of people ratting in the same system. Do this to increase quantity of higher end sites, in crowded systems, make the decay for lv 5 and 4 faster as well. 2: rebalance the m3 requirements to mantain lv 3-1 sites so that it is harder to disrupt by a single hotdropper, much in the same way military index is. 3: lower the m3 required to spawn lv 4 and 5 ore anoms. This way miners can actually achieve lv5 index without having to mine in a system for days on end, they still have the risk for a permanent hot dropping alt showing up in the system, just would give the miners a chance to move to another system and mine instead of being somewhat stuck if they are in a small alliance.


Edit: One added tidbit. I've been living in nullsec for approximately 2 years 2 months. In that time I have mined a lot, and built a lot. I have never seen the lv 5 ore anoms. Really would like to. In fact the one 2 day period we actually had it to 4 we got camped by people for a month, and they camped the adjacent systems. Really sucked. I would like to se it so that in he new sov system smaller groups can benefit off of the indexes the way they should be.

"Actaully have the industry index reflect industry...I want to have a reason to have all players of all kinds in my alliance."--theMittani, http://www.themittani.com/media/metashow-episode-12 (at around the 28:50 mark).

Prior to that comment above, theMittani talked about how it was amazing to him that industry indexes in null are so poor given that there are things in null that many people would consider industry.

Also, the new sov change AND tweaking the industry index could lead alliances to that want to hold sov to opening their doors to more industry oriented players. This has been a unicorn CCP has been chasing for along time. The new system could accomplish it...but not with the current boneheaded index system for industry.

Fix it.