Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I'm sorry but you don't strike me as the kind of person that enjoys mining and similar kind of tasks. I do, and in High-Sec too. Socializing with friends, checking up on forums on-line, planning on what to do with the ore once I have it, setting up spreadsheets for various things; mining gives me the chance to leisurely enjoy a game I otherwise bore of very fast as I am not a PvP person and would rather go out of my way to avoid that. If I'd do mission running I'd bore within a month, only exploring I'd bore within a week. Mix the two and it's still only a month. Not being able to play the market with ore and minerals wouldn't work either as everyone would put up orders for the ore they needed and thus the mineral part of the market would disappear or be diminished rather fast.

You also have your numbers skewered quite a bit:

A Hulk has 7k cargo hold or so. It's not a matter of killing a roid that ends the mining, it's filling the hold. One stone or three doesn't make a difference, hold is still filled and mining stops.
A Hulk also brings in roughly 1500 m3 of ore every minute if not in a fleet with boost. Your industrial miner brings in 60 m3 per minute. That's 25 times as much, at least. In fleet with boosts and being social while mining the Hulk can reach up towards 2750 m3 ore per minute, or more than 45 times as much as your indyminer.
If your Indyminer mines 23/7 (and doesn't need to haul but can mine, mine, mine, which of course is not the case) then he can pull in 2'484'000 m3 ore in 30 days. With a decently valuable high-sec ore you might make as much as 200-210 ISK per m3.
So, 23/7 mining, someone else to haul, in 30 days your non-skilled indyminer would get maybe, if really lucky as well as mining the best ore every time, get 521'640'000. In effect the indyminer would not even mine enough to get you your PLEX value back. Having 46 of them would just be even more loss for your afk mining theory, not to mention the haulers needed to haul for 46 accounts would need to be kept active too.
Also not to mention the time and effort needed to put in to get 46 accounts up and running. During which time the miners will be mining away and making ISK while you are still in your planning stage of your millions per account loss indyminer plan.

See, lots of math involved and put to good use.

If it came to a vote I'd for to keep mining in. Adding something to make it more involved I'm not sure about. As it stands it's more involved and needs more thought and planning than running High-Sec missions. Now there's something where getting the skills necessary for the right ship and fitting means more than actual skill at running missions. Try doing the level 3's in a Frigate instead, or the level 4's in an Assault Frigate, and we'll talk about skill at running missions. Otherwise it's just everyone with the right character skills doing it and running through the same motions time after time. It might make more ISK per hour but it's a lot more repetitive than mining, though that last is a matter of opinion really, or preference.

Each to their own I say, and let those that mine complain if they want it gone.

Cheers

I lol'd.

So I typed up a nice post full of calculations mining 18hours with an itty miner vs a hulk. And the forums wonderful "save draft" feature replaced what I wrote with just what i quoted and deleted everything else. (Seriously why doesnt it just post it the first time I press post >.> Why reload the "draft")

Anyway im not retyping it again. But the math came out to taking into various factors mining 18hours a day checking on your computer every hour to about 800km3 worth of ore a month. If that was veld you'd be making 180mil< roughly a month I think it was. with a hulk mining 2 hours a night you'll just about triple what the the itty brought in at about 2.2mil m3 a month worth of veld.

So ya its not unfair at all. an afk miner will never even come close to matching a hulks yield even if they put in 23hours day.

And afk miner wouldnt even be able to plex their account with the income. So essentially they'd be losing money every month

Yes, this is a good point. And like I said in the first post, this thread's suggestion is just the most radical and direct way to address AFK mining. It is not the only way, by any means.

However, something does need to be done. Commander Ted's suggestion on the previous page, that mining could be tweaked to require you to fiddle with your equipment every couple of minutes to keep it mining, could possibly work just fine, by acting as a way of verifying that peoplare are indeed not abusively AFK. (one easy way to do this would be to simply make all asteroids a maximum of 1,000-2,000 or so ore). I was suspicious of it, because current AFK miners might stop mining, and there could be shortages.

BUT if you all are confident enough that there are enough people who honestly find it fun, then that might just work after all *shrug*


Okay seriously, why is literally nobody reading the second post in the thread? It clearly stipulates that both price and supply would be very much dynamic, and player-influenced.

Also, there's really very little if any difference economically between ore generating in the hands of NPCs, and asteroids re-generating in space, anyway.


Get what PLEX back? As i explained earlier, you can get a 1.5 month long subscribed account for FREE - no real life money or plex required. You invite an alt, give it one plex, activate it, and then your main gets a plex back for the referral. I.e., you can get infinitely many activated accounts for no net cost, that last 44 days each. Since skills for an indy miner take like 2 hours to train, they can get started immediately.

