These forums have been archived and are now read-only.

The new forums are live and can be found at https://forums.eveonline.com/

Player Features and Ideas Discussion

 
  • Topic is locked indefinitely.
12Next page
 

Remove Mining Entirely... (a semi-serious thought experiment)
Author
Previous Topic Next Topic
Crimeo Khamsi
Viziam
Amarr Empire
#1 - 2012-11-30 20:50:00 UTC  |  Edited by: Crimeo Khamsi
This is a great game overall, but it has one major area, in particular, that centers around a core of absolutely horrendous game design. And that is mining.

Sitting in one place and not touching any buttons for potentially hours on end, is REALLY BAD design. Indeed, you don't even have to be at your computer. And yet we are not only encouraging people to do this, but actively requiring them to do so if anything is to be built in the galaxy, since new ores are constantly required for industry.





Rather than suggesting some patchwork way to fix mining, I am going to make a completely radical suggestion (as much just to get people thinking as it is a serious suggestion of any sort) to simply remove the entire mechanic. My basis for this is my intimate knowledge of another game that is very very similar to EVE in terms of its economy, which does not have any mining whatsoever. First, I will overview that game here, to describe how such a system CAN (and does) work:

________________A Case Study: There are Alternatives That DO Work________________

Another game that is a sandbox, involves a player-driven economy, and that was contemporary (more or less) with the launch of EVE is "Puzzle Pirates."

Overall, this is a rather odd little game, and I'm not at all surprised that it had significantly lower player numbers than EVE, even in its heyday (about 1/5 as many during its peak). It has weird cartoony graphics, and is entirely centered around skill at time-sensitive ongoing puzzles in order to drive the furnaces of industry or make ships move, etc.

HOWEVER, it has one major feature that makes it very relevant as an example to learn from for the sake of the mining discussion: It doesn't HAVE any mining.

Puzzle Pirates DOES have raw materials. And players DO have to haul them, in large bulky vulnerable merchant ships that can be PVPed, with chokepoints, etc. etc. And players DO need to subsequently process those materials into finished goods and then move/sell those, etc. It even has high and low-sec!!! In other words, virtually everything else about the economy is identical to EVE, except there is no mining.

Where do the materials come from? Well, you have to go out to certain islands (same as star systems, basically) which are spread out in various locations, and different islands faucet different raw materials. However, rather than being mined by the player, these resources are mined automatically by NPCs, and then sold off to players locally on the island in a market auction setting. Any player can place a bid on resources from an island, and whenever a group of resources spawns (semi-random, unpredictable event), the goods are auto-sold off to the highest bidders in order at that time until they run out. Then the materials are deposited in what is the equivalent of EVE's item hangars, and you have to come pick them up.

The end result is that there is no tedious mining grind, yet the economy is still just as player-driven. It IS possible to not have mind-numbing AFK time be the controlling valve for who gets raw materials. This is a system that CAN be fixed.
________________________________________________________________________


Now, how on Earth would this possibly work in EVE, given all the investment that people have already poured into mining in its current state? Well, I don't actually think that in the grad scheme of things, it would be actually all that hard or unfair...

1) Refund any skill points that people put into skills which were aimed at increasing the actual act of mining or mining YIELD in any way, and then eliminate them. For example: mining drones, mining, gas cloud harvesting, mining foreman, mining director, etc.

2) Magically destroy/remove any modules used exclusively for mining (e.g. mining drones, strip miners, mining lasers, rigs or modules that improve the efficiencies of these things, etc.), and compensate with isk (repay the exact amount each person actually paid for those things, if that is still stored in wallet records, ideally).

3) Any ship types that get bonuses to mining lasers or similar active mining buffs are rebalanced to get bonuses to something else reasonable instead, like hauling-related things or ore compression (ore still needs to be moved!), or whatnot.

4) Reduce the number of asteroid belts to 2 or 3 per system, max.

Then, every asteroid belt has a new miniature space-station type of structure placed in it, similar to a customs office. Here, ore is generated (of the type that used to be mineable in that same system, and in the same proportions as currently), and people can place bids on that ore. Generation is on a semi random schedule (e.g. once a day, but can occur during ANY one of the 86,400 single server ticks during the whole day), and all bids are immediately filled in order until the amount spanwed is exhausted. You can then come and pick up your ore at your relative leisure (4 day limit or whatever, similar to customs offices).

Players CANNOT own or replace these structures with their own, even with sov.

