Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Preamble:
The intent of this thread is to discuss and compile the ways in which we can improve and/or fix the mining system within Eve. I will be posting ideas in this thread and updating them based on feedback received. I admit to being a giant carebear stiffy, but nothing pleases me more than bumping and blowing up my competition. Therefore, I will keep in mind benefits that apply to PVP as well :)

Whether you like it or not, Eve relies on industry and mining in order to create the shinys that we all love to blow up (as long as they aren't ours).

Most importantly, this is not a thread about "buff mining output". Also, the numbers below are estimations and are subject to change.

Mining As A Profession (SUCKS)
Mining is by far the worst profession in Eve to make ISK. A maxed out solo miner makes, on an average, less than 30 mil isk an hour (that is a generous number in best possible conditions). Even if they had an unlimited supply of Arkanor, they are still making significantly less than a semi-competent lvl 4 mission runner.

In order to make decent amounts of ISK mining, it is mandatory to have multiple accounts. Even talented miners have difficulty maintaining 30 million isk an hour per mining character on a consistent basis (even flipping large belts). This is due to logistics, neuts or hostiles in system, and strip-cycle losses.

True, it is possible to maintain 10+ accounts to mine and make 300mil an hour. Assuming 30 mil per miner, you'd need 10 hulk pilots, a dedicated booster (rorq) and at one non-stop orca hauler. 300 mil/12 accounts = 25 mil an hour per account. At current PLEX prices, that's over 24 hours of real time needed to cover the PLEX cost of the accounts. A half-decent mission runner can cover the same in approximately half the time (estimated 60 mil an hour, estimated 620mil isk for PLEX).

Given the above estimations, the threshold for where it is more beneficial to mine with 12 accounts vs mission with 1 account is approximately 28-29 hours of (farming) time per month, at which you've paid for a PLEX for all of your account (s) and net 900 million in profit. [this does not take into consideration other methods of income].

Proposed Revision: Change how the act of mining works
Right now, miners target a rock and shoot it until it pops (or at ice forever). This is why income per person is so low and why people can manage so many mining accounts at once. To solve this, one option is to implement a mining "Mini-Game". This "Mini-Game" would involve some interaction in order to achieve optimum yield. The purpose of the "game" would be so that mining would require human interaction (FOR OPTIMUM YIELD). The "game" should not be so complex that a player can only run one account, but should be "busy" enough to make it comparable to multi-boxing PVE missions.

Key Points:

• Reduce mining output across the board by 50%. This enables income for people that still want to afk-mine. (slackers)
• Completion of minigame every (X) cycles or minutes boosts output. There are three levels of successful completion- Poor/2x (boosting output to 100% of original), Normal/4x (200% of original), or Good/5x (250% of original).

These outputs are designed in a way to maintain total output with fewer accounts, and make it extremely hard/impossible to continue to use as many accounts to mine (at optimum levels). This also gives a bonus to "skilled" players at a rate that equally skilled players experience increased income in pve.

These changes would not affect logistics of moving ore/mins, but only how the ore is mined from the rocks.


Spodumain/Gneiss
Remove or re-balance these ores. Boost the low end minerals that these provide so that 0.0 can be mostly self sufficient. I still encourage trading an importing minerals for large projects, but 0.0 should be able to mostly sustain itself. With the focus of 0.0 being "open" land to build our own empires, it doesn't make sense for 0.0 to be completely reliant on "Empire"/High-Sec space for low-end ores. I would even be fine with doing a straight replacement to Veld/Gneiss.


Remove 100% Refining Efficiency
Consider if we were to change the max reprocessing efficiency to 80% (with full skills/implant/station, etc).

Who would be hurt?

The people who were hurt the most would be those moving very large quantities of minerals around (supercap production or large production establishment). If the above suggestion was implemented, less low ends would need to be imported, but importing would be an increase in logistics costs.

Mission runners/ratters would be second, because they would lose some income from the reprocessing of T1.0/T1.1 items (I'm assuming they are selling or keeping higher quality named items for use or invention). That said, many mission runners blitz missions and/or don't loot- even if they do, only a small portion of the loot would lose value (the unnamed or low named variants).

Who would it help?
Mineral prices would go up due to the lessened supply and new local mineral markets in 0.0, helping both miners and 0.0 alliances. Empire miners would still experience a benefit in the increased cost of minerals overall, and alliances lacking a significant industrial backbone would still need to import ore. The ore that is imported via compression (if they go that route) would generate more demand because of the inefficiency of compressing and moving ore.

If minerals were moved without compression, many more trips would need to be made to move large quantities of minerals. This opens up opportunities to gank supply routes. Furthermore, many new war targets would open up (interrupting local mineral markets to force imports at higher cost).

More suggestions to come!

(reserved x2)

As a tengu pilot with maxed out skills that also salvages my mission, I can confirm that 60 mil/hr is high when you factor ammo, taxes, and crappy missions. In a good run of missions I would say that 50 in an hr might be possible, but more than likely ur not topping 45 mil/hr.

Also, reducing ore extraction by up to 50% also effects everything that is player produced on the market.
Hell, I would project that for every % loss in ore extraction is a 2% increase on player manufactures items.

So, a 50% drop in ore extraction would double the costs of all player manufactured goods.

Also, in doing so you would also help to increase the value of looted goods for missions runners by not only increasing the demand on meta items, but also increasing the value of minerals extracted when reprocessing these goods.

The only way to reverse this effect is to greatly reduce the mineral requirements of player created goods.

So basically, a complete redesign of EVERYTHING involving minerals, thus putting us right back where we are now.