Let's say, realistically, you do this 6 times, as many as you can run on a spare computer box in your living room. And let's say you have time to station them and send them out 2-3 times a day (before work after work, before bed, for example). VERY doable and VERY easy to set up every 44 days. And the isk investment is like... less than a few million for some beginner indy ships and a few mining lasers. Then, even if you use a mediocre indy ship that can hold 20,000 m^3 (due to few skills and not drawing attention), like a bestower, then you could check in as rarely as once every 5 hours before the hold fills up, and go click click click and send them all to station and back in under 5 minutes.

Every time you do that, you would make 24,000,000 in ore for those 5 minutes' hauling effort (not even a full 5 minutes. you could check your email while they fly to the station). 3 times a day * 30 days = 2.16 billion a month. For <15 minutes a day and 2 hours' worth of skill training. That blows PI and missioning and ratting and everything else out of the water, by a HUGE margin, especially considering somebody could do this on their second day ever of playing EVE, theoretically. Thus, it should be compared to LEVEL ONE missions and hi-sec ratting for a fair comparison, if anything.

it's also almost 3 times as much as a Hulk per time spent actually at the keyboard. Even with fleet boosts (again, using your own math, not mine. And again, with less than 0.1% of the SPs needed)

That's with 6 alts, not dozens...


Anyway, point being: AFK mining is a very realistic, very potentially profitable activity. You can do it in a way that only requires you to check in after many hours, with much much higher profits per time spent playing than almost anything else, and without even cheating (no bots used in the above scenario). THAT is the problem that needs solving.

Obviously, getting rid of mining ain't the only way or by any means necessarily the best way of doing that. But the problem needs fixing.

What ore are you mining that you're getting these numbers from?

The largest roids I calculated using your "itty" or "bestower" miner maxed out at 3 hours continues mining if you're lucky to find a roid that large each time And if no one comes along and mines it out from under you while you're "afk" The rarer hisec ores you'd probably get maybe an hour out of them and those would be mined under you.
Also those large roids were Veld and scordite. And like i mentioned putting in full effort to check on your account every 2-3 hours working them 18 hours a day you'd net close to 150-190 million a month
you're also ignoring rats. Even hisec rats are enough to pop your newbie hauler over time. And leaving every 3-5 hours your guaranteed to see your ship popped by them every time you return and your ore gone bye bye.
Please tell me what ore you're mining in hisec, the yield you're pulling in in m3 thats letting you mine non stop for 5 hours and pulling in 24mil isk

You've honestly thought about very deeply and created a hypothetical problem that actually doesnt exist in game. You're ignoring an immense amount of facts and issues with your theory due to an only theoretical ignorant knowledge of how this field of game play works and the reasons why your hypothetical can't actually be implemented and exploited. People tried trust me. I've known many miners who started out using haulers to mine and moved away quickly due to the low profits and the fact that, you know they want to actually play the game. Not pay 15 a month to walk away from a game. Or use up all their time doing an afk activity in order to support a single account they can rarely enjoy.

Anyway point being, afk mining is not a real threat at all, in anyway shape or form. The only threat to active miners is botters, which is being dealt with by CCP

I can also make a valid point that this is not an issue, as in all my years mining in hi and null, i've maybe seen a couple use a hauler to mine in. So please tell me where these afk miners are hiding that are destroying the mining systems and forcing a need for change because of this epidemic, if they are on all day every day why don't i see more of them? Because where ever they're mining must be secluded with untouched ore that i want in on. Cause quite frankly a lot of systems get stripped quite often.

Oh ya and miners have to deal with the dickery of bumpers, another thing that will take away isk from your afk miner =p

bumpers only need to bump you once to put you out of range of your roid and if your afk, you wont notice till you come back that you actually havent been mining for hours on end.

In null sec ratters can make 8mil on a single acount easily for 5-10 minutes work. It's also more then 5 minutes work for your mining alts
As i've stated before you're actually not being a miner you have no idea the actual logistics involved in finding belts with 0 competition that would let you do this. Not only do you have to find a large roid for each of your toons to mine in your afk periods. You will have to find a new one to mine each time you come back. And just from personal experience thats going to be in a new belt or even a new system that might be many jumps away. This takes quite a bit more time then 5 minutes. And again i point out that hisec rats can kill your low skilled bestower and will kill it every time you go afk.

Though if its really only 5 minutes of work to figure out and so easy why don't you put your money where your mouth is. Create multiple extra accounts or even just one and see how much you can make off it. Only touching it once every 3-5 hours at min

Theres no real way to afk mine without either using bots or a hauler. Everything else has too small a cargo bay. Jetcans are very commonly stolen in belts.

And for fun ill just mention it again, since this seems to be related of isk vs time spent at your keyboard. Go get a domi some sentry drones and go run missions while reading a book. lol

Minty's pretty well illustrated how you don't know anything, so I don't feel the need to repeat any of that. The only thing I'd like to add is if mining is such a brainless activity, what does it say about you when you're so terrible at it. Seriously, people in general need to stop mouthing off about **** they don't have experience in.