Player Features and Ideas Discussion

So I mine sometimes, and anything but fleet mining just seems boring to me... *good for forum posts! I've read the other suggestions and didn't think this related, so decided to go with a new topic.

Instead of making the mining modules on your ship interactive, make the asteroid belt interactive. This idea is based off of the tons of dry cleaning places around LA, and the sushi bars I see in the movies. It's pretty much a conveyor belt buffet style of mining.

The stationary asteroids don't allow for much interaction. With the addition of the new ORE mining frigate in a few days, it would be nice to have to chase down a high value asteroid and stay within range of it to mine off of it...

Belts could react in the same fashion, a buffet style asteroid belt would have moving asteroids, appearing on one side of the grid and dissapearing off the other side of the grid... different types of asteroids would move at different speeds, with the rarer asteroids flying faster that common ones.

Slow Ships -- Large Barges would have to cycle their targets, since new targets will be moving into range and old targets will move out of range. the smaller faster mining ships would have the option of staying on a flight path that keeps you at range of the asteroid. Since you have to jet mine in a hulk now, they would have to be stationary =\ bummer. But with a Mack you can move along the asteroid trajectories for better results.

Fast Ships - And skiffs have the ability to fly along a trajectory ect. Solo play it further emphasizes the skiff and frigate as great ninja mining vessels. Fleet play it still gives them a roll since they are the faster of the mining ships they are able to keep the better value asteroids at better range than the large counterparts.

**The asteroids themselves wouldn't have to be moving very fast, one moving at 150m/s would cover about 30km in 3 minutes (unbonused mining laser time, see below). Meaning if you were stationary you will complete 1 cycle on the asteroid before moving to the next one. The rarer asteroid types, dense veld ect. would travel faster than their more common types.
*A moving barge would have a higher window of attack on the asteroid and a ship that travels at 150m/s could follow that asteroid across the grid.-This is the point where the Hull designs hit, as The skiff would have a role in chasing down the fast rare roids and the frigate will be chasing down the faster even more rare roids.*

Mining drones would be big here as well, since they travel at 500m/s they can stay in range of said asteroid. An addition of a MWD (even a small one) would help getting the drones to target as well.

Having a limited window of attack increases the interaction the miner has with the game (I assume it also makes it more difficult for the mining bots), and the moving belt increases the realism. The option to have the belt span across grid, (like some of the ice belts currently in the game) would give miners a bigger buffer when gankers warp to 0 and isn't anything completely new, you still retain the option to continue the belt across multiple grids (depending on how much safety a mining team wants to scout).

Highsec Fleet Mining - Orcas already join their barge bretheren on the grid, and can control about 75km with their tractor beams. And the fleet boosts add Incredible bonuses to this style of mining, as the boosts consist of adding both range and cycle time to the miners. Math is as follows.

Null/low Sec Fleet Mining - Eliminating the use of off grid boosting, means that if someone wants Rorqual support then it needs to be on grid. With full skills it can already control a gridsized belt, picking any cans from miners at 240km range and scanning ability at 220km. Orcas sitting at the edge of the Rorqual control range add another 75km with full skills.

**If math doesnt interest you pls Ignore**
Math Revisited - Eventually I'll derive an actual equation so this is a temporary look.
(unBonused) An asteroid traveling at 150m/s comes into range at 15km you start mining, and in the span of your 3 minute stripper (haha, sry a little bit of reality) that asteroid will travel 27km, at that point you stop mining, and have to pick a new target.

(fullBonused) An asteroid traveling at 150m/s comes into range at 25km you start mining, that asteroid will travel 50km (distance of control you have with your lasers, obviously not a perfect 50km cause of angles) in about 5.5minutes, you as a miner you can now cycle your lasers 2.5 times (since the bonused laser is 2 minutes instead of 3)
**Math Stuffs over**

All you have to know from the above math section is, the slower the asteroids the more cycles you'll get on the roid it before it goes out of range.