And depending on the amount of ore being transferred from the structure to your cargo/ore hold, there could be a small time delay for the transfer to take place. Not nearly as long as it currently takes to mine, but long enough to be somewhat susceptible to campers (e.g., 1 second per 100 m^3 of ore or something)?

Okay, let the flaming commence!
Crimeo Khamsi
Viziam
Amarr Empire
#2 - 2012-11-30 20:59:38 UTC  |  Edited by: Crimeo Khamsi
Oh I forgot: How does the game determine how much to spawn Each day?

1) CCP looks at the current average amount of each type of ore mined every day universally (PRIOR to announcing this change, obviously). Actually the amount of minerals that that ore represents, not the ore itself, but that's a minor technical detail.

2) This amount is set as a soft "target" volume. (which could be adjusted manually by CCP every year or so. The only reason it should NEED to change in the long term is a significant change in number of players playing EVE, or a significant shift in the relative mineral requirements of new modules/ship types, compared to the current ratios)

3) The target volume is compared, via a 5 or so day moving average, for example, to the following value: [(volume of minerals recently used up by manufacturing jobs) - (volume of minerals gained from reprocessing)]. As the net number of minerals sunk rises above the target value, more minerals are spawned each day to replace them. As the amount sunk dips below the target value, fewer minerals are spawned each day.

This all functions as a dynamic way of resisting dramatic changes in price and resisting hoarding (if you try to buy up all of one mineral and hold onto it, more and more will keep spawning at faster rates, and the costs of your attempt to corner the market will exponentially rise quickly).




(Spawns of any type of mineral are distributed evenly across all systems that are of the sec status that generates that type of ore, of course - so it would be extraordinarily difficult to attempt to corner the market to begin with, in addition to the dynamic forces working against you I described above.)
Nikk Narrel
Moonlit Bonsai
#3 - 2012-11-30 21:08:37 UTC
I see what you are missing here.

I believe the following to be true:

One of the underpinnings of the mining profession is that it creates an exploitable vulnerability to a group of players.
They can be attacked, and are exposed to this risk continuously while participating in mining.

This inspires first predatory behavior. PvP pilots who attack the miners in exchange for what they may drop as loot.

That inspires protective behavior. The miners either take turns acting as guards, or work out arrangements with other PvP pilots for this service.

Often this results in conflicts, including over access to better mining areas, or simply pushing potentially hostile forces far enough away to have a reasonable sense of security.

Ratting and mission running also fit into the category like mining, but this thread is not about them as much.

Upgrading Local to Eliminate All AFK Influence What if Local Chat changed, Hunting the Cloaked...
Crimeo Khamsi
Viziam
Amarr Empire
#4 - 2012-11-30 21:23:58 UTC  |  Edited by: Crimeo Khamsi
Quote:
That inspires protective behavior. The miners either take turns acting as guards, or work out arrangements with other PvP pilots for this service.

Hence, two of the changes I mentioned above:

1) Reducing the number of asteroid belts per system. Hell, it could even go down to ONE per system, if needed. Such that people don't have to be floating in space for as long to be found by pirates. E.g., if you reduce 20 belts to 1, then you can spend only 5% of the time in space as you did before, yet still be just as susceptible to somebody warping in on you as before. Actually even less than 5%, since one belt is easier to d-scan than 20 (or camp)

2) The small time delay required to transfer ore from the auction house structure to your hold. This stops somebody from warping in to 0, transferring ore to their hold in 1 second, and then webbing themselves with an alt and flying to a pre-aligned bookmark 2 seconds later. If you have to sit there for 10-30 seconds to transfer any significant amount of ore, then you are susceptible to tackling, etc., and a belt camp becomes quite feasible in null/lowsec (lowsec belts could have token sentry guns to make it more similar to the risk/reward of gate camping)

By adjusting the details of those two mechanisms above, you could make it so that piracy is still just as much of a threat to ore haulers as it is now to miners. Or even MORE of a threat, if you wanted.
Minty Moon
#5 - 2012-11-30 23:32:14 UTC
I would have to say ....no

First off, mining isn't a tedious bore forced upon the world of EvE as most seem to proclaim.

It's actually a quiet and enjoyable profession. And with the right group like with any profession in EvE it can be a lot of fun. We talk, tell jokes, socialize and enjoy each others company during mining ops.
And to be fair i've been on roams and gate camps sitting around doing truly nothing for hours and personally found mining far more enjoyable.
It also for the manufacturers takes a bit of thought and isnt always just mindless point and click. (and i dont know any miner in null that will walk away from his computer while mining) You have to figure out logistics, hauling, calculating mineral needs for projects.

