Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Your suggestion doesn't really fix the problems with mining.

• It will still be so boring people do it as an AFK activity.
• Makes ganking more annoying, but doesn't really stop it either.
• Fixed belts will be cleared 100% of the time, due to small size, increasing the barrier to entry for new players.

-1

Almost forgot one more point:

• Doesn't change anything to deter botting

There were some pretty decent ideas about fixing mining with bigger belts, nerfing CONCORD, etc a few months ago...

mxzf, send me those bookmarks if you don't want them

Well, I already have the skills and equipment to take advantage of the proposed change, but so do most other players who've been at the game for any significant amount of time.

I'd like others to share my joy :)

Encouraging people to team up with others who already have the skills to gain better rewards is, however, a prominent feature in good multi-player game design.

Right now the fixed belts are too rich, you don't need a team to get a good return on a mostly idle time investment.

This. The only way around it would be to make the grav sites deplete and respawn often, so the miners would have to scan more and more. But tbh, by the time you reached the point where botters wouldn't bother scanning genuine miners will have gone completely insane too.

I honestly can't see a way to stop high sec mining, which is a pretty rare thing for me to admit, usually I at least pretend to have some kind of well informed opinion on everything. Null sec bots you could give a good kick up the arse by introducing time-delayed local or something similar, so that let players just kill the crap out of them, but there's a metric **** tonne of issues with that idea too.

Anyway, whatever the "solution" is to how incredibly boring mining is it probably isn't going to be found in a three sentence long forum post.

Well, I'd like for teenagers to stay out of the kindergarden sandbox.

Cutting the amount available to be mined in highsec system fixed to the point where a lone hulk could strip the entire system clean in an hour or so might mean that people will do so just because they can, but if they don't the rocks that are left will be plenty for mining frigates, cruisers, and the odd mining industrial (and those are odd).

But there aren't enough people that perverse to do it in every starter system area all the time. Not even in EvE. Not even if they are ticked off because the gravy train is chugging out of the station.

So claiming that it will harm the nooblets seems rather disingenuous to me.


Putting the rewards at above knee level keeps the kindergardners out of the teenagers' playground. At least until they know a couple teenagers that will lend them a hand or they grow up themselves.



If scanning down grav sites when there's many times more of them than there is now is too hard for people to manage then EvE players are lazier than WoW players.


Since grav sites have signatures that are already related to how valuable the site is, it also provides a mechanism for tying reward to difficulty that is already part of the game.

The best part?

No code change needed. Yeah, there's a bunch of database fiddling that needs to happen, which is non-trivial, but it could be handled over a single downtime for the whole universe.

What issue did I fail to address?

Anyone who has completed the nooblet orientation missions can scan down a veldspar-class grav anomaly. They have a pretty darn large signature.

Gankers can use scanners, too. Mining ships generally have huge signatures and are easier to scan down than the sites they'd be mining.

Botters would have an extra step. It might be enough to stop some since the easy, predictable path is less profitable.

Anybody can quote a block of text they obviously didn't read and say: no, u!

I'm not seeing where I failed to address it?

Scanning sites isn't particularly bottable. Sites auto-despawn after a few days even if they don't get used up. This biases the operation towards teams of real players over bots compared to the current setup.

And mining ships are easier to scan down than all but the least valuable grav belts, so unless the gankers are terminally lazy the miners aren't protected much by being away from known sites.

Erm, ok. Single pilot scans down sites. Saves as corp BMs, botsgo to work.

GZ, you added two minutes to the botter's day.