*To explain why the roids just disapear in space, make the grids they disappear into a big dust cloud that kills ships.... and say that the belt part they are mining in has been cleared of hazardous items within the belt orbit.*

Looking forward to seeing some input on this, player and dev alike!

-Ara

I really like this idea, as it makes the actual process of mining interactive and more strategic and such, to bring it in line with other types of gameplay. And yet if you just want to veg out, you can stay still-ish and mine a large common ore asteroid easily... you'll just get lower profits.

Possible issues though:

1) Would look kinda silly if the asteroids didnt move in their own trajectories and if they didnt spin around independently, etc. Yet doing it so that those things happened would possibly be computationally very intensive.

2) It would be harder to get rarer ores with this system than it is now, so youd need some way of compensating for that, so that we don't have rare ore shortages, or whatnot. Perhaps some sort of dynamic feedback self adjusting system for deciding which asteroids are generated at the front end of the moving belt?

3) If a larger ship gets itself stuck in the stream of asteroids, it could potentially get stuck almost forever, bouncing around like a cartoon rubber ball or constantly getting misadjusted. This would be really annoying, and in the most extreme cases, might prevent you from escaping for a long time. since it will keep throwing off your warp alignment, and sublight will just cause you to run into more asteroids (even if you log off itll just warp you right into the stream again). This issue is compounded by the fact that people would almost definitely try to bump miners into such a position on purpose, all the time.

4) A lot of your intended mechanics here could be circumvented by using local warp bookmarks. Even if i am in a slow-ass ship, if I upgrade its sensors to reach out to 30km, then i can target an asteroid before it enters my miner sights, even if it is fast. Then get the full run of mining it until it gets too far ahead, then warp to the next bookmark and repeat 2 or 3 times on the same asteroid. Kind of a loophole.

Eventually ya, but the idea is to have the asteroids in the belts a bit further apart than it currently is now. (a lot less programming involved, since there would be fewer collisions)



Nah, the idea is you would never extinguish a belt, or if you did it would literally take you all day from DT to DT. So there would be no shortage of rare ore. But I do like your idea with a dynamic feedback system, that would further help mold the ore amount that comes out of the 'mine-able' part of the belt.



Spreading the asteroids out, creating different channels for them to be in would help too, ideally you want them within about 10km of each other, maybe even a cluster as close as 5, but those would be small and rare. Spreading them out a bit and making sure there's a constant stream of asteroids should deter bumpers as bumping you around just means you'll get free moves to potentially closer targets. (this might not be the case though, no way to tell until its implemented -- but it was my understanding that bumpers go after autominers to mess up their scheme or what not)



Oh ya that's definitely the idea, I've seen pilots jump around ice belts to flee from gankers, so setting up multiple bookmarks to get a better bearing on the asteroids is definitely not a loophole, more of a strategy like Midnight stated.

**moar maths!** Also 30km is the range at which your lasers can reach, if you position your self in front of a moving asteroid you get the 15km base laser optimal, while it travels to you and another 15km base laser optimal when it travels away -- you wouldn't want to be directly in front of it because of said bumping issue so you wouldn't get the full 30km to work with you would probably end up with around 28km

Also now that you bring up sensors, a larger sensor range would be great to assist in mining like this, as well as a larger drone range, like 2x-3x drone range limited to mining drones only. Some way to "assign" the drones to assist a faster ship like the upcoming mining frigate would be nice, to get around the drones traveling 50km every time their full (they fill up fast, 1 minute I believe) assigned drones could deposit their ore into the person that you assigned them to.

