Player Features and Ideas Discussion

EVE Online is all about building your dreams and wrecking your foes' dreams. Year after year we are getting more and more tools to do the latter, in ever new ways, with ever new ships - but we rarely get anything new in order to build our dreams. Yes, we did get manufacturing revamp, we did get Citadels, we will get Industrial Arrays, and we will eventually get player built Stargates. But these things aren't the materials to build our dreams. They are the means through which our dreams come true. And to build them, we use minerals, we use planetary commodities, we use harvested gas, salvaged scrap, and we use moon materials.

All of them are harvested in unique, but utterly one dimensional ways:
In the case of mining, gas harvesting and salvaging (hacking falls under this aswell), we lock a target, press a button in our HUD and then things happen, and after the cycle we get some items into our cargohold. These items are predictable in the case of mining & gas harvesting, and random in nature but all within the same group of materials in salvaging & hacking.

In the case of planetary interaction and harvesting of moon materials, it's not even an active undertaking by the player. What players need in order to harvest these materials is a set of structures, set them up - either in space, open for attack by other players on a moon, or unattackable on the surface of a planet - and then give it time. The structures will automatically harvest the materials, put them into their built in storage bays, where they then wait for the player to return and pick them up.

After this come the steps needed to create goods that can be used by players to make their dreams come true. These steps expand into a multitude of different paths to turn the materials into something new, some of them are easy and instant, like reprocessing ice into ice products, some take player input and then time until baked things come out like manufacturing or moon reactions.

This is not about these steps though. This is about the initial harvesting of ressources and only about the initial harvesting of ressources.

After all, every dream of ourselves we build and built in EVE Online was only possible because we are able to gather the ressources for them in the first place. Maybe not by sitting in an asteroid belt mining the minerals we need to build our spaceships, but at least by paying some other player to do that for us. Even destroying our enemy's dreams requires us to have these ressources in the first place. Nothing in EVE can be done out of thin air, even doubling ISK in Jita Local requires someone else to first generate that ISK, and for that he needs a ship which has to be built by someone.


Everything we can do in EVE we can only do because someone, some time, put effort in and harvested some ressources. And for years, the very means to harvest the ressources have stayed the same one dimensional and repetitive tasks where the only real player involvement of optimization is through choices and changes in setup, but not in optimizing the mechanic itself by himself. A ratter / mission runner / combat explorer can change his tactics, his strategy in how he clears his objectives. Shoot the dangerous guys first, only shoot the important guys, shoot what's necessary in order to tank the NPCs and clear them out all, how he has to move on grid in order to achieve these things etc., these pilots can make and have to make so many decisions which directly impact their income.

A harvester can only make sure his equipment is running all the time. He can't blitz an asteroid field. He can't blitz gas harvesting. He can't blitz planetary interaction, he can't blitz moon harvesting. All he can do is maximize his income through the actions he takes before starting the actual harvesting process: fitting out his ship, looking for the right spot, organizing the moving of the harvested goods.

The actual harvesting itself is binary: On or Off.
No in between. There is no running in 45% efficiency because you don't clear out the spodumain rocks first. There is no 98% efficiency because you decided to overheat your gas harvesters in the right moment. There is no playerinput required in order to make harvesting more rewarding for those who aim for high efficiency. Everything is determined by setup. Every variable of the equation is absolute. You either mine Veldspar, our you mine Arkonor. You either collect Toxic Metals, or you collect Noble Gases. You either harvest Dysprosium, or you harvest Titanium. You never harvest a mixture of it that is unique in it's proportions and concentration of all the materials out there. You never get to really prospect an asteroidfield and look for peaks of a certain ore, or the spots which have the highest overall density of valuable ore.


Let's change this
And through this change, make it a set of professions in which everyone may strive for excellence if he wishes to do so. Let's bring depth into the very foundation on which every single dream in EVE Online builds and is built.

What can we hope for through this?


A more engaged harvesting & gathering expierience.
Imagine telling your friends about EVE Online and how you're the biggest mineral supplier in your alliance of hundreds of people, and that your contribution to the alliance is what keeps the pilots fighting, as you deliver the minerals for every ship and every turret and every round of ammo they use.

Your friends are amazed by your story, want to take part in it, sign up, just to figure out: You lock a thing, press a button and that's it. That's f*cking it. There is nothing more to it. All you do in mining is lock a thing so a picture shows up on the screen and then you press a button and your ship does things. On 40 accounts. It doesn't sound appealing, now does it?

Now imagine how your friends would react once you tell them they should grab this ship, here is the scanner, this is how you use it, we are looking for these types of ore, now go out there and prospect all the ressource fields and find the good spots, so we can come over and run a profitable mining operation because YOU, the new guy to EVE, did the work to find the honeypots among the several dozen star systems your alliance controls and are responsible for billions of ISK in profit.

Meanwhile in highsec, some little guy is really happy, cause he found a small deposit of highly concentrated high-end ore in the middle of a random asteroid field around a planet in a remote system. Noone else knows of this deposit, as it can only be found when you are right there, surveying the RF. He decides to mark the spot - and sell it for a nice little sum! He then moves on in his "Prospect" class mining frigate and looks for other riches, either exploiting them himself or selling them to the highest bidder. And to the second highest bidder aswell. And maybe some more.


Easier access towards all ressources.
Miners can now find and gather metals currently only found on the surface of moons. These metals could for example be bound into alloys, and need to be reprocessed before they can then be used to create T2 components. Alliances who currently generate income through moons will then generate income through the reprocessing going on in their Citadels / Industrial Arrays.
Miners all over New Eden can now also find minerals currently not available in their regions, such as moon metals in highsec, high-end ore in high-sec, harvestable gas for boosters in constellations where it doesn't spawn currently. Allthough in very small concentrations over the whole area, sometimes in concentrations rivaling current maximum income for miners in nullsec, albeit only small volume.

Read the whole thing and I like your idea (BTW good call on the music).


The topic is being beaten to death, raised from the dead only to beaten again. So I apologize butI just got done reading a bunch of threads on this trying to get any more info as well as a feel for how the community is taking it.

Rorquals could play a huge role in a set up like you described having the ability to offer high res scans of the RF sites in a system. Similar to how the PI scan works now. All other ships need to be on station to do this where as the rorqual can do it from anywhere in system. Or perhaps give that functionality to one of the new arrays being fielded soon. Yeah the guys in the other site aren't getting the boosts because they're off grid but you save them oodles of time having scanned down and fed their ships the scan data.

I see many, many opportunities for active and invovled game play with this. I truely hope one of devs sees this and actually tries to make use of it.

I say go ahead and pit PI and moongoo in these RF sites. You just make the concentration higher the closer they are to where they were originally obtained under the current system. Like you said ring would become an excellent spot to find PI and the asteroid belts near moon for moongoo as your static or green sites. Then you add random pockets that are highly affected by the composition of the system celestial bodies that form up as probe or red sites. These would contain higher concentrations of your rarer base amterials and ores despite being smaller in size and amount of matterials. Or conversely huge with a light density where you gather less per hitbox. But after harvesting the whole thing you could end up fair amounts of the really good stuff.

All on the fly and not as well thought out as what you have but perhaps this can add some fuel to the fire your cooking these ideas with.