If you've seen some of the spread sheets for FC's of mining fleets that have to divy up isk based on participation of miners, it can be a nightmare for people coming and going, variables of volumes mined per a miners skills.

And with the changes/nerfs CCP has been making, miners are becoming more of a valuable commodity in EvE

Also I really don't know where you got this "not touching buttons for hours on end" but mining with my hulk if i'm lucking to get large enough roids i'll have to change rocks maybe at most every 5-10 minutes (less with boosts) and with my skills my ore hold only holds 1 cycles worth of ore for my 3 lasers so i'm constantly having to jet it out to a hauler every 3 minutes or less.

Though if you really want a profession that revolves around horrendous game mechanics that you can literally walk away from your computer. Try a structure bash with an oracle Roll

(Player Opened Direct Wormholes) (Expanding on Wormholes)
Commander Ted
Caldari Provisions
Caldari State
#6 - 2012-11-30 23:57:24 UTC  |  Edited by: Commander Ted
Just make the actual process a little more complicated. Maybe have a PI like interface on the asteroid to concentrate on different areas to maximize yield but not compromise the asteroid or what not. Maybe require the surveying with a module before you know what it is etc

Just something less passive without compromising yield or anything like that. I'm sure miners have plenty of time for fantasies of their efforts in surveying and harvesting the asteroids as captain of a mining barge working for a space based conglomerate in deep space.

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=174097 Separate all 4 empires in eve with lowsec.
Bobo Cindekela
Doomheim
#7 - 2012-12-01 00:08:42 UTC  |  Edited by: Bobo Cindekela
Have to chime in to say that some people like sitting in front of 20 clients "barely pushing butan"

are they not basically the npcs that sells the resource to you?

can you not already pretend in your mind that they are and the market is your source for material to make your ships?

why does ccp need to eliminate an entire type of gameplay just because it doesnt suit you? is it somehow unfair?

You are about to engage in an arguement with a forum alt,  this is your final warning.
Crimeo Khamsi
Viziam
Amarr Empire
#8 - 2012-12-01 05:35:32 UTC  |  Edited by: Crimeo Khamsi
Quote:
is it somehow unfair?

In a sense yes.

1) Unlike ratting or missions, somebody HAS to mine the ores that everyone consumes, and those ores actually go somewhere and affect a supply/demand market. Thus, the reward from mining is not fixed like missions. It is dynamic, based on how many other people are mining, and their yields, etc.

2) Thus, if somebody has an "unfair" advantage, it actively hurts other miners.

3a) Since mining requires absolutely no skill or adaptive thought whatsoever, it is absolutely trivial to make bots, which is obviously "unfair," and not only gives botters ill-begotten isk, but also directly hurts their competitors, because a bot program could run like half a dozen low graphics settings accounts at once some huge proportion of every day (not so much as to obviously be a bot, but a lot).

3b) Even for those people not cheating, you are still rewarded in-game for bizarre things that you shouldn't be. Like for instance, anybody who works from home can run eve in the background while they write and fill out reports or whatever for their job, and make a ton of isk while only checking in every 20 minutes or whatever for a trivial amount of time. Whereas people who work at an office cannot. Even if both of them have the same amount of real work to do and can only devote exactly one hour of actual eve gameplay time, the first person can mine 10x more than the second person...? That's just really odd, skewed, unfair, and unnecessary game design.

3c) Due to the whole "you don't need to be at your keyboard" thing, it screws with the balance of mining skills and modules in a way that is almost impossible to balance in any reasonable way. For example, I can get an Iteron V with like... no mining skill and a single mining laser, tech 1, and a survey scanner, and let the thing run overnight, and get millions of isk worth of minerals potentially, if I can find a sufficiently large asteroid to begin with. All for a few minutes of playtime, I can make vastly more than somebody with a fancy ORE ship and strip miners, etc. who is actually mostly at their keyboard.

All pretty messed up and unnecessary. #3c is the least "unfair" of those, however it is still a problem for the game. It devalues mining skills and modules (for high sec ores, at least), and it is not in either players' OR CCP's best interest to have computers calculating flight paths and velocities and rendering pretty skies and basically causing GPUs and processors to burn at full tilt, when the person isn't even there. Why are we encouraging a playstyle that performs 500,000,000 calculus equations or whatever just to make a number go from 1 to 30,000?