@ Midnight Pheonix -- tractor beam interaction with the asteroid trajectory would be a good thing to aspire to, but I'm thinking there might be a tremendous load on computing power trying to include trajectory in with affecting speed, lets try and get them moving first and maybe look into something more along the lines of WEB use on the asteroids since that only affects speed (easy to program i imagine), the Rorqual on grid not inside a POS shield would be a giant target so a fleet of defensive ships patrolling the belt would be good, what better thing to do than give them targets to web with the webbers they already have fitted.
At this point, you can field the frigates with large drone bandwidth/bay, with an extra flight of miners IIs you can assign to your drone target (since they wont be filling up your cargo hold), just more strategy for ya! =D play a double role, you're helping the fleet with webbers and drones, and when pirates come in you can actively shoot them. -- I'd imagine there might be a lot of minni ships on the field for their web range bonuses.

More on top of subject, survey scanners would give you speed of the asteroid allowing you to set your ship to fly the same speed, trajectory would be different, so you would have to manually point your ship after you have the correct speed.

-Ara

Cmon ppls this post has only just started to roll... lets get it goin! =D

Initially treat the tractor beam interaction as a speed reduction to the asteroid, just like the web. I don't see any reason to use a web with it's limited range, only Matari Recons would be used if that were the case. If you apply a web like speed reduction to tractor beams targeting asteroids you'll be able to utilize your Orca and Rorqual for more than just boosting and hauling.

I was pretty sure that's how this worked, which is great ... 1 continuous belt would be awesome! definitely something to look forward to. Implementing full belts like you mentioned would definitely be a programming feat. If that seems like a daunting task to begin with then it might be easier implementing moving mining targets in the form of Comets or a massive rare asteroid first.

IE. Comet (Ice Asteroid) enters system and starts falling towards the systems star, eventually breaking up as it gets closer to the sun... a large enough comet would leave a wake of ice shards barreling through space that you would need to tackle down and mine out before they pop due to the suns heat. This allows for random generated events in systems or across constellations over the course of a monthish.



Ah yes, you do bring up a good point. if the tractor beams aren't grabbing cans then they aren't doing anything in the belt. putting a snare on the beams would also make sense, because webs are used to disrupt the propulsion on a ship... an asteroid doesn't have thrusters, engines, or prop mods so a web wouldn't be able to interact with it (keeping realism). A snare on a tractor beam would be perfect, and since you already cannot tractor beam something that is being tractor beamed it keeps from stacking tractor beams on 1 target to keep it still. Different size tractors could affect each asteroid, at a different rate... small affecting asteroids by 35% and cap tractors affecting them by 50%

--On a side note, if asteroids were to pop rather than despawn that'd be more entertaining.--

-Ara

I like the OP's general concept.

The idea of removing the static belts and replacing them with asteroids and comets that randomly spawn and move along some sort of trajectory sounds great. Ships would then have to use their on board scanners the same way combat pilots scan down cosmic anomalies.

Imagine;

• The difficulty pilots would have ice/gas mining a comet it it's too close to the sun?
• Imagine the cool visual effects everyone would see in that system from the comet, as well.
• If not only little asteroid/comets would spawn, but small planetoids that one could stick a pos on and mine for a week before it despawns/passes through the system/crashs into the sun?

+1!

would that not just make mining like PvE? "running after stuff that cant hurt you until you get in range to blast them to hell" though i agree with it, more rare "belts" would go faster, make them go faster then skiff's speed like 400 or something, then il have good reasons to mine in a carrier (lols)


another though, would it not just blow up CCPs servers to hell?

I like this idea

This was my original idea, grouping the types of asteroids in the belt to go 1 speed, thus creating 1 entity per asteroid type available in the system (or at least 1 entity in the server's eyes). Some suggestions are as follows.

Examples:
baseVeld/Scord - 25m/s
5%Veld/Scord - 50m/s
10%Veld/Scord - 100m/s

basePlagioclase/Omber - 30m/s
5%Plag/Omb - 60m/s
10%Plag/Omb - 120m/s

My first though was server stability, and if creating that many asteroids would affect it which is why I originally suggested to make it only 'grid' sized. I was then informed grid don't work how I thought they did, which is good! My Original idea is much less server intensive.

