Player Features and Ideas Discussion

One of the major changes coming up this year is the addition of Drilling Platforms.

As expressed at fanfest, CCP has not yet determined what the structure will be capable of, how they would effect moon mining, nor how they would effect belt mining; Basically, they haven't established how these structures will work at all.


So, I wanted to get the ball rolling and allow the players of Eve to establish what they would like to see out of the drilling platforms in and out of HS, as HS is quite different than anywhere else.



Some suggestions that I have come up with are:

Allow drilling platforms to be anchored within range of asteroid belts. In the case of moon goo, the hope here would be that the drilling platforms are effectively anchored to the belt and the moon. This would cause the moon goo to spawn in the asteroid belt.
In the case of moons without belts, the drilling platform would cause a belt to spawn.
These advantage of this would be 3 fold.
It would replace the mining upgrades on ihubs. Certain rigs would increase the spawn rate/density of asteroids, some would increase the moon goo production while hindering asteroids a bit, and others would increase productivity of the structure.
However, instead of all your upgrades being tied to a single structure, your upgrade lvl of the system would not be determined by how many drilling platforms you have in a system.
Systems with a higher density of moons would become more popular, not only for moon goo, but also for mining potential; thus driving conflict. Null no longer becomes about finding a place to hold up, but more about finding a place where you can increase production and/or production can meet demand.


In the case of HS, these drilling platforms seem a bit, as you don't want them to provide too much power to the owners, you don't want them to hinder the capabilities of others completely, but you also want them to be able to drive conflict and/or allegiances between entities within that system. You also don't want large entities to be able to take full control over everything.
I've ran a few ideas through my head, but in the case of HS; if I think of something some would consider cool, it also comes with a negative aspect.

Examples would be
You put a drilling platform on an existing asteroid belt to increase asteroid spawn/density and/or provide boosts to those friendly to the structure. Problem is, powerful entities can set one up and declare war against anyone who tries to mine there; thus the drilling platform protects the belt why they do nothing.

Drilling platform can be placed on a moon, generating a somewhat private asteroid belt that anyone can mine at, unless you're at war with them, while not effecting standard asteroid belts. The problem with this becomes - How many are allowed to be anchored near a moon / Does the owner essentially control the moon much like planets with POCOs / Would this increase mineral production in HS by too much and/or how much is too much?


As of right now, I can think of many different ways in which these would make life for null sec miners quite a bit more interesting.
However, there is a complication with what this structure can provide to HS without allowing players to lock down systems, not giving a single entity full control over a system/belt/moon/planet, and not allowing OP levels of increased mining.




So, now that we've got the ball rolling.
Let's see what ideas you and/or we can come up with that may help to provide CCP with some incite on what we want and/or need, as well as things that would interest us as opposed to a simple structure that we use for reprocessing before we move everything to a new structure.
There's no point in having another structure solely to compress and/or reprocess ore.
If this and moon goo are all that the drilling platforms provide, then we might as well incorporate them into another structure and cut back on the work load of CCP, server load of Eve, as well as management load on the players.

So what do you think the Drilling Platform MUST have and/or what would you like it to have; and what can we do to make them viable in HS, thus more stuff goes boom?

You'd figure players would have more to say about this..
Then again, the forums typically aren't highly monitored by non-pvp oriented minds.

Well, the moon goo would be limited to low/null/wh.

It's actually quite difficult to find a viable use for drills in HS that wouldn't allow the players to monopolize HS mining.
There's not a lot in HS drills if all they do is allow you to refine/reprocess/compress.

No goo in wh. We don't want that crap in there. It should really be removed from the game entirely.

I have my own basics which this platform should be.

* accessible by everybody (aka can be hacked to run, can be made a public resource, etc.
* does not store any moon material at all (see 4)
* uses ice to run (not 24:7 afk).
* moongoop gets ejected as asteroids (will have to be mined).
* if a rorqual anchors on the mining platform, the platform ejects extra moongoo into the rorqual.
* the mining platform has activation times (so let's say you can activate the platform and it'll run for 3 hours, the asteroids it produces lasts for 3 days before being mined out or just vanishing).
* rorquals anchored on platform are vulnerable
* orcas can also anchor on platform (beginner moon miner).
* the discovery (new frigate ice miner) also gets a bonus to mining moon based asteroids.
* rorquals anchored on platforms produce extra and denser moon rocks for subcaps to mine.

Something along these lines. End the afk moon mining. If someone wants the resource, they'll have to kill whoever is there, anchor their own platform, and support it with mining fleets, or as and rorquals. You can't just kill whose there, drop a few platforms, and leave the area never to return except via afk out of corp jump freighter alt once a week to pickup goop.

you want afk moon mining, send a rorqual and collect up moongoop. Risk the rorqual though as it'll take more than 15 seconds to do it.