Quote:
Just make the actual process a little more complicated. Maybe have a PI like interface on the asteroid to concentrate on different areas to maximize yield but not compromise the asteroid or what not. Maybe require the surveying with a module before you know what it is etc

Just something less passive without compromising yield or anything like that. I'm sure miners have plenty of time for fantasies of their efforts in surveying and harvesting the asteroids as captain of a mining barge working for a space based conglomerate in deep space.

If it succeeded, then yes, this would also solve all of the issues above. I would endorse such a change equally as much as just removing mining. Although less elegant, it does avoid the sticky situation of refunding skillpoints and things.

I very much doubt, however, that this would actually WORK as you intend it to. Since I suspect a large portion of miners only mine BECAUSE they can do it while AFK, if we were to require such "mining tweaks" in order to continue mining, a large number of miners would drop out of the industry, and we would have huge ore shortages and all manner of problems.
Asuka Solo
I N E X T R E M I S
Tactical Narcotics Team
#9 - 2012-12-01 05:38:24 UTC
While your at it.. lets remove gate camping and 1k man fleet lag fest blobs.

Cuz lets face it... sitting infront of a computer and not pressing any keys for an extended period of time waiting for a server response or a ship to gate into your system is a rly bad game mechanic....

Eve is about Capital ships, WiS, Boobs, PI and Isk!
Crimeo Khamsi
Viziam
Amarr Empire
#10 - 2012-12-01 05:44:57 UTC  |  Edited by: Crimeo Khamsi
Quote:
Cuz lets face it... sitting infront of a computer and not pressing any keys for an extended period of time waiting for a server response or a ship to gate into your system is a rly bad game mechanic....

1) Nobody HAS to gate camp. If nobody thought it was fun, and nobody did it, then... that would be fine. The game would continue on without issue. That's because it is an emergent, optional phenomenon (observe: there is not button for gate camping, and no "Gate camping module" or skill. it is not even really a "game mechanic" at all). Unlike mining, it is not a necessary, hardcoded game feature that must be performed in order for anybody else to do anything. Thus, it's not really worth worrying about in the same way as mining, because gate camps? not gate camps? Doesn't really matter all that much.

2) More importantly, you cannot gate camp while AFK. If you leave the damn house and go grocery shopping, you cannot come back and find an enemy ship wreck sitting there conveniently for you to plunder and salvage before you head back to the station. People should be rewarded for PLAYING a game, not for NOT PLAYING a game.

3) Yes, you sit there not doing anything for awhile when gate camping, but that's not a NECESSARY and FUNDAMENTAL aspect of the activity. it's simply a matter of there being too many chokepoints and not enough pilots who need to go past chokepoints. Inactivity in gate camps is a symptom of something ELSE. Thus, the problem of having to sit there for too long in gate camps could very much be solved, without eliminating gate camps. For example, by concentrating chokepoints into smaller numbers and more strategic spots. or by increasing the benefit of traveling to and from low-sec. Mining non-eventfulness, by comparison, cannot be fixed in any obvious way I can think of, without fundamentally undermining the entire architecture and structure of mining. It's INHERENT to mining, not just a symptom of something else. It can only truly be addressed at the very root.

4) Gate camping is a much healthier activity to reward for a game that values emergent and innovative gameplay, as EVE obviously does in general. Because you have to have some sort of skill and intelligence to make money doing it. You don't have to be Einstein to camp successfully, but you have to be a hell of a lot more clever than is required in mining, where you make money by pushing one single button that they teach you how to push in a tutorial 30 minutes into your first session of EVE... Good game design rewards clever, skilled behaviors above and beyond robotic, repetitive behaviors. To not do so is discouraging to innovation, freshness of the game, and ultimately future player counts, etc.

5) Gate camping is a social activity, and is thus for yet another reason inherently healthier for a MULTIPLAYER online role playing game, compared to a game mechanic that encourages you to read a book with a computer 3 feet away from you. The goal of an MMO should be immersive, multiplayer interactive gameplay, not increased national literacy.
Commander Ted
Caldari Provisions
Caldari State
#11 - 2012-12-01 06:05:19 UTC
Having mining be in the game is important for the sandbox experience of eve. Having a fixed amount of production you harvest from is a bad thing as it removes control from the players hand. Players should have the power to directly affect production (goons ice interdiction and hulkageddon). Also the supply is more tied to how many people are playing.

