Player Features and Ideas Discussion

My idea is about making mining more fun, and providing incentive to mine in low sec.

The idea is two-fold. A new mining ship, and a new type of ore.

The way I see it, the key issue with mining is that it isn't fun. It's to easy to bot, and people that take it seriously are not engaged in the game in any meaningful way.

What if you could spend an hour 'mining' where the hour was all about 10 minutes actually mining, and 50 minutes split between finding the ore, and dodging people trying to steal it from you, for the same reward.

First Part: Hyper-quality ores.

These ores are *only* found in low-sec. They are found in gravimetric sites, and are special rocks contained within larger fields (you'll need to find them in the list - survery scanner would provide some help here).

I'm talking ore that yields 5-6 times (adjusted for balance) the kind of mineral yield that normal ore yields. Do the same mining, in 10 minutes, that you would achieve in an hour.

It takes up the normal amount of cargo space, but it is *super-dense* (story wise), so it requires a special type of miner...

Second Part: Tech 2 Mining Frigate

The frigate contains a specialised ore hold, designed to contain the super-dense material of hyper-ores.

The trick with this frigate is that it's paper thin, but can align as fast as a normal frigate. However, it has one of the slowest warp speeds of all ships, allowing it to be overtaken very quickly in warp, due to the hyper-dense ore hold having physical properties that allow it to carry the ore (and also the reason why nothing larger than this beastie can be used).

It also requires a special mining laser to mine the hyper-dense ore... that mining laser is worth a lot more than standard mining laser, making it an interesting loot drop for pirates, who may even have a mining frigate in their group specially for picking up the ore.

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More detail required, eg. do you make the field visible to all once found? Do you have rats in the field? etc...

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What I'm envisaging is a high risk, but ultimately extremely fun method of mining. It's not about the mining per-se, but about the cat and mouse game afterwards. As a miner, do you choose gate-to-gate, minimising the travel distance, and risk predictability and being overtaken in warp, or do you go from planets first and risk having a gate-gank setup waiting for you.

Not only that, but the nature of the ore is such that it will be easier to make use of it near where it's found. It may aid in buffing the low-sec market a little... perhaps? At the very least, there is an incentive for pirate gangs to scoop the ore and take it home to help rebuild there own fleets.

Thanks for reading.