If you open your Solar System Map, you get presented with a ton of glorious visuals, stay with me.
-Star in the middle, surround by the planets and their orbits > zoom in on a planet and you get the orbits of its moons.
(new information explained)
A belt would have to be set up around a planet, encircling it. So what ever planet you picked, look at the smallest orbit and instead of Moon I, imagine that that is now an asteroid belt. (This would have to be done since there are no so called 'grids')

-You would have to set up a full ring of veldspar around the planet**, and set that ring to orbit the planet at 25m/s (above ex). Then you would have to go along, and breakup the solid veldspar ring into asteroids (visually it would look like a river of veldspar all traveling at the same speed and same direction. But when you mine it you're pulling from the same veldspar pool as the guy mining veld on the other side of the planet)

-You would then have to repeat the same steps as above, with all the rest of the ores and their variants. Most systems have only 4-6 different kinds of roids, with 3 different variations each its 12-18 different "entities" the server has to worry about, this would pose a problem on the tractor beam/webbing idea in that would wouldn't be able to affect 1 roid separate from the rest of the same variant.

*Side note-There are already broken up asteroids in belts right now, in which your laser gets to jump to different faces or crumbs of the roid, so a Cluster of multiple asteroids all close to eachother could act as 1 complete roid giving you bouncylazervisuals
**(I think of the starship troopers moon orbit docking ring, but solid veldspar)



Ya, I was recently blessed with a field in which the asteroids were 200+km apart. It was easy enough to setup warp points to and from the main group. Honestly some of the most entertaining mining I've done, just watching the barges warp back and forth b/t the asteroids was just hilarity, to make it more effecient you had to be aligned when the asteroid was about to pop or when your cargo was full. I would not want to get rid of the current fields (also they should be renamed fields, as they arent really belts), they could definitely go with a tweak, it seems like there are only a few formations the asteroids spawn in. Most are the same, crescent shape (I guess to emmulate a belt) and flat. I would definitely love to see this changed, heck if theres an easy program out there that makes Asteroid belts for eve sign me up, I'm often bored at work and that would count as doodling to me. hahaha

Your other idea lined up with Beta Miner's on the comet discussion I threw out there. I am down to anchor things to large roids, but the idea is to get mining a bit more involved so making anchored items that passively mine is a different direction. I also imagine that getting a ton of ppls assets to move through space without anything affecting them (tractor beams or actual pilots) would be difficult.

Now Anchoring something like a literal anchor to a comet in space would make sense, once you anchor that item to the comet it reduces the comets speed by a certain amount you don't even have to make it player anchorable (would be nice if it was).

Comet/Large Asteroid Mining -A player who scans down a comet (there will already be some intel on where the comet's trajectory might be--orbit or something--, but you still have to scan the actual comet out) could then warp to it. That pilot could then load up a indy with something like a gantry worth 20mil, would be taken by a player to anchor onto the comet, anchoring the gantry would reduce the comets speed by a % and give that player a warp to on the comet. That player could shout to other localminers/corpmates to help upgrade the gantry for 20mil as well, each 20mil upgrade further reduces the speed (down to a certain %) of the comet and gives each new player a bookmark to warp. With only a certain amount of upgrade slots on the gantry there would be a limited amount of dynamic bookmarks handed out to people, and limited on how slow of speed you can drag the thing down to. -- The thing with the upgrade slots is that they are open for anyone to pitch in (like a sytem wide effort), anyone including gankers! o.0

-Ara

I don't see why. You could simply have a big loop like... roughly 5,000km in circumference circling nothing in particular, and inject asteroids into whatever area didn't have players in it at the moment (if all parts are loaded, then asteroids appear right in front of people, but not all in one place, so they wouldn't be that noticeable). No one player would ever see the whole loop, so it would LOOK like a straight line at any one time, and it would be easy to suspend disbelief and imagine it as a belt stretching around the entire system, no matter where you were observing it.