Just making mining more engaging solo and I wont care.

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=174097 Separate all 4 empires in eve with lowsec.
Crimeo Khamsi
Viziam
Amarr Empire
#12 - 2012-12-01 06:10:26 UTC  |  Edited by: Crimeo Khamsi
Commander Ted wrote:
Having mining be in the game is important for the sandbox experience of eve. Having a fixed amount of production you harvest from is a bad thing as it removes control from the players hand. Players should have the power to directly affect production (goons ice interdiction and hulkageddon). Also the supply is more tied to how many people are playing.

Just making mining more engaging solo and I wont care.

Read the second post in this thread. It was NOT a fixed amount suggested, and people COULD influence amount of production via market-based tactics, although with diminishing returns and some difficulty (as it should be).

Also, the ore appears AT the asteroid belt, and must still be transferred with a short time penalty (e.g. to a hulk or whatever) and hauled back to station. The short time penalty provides a golden opportunity for belt camping, in addition to gate camping nearby, etc. These are all opportunities to affect supply militarily (like hulkaggedon), in addition to how it can be manipulated economically via the dynamic spawning system (see second post).

And inn addition, unlike currently, the whole loading and hauling process and camping and all that requires you to:
A) Be at your computer...
B) Weigh risks and rewards seriously.
C) Consider creative options like tactical bookmarks, escorts, scouts, time of day, strategic galactic location, etc. to be as safe and thus productive as possible.

*Gasp* Having to THINK with a higher level of sophistication than a brick, in order to make isk? Pretty radical stuff.
Minty Moon
#13 - 2012-12-01 08:14:52 UTC
Ok this annoys me. After reading your comments and suggestions. You obviously aren't a miner.

You think you have a grasp behind the gameplay of mining that its a pure afk activity and it bothers you, And thus because it bothers you you want to eliminate it.

Quote:

1) Unlike ratting or missions, somebody HAS to mine the ores that everyone consumes, and those ores actually go somewhere and affect a supply/demand market. Thus, the reward from mining is not fixed like missions. It is dynamic, based on how many other people are mining, and their yields, etc.


yes and actually more activities need to be more dynamic. And ratting isn't as static as you think. A number of factors allow one person to make more isk an hour than another. Based on game skills, ship type amount they may invest in their ship and modules. As well as other factors, mission runners and ratters encounter luck based drops with faction spawns and rare loot. So payouts are never purely the same and shouldnt be

Yes somebody has to, and no body is making you.

it is absolutely trivial to make bots,

yes it is, its also something CCP has been and is cracking down on.

Quote:
3b) Even for those people not cheating, you are still rewarded in-game for bizarre things that you shouldn't be. Like for instance, anybody who works from home can run eve in the background while they write and fill out reports or whatever for their job, and make a ton of isk while only checking in every 20 minutes or whatever for a trivial amount of time. Whereas people who work at an office cannot. Even if both of them have the same amount of real work to do and can only devote exactly one hour of actual eve gameplay time, the first person can mine 10x more than the second person...? That's just really odd, skewed, unfair, and unnecessary game design.


are you kidding me? Mission runners can do the exact same thing. And the amount of attention required for mission running in certain ships is actually less then what's required of mining. As i've pointed out with yield and cycle times. You need to be checking your modules every 5 or so minutes to switch them to a new target. You can have drone boats run missions and walk away letting the drones do all the work lol Roll

Quote:
3c) Due to the whole "you don't need to be at your keyboard" thing, it screws with the balance of mining skills and modules in a way that is almost impossible to balance in any reasonable way. For example, I can get an Iteron V with like... no mining skill and a single mining laser, tech 1, and a survey scanner, and let the thing run overnight, and get millions of isk worth of minerals potentially, if I can find a sufficiently large asteroid to begin with. All for a few minutes of playtime, I can make vastly more than somebody with a fancy ORE ship and strip miners, etc. who is actually mostly at their keyboard.
Sure you can do that, your yield would be terrible you'd be making a trifle amount of isk, one a ratter could probably match 10x over in 10 minutes, and whatever roid you were on would pop under an hour.
And you would come no where near making as much as someone mining in an ore ship.

