Science & Industry

Just a thought I had on the way home from work...

What if instead of mining being a semi-afk event (or instead of changing things completely, what I'm about to suggest could be accomplished by a new 'programmable mining array' or something like that), mining could include an interface, along the lines of PI? When you target and focus on a rock, you could program the mining laser to react differently under different circumstances. Different asteroids could most optimally be mined by using different settings.

Say veldspar is a denser rock than pyrite. You'd want to increase the cutting strength of the beam, and focus it more narrowly; as opposed to using a weaker cutting strength on something else, but spreading it out a bit more. Additional features could be built into this new system, an asteroid density meter for example. Instead of scanning an asteroid to see how much of it is left, if activated, the meter would give a real time count down. Devoting just a little CPU to the density meter would update it every 30 seconds, devoting a lot every 3 seconds.

If mining in a group, with a fleet commander, the commander could monitor everyone's settings to make sure the group was maximizing efficiency. In such a case, everyone wouldn't want to run the density scanner either, the command ship could handle that for the group, allowing the miners to put more CPU strength into faster extraction.

Mining lasers would be monitored for overheating, or other such problems that would require readjustment during the operation. The closer you watch it, the more efficient your yield would be.

1. Ban bot miners

2. Reduce mineral influx by "nerfing" T1 loot and Drone Regions

3. Wait for mineral market to stabilize and players to pick up mining as it once again becomes profitable compared to other activities

4. Now that you have a system that is actually used by real players and not bots, start spending Dev resources and mess around with the mechanics to give higher rewards to active mining, and further reduce the ability to "bot the system" – so you don't have to spend resources focusing on 1 again.


1 has happened, kinda, maybe...

2 is about to happen.

3 will take some time after 2 happens

4 will come SoonTM after 3



I really hope we'll see some changes to mining after the market stabilizes. Possible together with the planned "ring mining" CCP talked about regarding moon goo.

CCP wages war on bots, -1 for changing mining mechanics. Mining is working as intended.

Any change to how mining is done would remove the multi-boxers from the game and that would be against what CCP is trying ot accomplish. CCP wants to encourage mutli-boxing because it brings in the bucks while squashing botters. Dont expect changes to mining anytime soon.

Plenty of people enjoy mining as it is right now (just like me) so stuff your "more interesting" thing where the sun dont shine.

Resource gathering in MMOs is *always* tedious. If it's not tedious and can be legally automated in some fashion, then it pays even worse then average, to the point where it's barely worth doing.

I would love some mining minigame, could give some bonus to yield if solved, won't give any bonus if skipped. Anything that would entertain miners and give them something for their time. But nothing serious.
If rifter would cost 5m, well, wouldn't that be the time to appreciate your alliance indy corps instead of despise them?

While I would agree that mining could use some more interesting mechanics - you'd also have to address the trade-off with security.

Because as someone who does NOT afk-mine, I end up spending 95% of my effort on avoiding the gank. If you're going to add more button-pressing to the operation of mining minerals, then you need to address the fact that most of the button-pressing that occurs NOW is "running D-scan and aligning to station".

Like most of you, I too enjoy mining as it currently exists. Usually I'm mining while working on something else on another screen. This entire idea came to me while thinking about manufacturing. The reason I enjoy it so much is the fact that it's not just a matter of combining A+B+C = Done. I'm comparing prices of resources, I'm looking at how fast I can turn a profit, how much increased yield researching gives me; and I thought it would be interesting to apply those same mechanics to mining.

I never intended to completely revamp mining, I know total revamps are seldom a good thing in mmo's! I did say...



So the old way would still work exactly as it does now, but for those who want to put a bit more energy into it, they could extract higher yields. In the same way that if I actively micromanage PI I can get a higher yield than if I just set the extractors and come back a week later.

anyone played jumpgate? some kind of first person starship shooter. there was a concept called active mining. you could either do a full stop, activate your lasers and wait for your hold to fill or you could do some kind of slide around the roid wich gave about 25% more yield
"slide" is the correct expression as jg had thrust only in the direction of the ships alingment ( the opposite to eve where the ship alignment is consequence of direction you thrust to) and also changing ship mass from your cargo hold filling so you had to change thrust and alignment all the time to fly a circle
also a crash into the roid (or another one nearby) could blow your ship up depending on ships mass, speed and shield strengt

i dont think this concept can be transfered to eve easily but i really liked this on jumpgate

think of some kind of slider to adjust your laserpower following a marker or something.. you could either do nothing and get "normal" yield or optimize our yield while doing a very stupid kind of minigame. its the best i can think of in at the moment (im sorry )

/edit: and i dont want any screenfilling minigames, it has to blend into the current interface

The fact is most serious miners are multi-boxing ....you're running boosts, multi-hulks, your hauling or crunching ore and most importantly your watching local or even ratting on your alt or scouting adjacent systems for hostile traffic with that alt.

Mining is busy enough, or its incredibly relaxing - either way - it's working as intened so suck it.

Where do you tie up your horse, when you go to work?