Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I'd like to propose a change to Excavators to reduce the linear scaling of AFK multibox Rorqual fleets.

That change is simple (lol).
Turn Excavator Drones into Sentry Drones in function. Essentially a deployable Strip Miner, like Sentry Drones their range would be your Drone Control Rage.
Second, Give Excavator Drones an Ore Hold that the Rorqual pilot is required to manually open and take the Ores from.
Third, Reduce the cycle time and yield per drone to 20 - 30 seconds but keep the same yield per minute we get now, just gets dumped into the hold in smaller increments at shorter intervals.

The issue with AFK Rorquals with Excavators is really quite simple:
-Drones automatically bring Ore into your Hold.
-Your hold is massive, large enough to require no interaction for extremely long periods of time.
-You only need to tab around and compress, eliminating the need to leave the belt.

By turning them into Sentries, Rorquals will no longer be required to sit at 50m from the target rock to function.
By giving them a manually emptied Ore Hold, small enough to require constant attention, but large enough to allow you to look away for a minute, you start to hit diminishing returns on how many Rorquals you can have AFK at a time under 1 players control.

I would also like to see the current Excavator renamed to "ORE Excavator Mining Drone" in addition to a new line of Mining Drone using the name Excavator Mining Drone.

These new Excavator Mining Drones would have Tech 1 and Tech 2 variants, with possible meta variants as well.
They would all use the above proposal to function as Sentry Drones do, But the Tech 1 and 2 versions would be built using normal T1 and T2 materials.
The differences between the ORE and T1/2 Excavators would be yield, cycle time and Ore Hold size. As well as price.
Recalling an Excavator with Ore in its hold would eject it as a jetcan, requiring you to pick it up manually.
Standard Mining Drones would remain as is with no changes.

The goal of the proposal is to reduce the linear scaling of AFK Rorquals in belts by adding management to the Drones.
A single player with a single Rorqual would see benefits in that they dont need to be sitting on top of a rock to function, while massive AFK multibox fleets get kicked in the teeth by making sure they are either frenetically tabbing through every client and dragging the ore out or losing massive quantities of ores to wasted cycles.
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For Asteroid Anomalies, i would like to see them changed to be similar to Ratting Anomalies in that you have multiple anomalies active at a time at different 'difficulty' levels. Perhaps scaling the NPC rat response based on the size of the anomaly.
Example: (All Numbers for discussion)
-Break an Enormous Belt into 5 - 6 anomalies spread through the system, Take the total mass in a current Enormous belt and divide it into smaller chunks in different warp-able anomalies.

Do the same to the lower tiers of anomaly belts as well, with varying amounts of mass per anomaly but always totaling the mass of a current anomaly across all belts.

The end result of such a change would be a System with Level 5 Industrial ADM would have (example) 20 Ore Anomalies of varying quality and mass.

What does that accomplish?
It reduces the power of AFK multibox Rorquals by forcing that fleet to be constantly warping to new anomalies to keep going. The new respawn mechanics for mining anomalies would work better in such an environment, since it allows smaller entities to clean out anomalies to trigger their respawns.

It also makes it harder for hunters to catch Miners by giving the Hunter multiple possible locations for the Miners to be hiding in, Similar to hunting for Ratters, where the Hunter has a chance of warping to the wrong anomaly.
Hunters would need put more effort into the hunt than "Open probe window, warp to best mining anomaly, GOTCHA!" that it is currently.

Sorry not sorry for the size of this post, Many words were required to explain my thoughts.
I would appreciate any and all criticism and discussion.

That change is specifically to hurt the AFK Rorqual fleets.
Except it wont, Because you just sit at 0 from the rock you're mining from to minimize drone travel times.

It does absolutely nothing to the AFK Rrqual fleets except slightly diminish their isk/hour. It doesn't do a damn thing to combat the 100% linear scaling of an activity that only requires input once per hour per ship.

All it does do is make Rorquals, a capital ship, slowboat 10kms from the warp point to 0 on the rock they want to eat. Its just a pain in the ass that only irritates you on the setup, then from there its a non issue.

Belts massively favour people who log in just after DT.
I'd favour the reverse. Remove all static belts, replace with 'anoms'. Though you could remove the mining anoms off the scanner and use beacons for them instead under the current 'belt' class. But the timed respawn vs DT respawn is a much better system. The 'upgrade' system doesn't need to be as steep obviously, so even a low index null system could have significant ore that way. And the index could affect other things than which anoms can spawn. But yeah, I'd rather all 'anoms' than belts.

Not if you keep the current mechanic of timed spawns/replenishment of anoms. Belts don't need to replenish at DT, they can be replenished procedurally over time.

Wait .. What? You mean to tell me that the process of:
-Warp to Asteroid
-Start Industrial Core
-Launch Excavators
-Compress Ore once per hour or so depending on Skills/Fitting.

Is harder to bot than:
-Warp to Asteroid.
-Start Industrial Core.
-Launch Excavators.
-Periodically take Ore from the Cargo Hold of the Drones into your own Ore Hold.

The Ore Hold in the Drones would function more like a Fleet Hangar that only the owner of the Drones can access. There would be no Loot All button.

Yes, it adds micromanagement ...That was the entire point of the proposal.

With the current system of the Drones automatically returning the Ore to the Rorqual combined with the Rorquals huge Ore Hold, which is essentially infinite thanks to Compression, you have the current problem of infinite linear multibox scaling.
That is the source of the mineral flood reducing prices for everyone.
By adding even a small amount of micromanagement to the Excavators, You greatly impact the power of multibox Rorqual fleets without needing to cut into the profitability of Rorquals used by solo miners and small corp fleets.
There would be an efficiency ceiling on the number you can control, dictated by the players APM capacity.

We're going to see an infinite loop of "Oh, CCP nerfed yields again, thats ok, i'll just add another Rorqual to the fleet to make up for it!"
What needs to be addressed is the sheer absolute ease and automation involved in Rorqual mining, without nerfing the yields into oblivion. Which is what my proposal seeks to do.