(Player Opened Direct Wormholes) (Expanding on Wormholes)
Minty Moon
#14 - 2012-12-01 08:15:05 UTC
Quote:
2) More importantly, you cannot gate camp while AFK. If you leave the damn house and go grocery shopping, you cannot come back and find an enemy ship wreck sitting there conveniently for you to plunder and salvage before you head back to the station. People should be rewarded for PLAYING a game, not for NOT PLAYING a game.

and if you leave to go grocery shopping while mining, you'll find that youre miners have stopped probably within 5 minutes of you walking out the door. So your ship had been doing nothing but floating in empty space that entire time. And odds are maybe even popped by some griefer

Quote:
5) Gate camping is a social activity, and is thus for yet another reason inherently healthier for a MULTIPLAYER online role playing game, compared to a game mechanic that encourages you to read a book with a computer 3 feet away from you. The goal of an MMO should be immersive, multiplayer interactive gameplay, not increased national literacy.

So i'm just going to assume you skipped my first reply about how my corp and many others I know mine because they can be social and chat

Quote:
And inn addition, unlike currently, the whole loading and hauling process and camping and all that requires you to:
A) Be at your computer...
B) Weigh risks and rewards seriously.
C) Consider creative options like tactical bookmarks, escorts, scouts, time of day, strategic galactic location, etc. to be as safe and thus productive as possible.

*Gasp* Having to THINK with a higher level of sophistication than a brick, in order to make isk? Pretty radical stuff.


Try being in camped null sec 23/7 with 10billion+ isk of ships on the field. Ships that cant defend themselves well. Takes more thought then being a brick. To understand your enemies active times, keep aligned with a sharp eye on your overview and go out and risk ships with tanks no better than a cov ops frigs but 2-300 times the value.

Mission running takes same lvl of thought as mining. Lock, shoot, next target, repeat.
If you're going to complain about mining being a passive income you should really understand all profession in the game that make isk. P.I. and moon mining being the most passive with almost greater rewards then mining when done right.

Protip, have more than a vague idea of what a profession is about when you suggest to remove it from the game simply because what you think it is about bothers you.

/thread

(Player Opened Direct Wormholes) (Expanding on Wormholes)
secuutus
No Trespassing
#15 - 2012-12-01 11:35:11 UTC
Crimeo Khamsi wrote:
This is a great game overall, but it has one major area, in particular, that centers around a core of absolutely horrendous game design. And that is mining.

Sitting in one place and not touching any buttons for potentially hours on end, is REALLY BAD design. Indeed, you don't even have to be at your computer. And yet we are not only encouraging people to do this, but actively requiring them to do so if anything is to be built in the galaxy, since new ores are constantly required for industry.





Rather than suggesting some patchwork way to fix mining, I am going to make a completely radical suggestion (as much just to get people thinking as it is a serious suggestion of any sort) to simply remove the entire mechanic. My basis for this is my intimate knowledge of another game that is very very similar to EVE in terms of its economy, which does not have any mining whatsoever. First, I will overview that game here, to describe how such a system CAN (and does) work:

________________A Case Study: There are Alternatives That DO Work________________

Another game that is a sandbox, involves a player-driven economy, and that was contemporary (more or less) with the launch of EVE is "Puzzle Pirates."

Overall, this is a rather odd little game, and I'm not at all surprised that it had significantly lower player numbers than EVE, even in its heyday (about 1/5 as many during its peak). It has weird cartoony graphics, and is entirely centered around skill at time-sensitive ongoing puzzles in order to drive the furnaces of industry or make ships move, etc.

HOWEVER, it has one major feature that makes it very relevant as an example to learn from for the sake of the mining discussion: It doesn't HAVE any mining.

Puzzle Pirates DOES have raw materials. And players DO have to haul them, in large bulky vulnerable merchant ships that can be PVPed, with chokepoints, etc. etc. And players DO need to subsequently process those materials into finished goods and then move/sell those, etc. It even has high and low-sec!!! In other words, virtually everything else about the economy is identical to EVE, except there is no mining.

Where do the materials come from? Well, you have to go out to certain islands (same as star systems, basically) which are spread out in various locations, and different islands faucet different raw materials. However, rather than being mined by the player, these resources are mined automatically by NPCs, and then sold off to players locally on the island in a market auction setting. Any player can place a bid on resources from an island, and whenever a group of resources spawns (semi-random, unpredictable event), the goods are auto-sold off to the highest bidders in order at that time until they run out. Then the materials are deposited in what is the equivalent of EVE's item hangars, and you have to come pick them up.

