Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The short:

A deployable mining claim unit, here I'll call it a Resource Claim Unit, that gives your corp temporary mining rights for that grid. Anyone who mines without permissions gets a suspect flag. Only depolyable in anomalies (not belts).

This idea would require significantly more mining anomalies in hi-sec that have lucrative ore, say 50% more yield as an incentive.

Only one Resource Claim Unit can be active per anomaly. If another Resource Claim Unit is active it must be removed or be inactive for a new Resource Claim Unit to be launched.

Shooting Resource Claim Units only makes a pilot suspect, no CONCORD intervention and no sec status drop. This allows them to be contested but the contesting party opens themselves up to being shot.

The Resource Claim Unit requires charters (or fuel or whatever) to stay active but only has a large enough bay to stay active for 5 minutes untouched. This means it must be actively kept fueled in order to hold claim (no set and forget claiming). This requires a pilot to be active in order to hold claim on a site.

If someone is already mining in an anomaly and you drop a claim unit they get to finish their cycle but any new cycles will flag them as suspect.

Important to note that asteroid belts would still be available to all, these units would only work on lucrative anomalies. This means solo pilots and small entities can't be completely cut out by large groups.




The long:

The idea around this is to create competitive gameplay around mining in hi-sec beyond suicide ganks and just mining out all the belts in a system. Serious miners can compete for the 'good' ores, while still letting solo players and small corps mine normal belts unharassed like they do at the moment.

Part of the idea is that if you are in the site and mining it's not hard to keep the Resource Claim Unit running, but if you're trying to claim multiple sites over a long time it takes work to keep all the claim units running. Corps can have pilots drop Resource Claim Units all over the place and charge miners for the 'right' to mine. It takes a bit of work to keep them active though (the 5 min charter timer) so that they have to be bothered to actually fly around and keep their claim units running. This way people running claim corps have to put in work to hold onto their claims. It could be seen as a service or a racket. Some mining groups might see it as a corp offering services to keep other people off ore so they can pay to mine the good stuff, some people might see it as thugs shaking them down for the right to mine.

Trying to do this wouldn't be without risks though. The claimant has to defend his units against attackers. Anyone can attack a Resource Claim Unit at only the cost of a suspect flag. If a mining group wants a site they have the choice of paying the claimant or hiring someone to come in and clear out the Resource Claim Unit (or doing it themselves). Now we have a new profession for small scale mercs. They are risking the claimant actually bringing a decent force and fighting them off. The mercs will charge a fee based on their risk of losses. If the claimant is a one man corp who is unlikely to fight back it might be cheap. At some point the cost of clearing out a Resource Claim Unit wont be worth the bonus ore though.

If the mercs successfully clear out the existing Resource Claim Unit the miners drop their own as soon as it's clear and start mining the site. They might pay the mercs to hang around for a bit in case the original claimant comes back. Of course once they leave the original claimant might come back to shoot their Resource Claim Unit, but that's all part of the risk and conflict.

The goal is to be in the spirit of hi-sec. People don't get to just kill minors without consequences, but if you want the good stuff you open yourself up to a bit of competition. Say you start mining in an anomaly without a claim unit. A big corp comes in and drops a claim unit. You know this corp is big and has a rep for enforcing their claim units. If you are bold you can risk it and fight over the site. If you are unable to fight for the site however you can still try to find another anomaly or go back to mining low quality ore.

The unit will have no effect on Null. Potentially has an effect on Low but who mines in Low anyway? And in low you can just shoot the miners so... no real effect in Low either.



I'm sure the idea has plenty of flaws, and people will probably see it as 'PvP lite', but please give any criticisms. (Aside from TLDR).

You are attributing about 100x more backbone to highsec miners than they actually possess.

If an action would force them to go suspect, they won't do it.

If dropping a claim unit would mean that mining there would either mean mining with it up and going suspect or shooting it and going suspect, it's simply a new tool for highsec greifers to use to kill ignorant highsec miners who don't know better.

-1

P.S: Miners don't make enough to hire mercs. Even if it was an ultracheap hobo of a merc corp who only charged say 50 mil to come and whack the thingy and keep anyone else from deploying one for say 5 hours, that's already a large chunk taken out of any potential profit.

And mercenary actions tend to start at several hundred mil for the very low end actions in highsec, scaling up to hundreds of Bils for say hiring PL to invade a region for you in nullsec.

The real merc corps and the likes of CODE would simply drop these in every belt to enforce their extortion even more easily. There wouldn't even be a CONCORD response to killing the miners there with this idea. I do wonder if it's a CODE troll :D

This, it would be abused so fast by people that aren't mining. Anoms in high sec are usually empty because ive seen there being mine by a venture pilot that isn't ligit, the second another miner shows up the venture pull up by the barge and suddenly catalyst happens. every anom site would have these deployed on them by someone in hiding.



since when does ore/mins become a isk fountain? you mine ore, sell it on market to another player in exchange for their isk with a bit lost in taxes in transaction, where the generation of the isk?

Isk generation comes from isk printing activities like ratting, missions, incursions, combat anoms, and some trading in npc trade goods,
bounties on a player don't count as it was isk put on a player by another player
moon mining that null sec relies on doesn't generate isk as the people that use moon goo to build buy it.
PI doesn't generater isk as again people that use it also buy it so again isk changes hand but is not added to the system.

If people didn't lose ships, there would be less of a need to grind once they got the things they wanted and industry would die.
if plex didn't exist or be bought for isk people wouldn't have x number of alts or continually grind to run their many accounts