Player Features and Ideas Discussion

ways to make eve more fun for miners:

- Having no ability to respond to asshats sucks!
- flying an Orca Sucks! (unless you have multiple accounts)
- being squishy sucks!
- being poor sucks!
- solo play sucks!

So, how to improve the lot of mining in eve without making eve unbalanced and suck for everyone?

- miners have been asking for more response to suicide gankers for along time. Suicide ganking is a stupid play-style. It's childish bullying that relys on one player ruining the play experience of another. there is currently no feasible way to counter it. There are arguments to be made but if you ask any miner there is nothing they can do to counter suicide ganking except not play. this is not in anyone's best interest. If PVPers want to have a valid market based economy and people to play with they need to support measures that make the game fun for everyone even people who play differently.
- to start with my idea is to make the hulk more durable without unbalancing play. to my mind the best way to do this is to make industry safer based on numbers. so the more industrials the stronger the fleet as a whole.

How:
- a pair of modules (mid slot on exhumers and on the orca) that allow T2 mining fleets to share shield HPs. On the surface this seems like its a little overpowered but at the same time there should be an advantage to flying with numbers. And the hulk doesn't really do anything that the T1 ships don't do this would make them a little more interesting and gives mining fleets more durability without making them combat ships. also it does exactly nothing while not in a fleet with an orca and at least one exhumer.
- Give the orca more combat role as the "guardian" of the mining fleet. This would make flying an orca a little more interesting. I think a mid slot module that gives bonuses to drones (maybe including drones assigned to them from the rest of the fleet) The point being to allow the industrial command ship to be able to defend the fleet without major changes. It could allow 10 drones, or increase dps substantially, or some such so that the orca can dps enough that it can do 250-300 dps with more with fleet support.
- the modules above would only work at the squad level and on exhumers and orcas only.
- with these two changes mining fleets can become much harder to suicide gank without unbalancing the game and gives the players a way to become hard through smart game-play.
- While I think that suicide gankers need to get some social skills and a friend or two this is a sandbox and it doesn't make it impossible; just hard to kill stupid miners.
- for example here is how I imagine mining fleets would work:

a full squad of hulks (10) equipped with these modules and an orca in the squad commander role. This would amount to Shield hit-points of about (SWAG: Scientific wild ass guessing) 75,000 (skill dependent) to maybe 100,000 shield HPs shared between the whole fleet. the orcas would assign the drones to the orca. The hulks would throw a couple of points here and there so there is some pvp ability. this kind of combat ability is far from imbalancing since this basically makes the fleet as a whole the equivalent of a faction battleship. But it does make the the fleet much more survivable. In high sec concord would be on scene before this tank was broken except without some very smart coordination and most of the fleet would almost always get away from fleets that are smaller than the mining fleet. On the other hand if you bring larger numbers so you can point the whole fleet they are just as much sitting ducks as without the modules. The combined dps of the orca commanding 55 drones could make for some significant dps that could be a deterrent. This would make mining fleets able to defend themselves but I don't think we would ever see a fleet of them used in combat intentionally. There would be no additional hit-points to the fleet, but all ships would share the shields they already have with the fleet as a whole.

Now
- miners can respond through coordinating their fleet fits and using combat drones to defend.
- flying an orca puts the pilot in the fleet defense coordination role.
- T2 mining barges are only squishy if they are alone
- miners can still mine during hulkaggeddon, wardecs and such and in dangerous places (WH, etc). if my lasers are turnin they are earnin.
- Encourages team play and cooperation.

Thoughts on the modules:
- the orca module (maybe call it a fleet shielding transformer) allows the fleet to have the shared hit-points. It would only work on a single squad level if the orca is the squad commander. It uses mid slot and enough PG and CPU to make putting large shield extenders on the orca difficult (but not impossible) The orca would have to choose between the fleet mining foreman links and any shields.
- The exhumer module (maybe call it a shield antenna or some such) allows the hulk to share it's shield to the orca who then redistributes it to the rest of the fleet.
- my first thoughts are to make it instantaneous, though it might just need to be VERY fast versions of the shield transfer modules.
- Drone bonuses module is basically a rough attempt to make an orca with all fleet drones assigned a mini-carrier. let the orca control all dps of the fleet and allows the orca pilot have a role and give a player with a solo account a reason to train into this ship. Another way to do this would be to add a gang link that would give bonuses to drones; though this would creep into affecting situations other than mining so needs to be vetted carefully.

Sorry, I can't fix botters, CCP has to do that.

I think anything that makes mining better is worth considering.
I am not so sure this idea will be the best solution, but I do know one thing:
CCP is handling the botters.

Don't burden your designs on needing to stop them, it is being handled by experts even now.

^ that is what I should have said.