The end result is that there is no tedious mining grind, yet the economy is still just as player-driven. It IS possible to not have mind-numbing AFK time be the controlling valve for who gets raw materials. This is a system that CAN be fixed.
________________________________________________________________________


Now, how on Earth would this possibly work in EVE, given all the investment that people have already poured into mining in its current state? Well, I don't actually think that in the grad scheme of things, it would be actually all that hard or unfair...

1) Refund any skill points that people put into skills which were aimed at increasing the actual act of mining or mining YIELD in any way, and then eliminate them. For example: mining drones, mining, gas cloud harvesting, mining foreman, mining director, etc.

2) Magically destroy/remove any modules used exclusively for mining (e.g. mining drones, strip miners, mining lasers, rigs or modules that improve the efficiencies of these things, etc.), and compensate with isk (repay the exact amount each person actually paid for those things, if that is still stored in wallet records, ideally).

3) Any ship types that get bonuses to mining lasers or similar active mining buffs are rebalanced to get bonuses to something else reasonable instead, like hauling-related things or ore compression (ore still needs to be moved!), or whatnot.

4) Reduce the number of asteroid belts to 2 or 3 per system, max.

Then, every asteroid belt has a new miniature space-station type of structure placed in it, similar to a customs office. Here, ore is generated (of the type that used to be mineable in that same system, and in the same proportions as currently), and people can place bids on that ore. Generation is on a semi random schedule (e.g. once a day, but can occur during ANY one of the 86,400 single server ticks during the whole day), and all bids are immediately filled in order until the amount spanwed is exhausted. You can then come and pick up your ore at your relative leisure (4 day limit or whatever, similar to customs offices).

Players CANNOT own or replace these structures with their own, even with sov.

And depending on the amount of ore being transferred from the structure to your cargo/ore hold, there could be a small time delay for the transfer to take place. Not nearly as long as it currently takes to mine, but long enough to be somewhat susceptible to campers (e.g., 1 second per 100 m^3 of ore or something)?

Okay, let the flaming commence!



How much these minerals come from mining ? there is the other side of the equation, reprocessing npc trash. The whole idea is to create competition, not replace it with mindless computer automated processes.
Akrasjel Lanate
Immemorial Coalescence Administration
Immemorial Coalescence
#16 - 2012-12-01 11:35:26 UTC
You funny.

CEO of Lanate Industries

Citizen of Solitude
DJ P0N-3
Table Flippendeavors
#17 - 2012-12-01 16:28:38 UTC
If I fired up my mining lasers and walked away for 20 minutes, in the best case scenario I would come back to a Hulk with a full ore bay that had been sitting idle for at least 15 minutes. In the worst case scenario I would come back and find myself in a station needing to update my medical clone and my corpmates gently reminding me that I'm an idiot.

What is far more likely to occur when I mine is that I will mine while running core probes and dscanning, maybe checking up on my PI or invention jobs in between laser cycles, chatting with people who are online, giving my cans silly names, swapping out of the Hulk to ferry my cans back to the POS if no one else is available to haul them, and generally being on standby to run for my combat ships in case something exciting happens nearby. Would I like to have mining be a more interactive minigame-type thing? Sure. Sounds good to me. Making ores and ice basically NPC sell orders that you can only get at belts won't add anything more engaging than PI did -- in fact, since it requires less micromanagement and multiple stages of production, it adds less.

I do think CCP should make mining more engaging, but most PvE in this game could use a tune-up in that department.
Souisa
Subhypersonics
#18 - 2012-12-01 16:33:39 UTC
I dont know if asteroids have volumes. But it would be cool if ships with a large enough cargo bay could scoop them up. Scoop it up, return to station and reprocess it. Rinse, repeat.

o/
Daichi Yamato
Jabbersnarks and Wonderglass
#19 - 2012-12-01 16:35:04 UTC  |  Edited by: Daichi Yamato
to the OP

mining is a part of the game that requires a completely different breed of players to urself. Playing the game for them becomes less about flying the actual ship their in and more about the maths behind mining and industry. Where u play on a tactical and sometimes strategic level, miners and industrialists are playing on a strategic and sometimes organisational level. so the fact that u dnt have to be looking at ur screen 100% of the time is extremely useful as it allows u to get **** down on a spread sheet, or even a piece of paper and a calculator.

also, missioning is way more monotonous than mining and is also more of a solo profession than a MULTIPLAYER one (since u like caps) as industrialists have alot to more gain by working together than two or more mission runners.

EVE FAQ "7.2 CAN I AVOID PVP COMPLETELY? No; there are no systems or locations in New Eden where PvP may be completely avoided"

Daichi Yamato's version of structure based decs
Crimeo Khamsi
Viziam
Amarr Empire
#20 - 2012-12-01 17:36:15 UTC  |  Edited by: Crimeo Khamsi
Quote:
How much these minerals come from mining ? there is the other side of the equation, reprocessing npc trash. The whole idea is to create competition, not replace it with mindless computer automated processes.

Read post #2 in this thread. The dynamic system that determines how much ore is generated would take into consideration both # of minerals used in manufacturing, and also would subjtract out minerals regained from reprocessing, in order to find the net minerals sunk per day.

@Minty Moon

I already said that my comments refer to high sec mining, not null. And as to most of the rest of the stuff you said, you are talking about how YOU happen to mine in a way that isnt afk-ish and isnt antisocial

Wonderful, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm fully aware that some people do this your way, but the problem is that you don't have to. You CAN just afk for hours at a time (yes, you can. Asteroids can have tens of thousands of ore in them, and a miner I gets 40 ore a minute = hours on a single asteroid. Even the most mediocre of asteroids have enough to last a miner I an hour.)

Yes, your yield per second will be vastly lower per ship than you at your keyboard in an ore ship, but so what? I think what you're missing here is that real life time doesn't matter.Play time matters:

It is easy to make an activated account for free for a month (invite yourself, then spend a PLEX on activating them, and then collect your one PLEX reward for the referral). You can do this a dozen times, train them all to fly industrial ships in a couple of hours each, and then log them all on at the same time (however many your box can handle, or if you have two boxes, even more). Now, I can set my miners to mine, walk away for several hours, and STILL get the same yield as you, or even better yield per real life second. But unlike you, I dont have to check in neeeearly as often. I'm just printing isk while not there.

If one or two of my accounts get ganked, whatever. I could pick up a new wreathe for 300,000 and go right back out. OR I could fly them back to station every one hour instead, and not accumulate enough to attract gankers. I'm still making way more than you per unit real life time and play time.

Quote:
If I fired up my mining lasers and walked away for 20 minutes, in the best case scenario I would come back to a Hulk with a full ore bay that had been sitting idle for at least 15 minutes. [snip]

Just like MintyMoon, you aren't thinking of this from the point of view of an afk miner. Obviously, if you use the exact same ship and the exact same tactics and mindset and approach that you use now as a NON afk miner, then it isn't going to work very well.

You have to change that perspective and reconsider your entire mining strategy from scratch, to imagine what an legitimate afk or bot miner or whatever would do. They would NOT use hulks. They would NOT use strip miners. They would use small, uninviting pvp targets (like wreathes or badgers) with a single mining laser attached. This requires almost no skills, such that many accounts can be trained up for free inside of a day, and yet still achieves the same yield as you in your hulk if enough of them mine at once.

With the advantage being that they can leave their keyboard for vast amounts of time. Unlike you, who are stripping a single asteroid bare in 5 minutes, they are stripping 12 asteroids bare in an hour... The numbers add up the same either way though, you see?

Also keep in mind that even if a person did want to AFK mine and happened to have a hulk for whatever reason, they still don't HAVE to train all of their lasers or strip miners on the same asteroid. Even in a hulk, if you aim each strip miner at a separate asteroid, then you could walk away from the keyboard for three times as long.

Think outside the box, and the problems become more and more numerously apparent.

Quote:
Playing the game for them becomes less about flying the actual ship their in and more about the maths behind mining and industry.

Fair enough, but what are the "maths" behind mining? More ore = more profit. If you want to know exactly how much profit, you can look up any of a dozen premade charts online in under 5 minutes and see the exact profit per m^3 of each ore type, etc. That's pretty much it. Well there's also ship fitting, but that's a one-time thing which you don't do again for a month or whatever until you have skills for a higher tier ship.

What am I missing here? I've mined quite a lot and dont recall any other "math."

Industry has nothing to do with it. Even if youre building something with minerals A,B, and C, that doesn't mean you should mine A+B+C. You should mine whatever is highest profit (perhaps D) and then buy anything that isnt your highest profit. So the interface between mining and industry doesn't really have any complexity either. Unless maybe youre mining strategic, scarce, defended resources like nullsec ores or whatever. Again, I don't have a problem with nullsec mining.
12Next page