Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Awesome. Was not aware of this. I always thought having sites respawn at downtime was plain stupid and unfair to people who lived on one half of the hemesphere.

Are system wide belts still on the table?
Like a large ring of astroids orbiting a planet

I think huge system wide betls where you have to scan down clumps of whatever ore you are after might be kind of fun.

Could encourage more intresting fleet operations as well, scouts to go out and find ore then the miners / Orca warp in while the scouts continue to look for a better spot.

Astroids in EVE have never really made much sense, as they don't seem to have an orbit as such they just float in belts or in random grav sites

Might be too much effort to impliment though.


But I do like the idea of having to scan down belts, I currently can never find grav sites though, aways wormholes or boring little sites with rats.

The game is already pretty well setup to hand hold new players into working with this idea. The explorer career mission walks you through scanning sites, gives you a probe launcher/probes and even a scanning frigate. And there really isn't a need to fit a probe launcher on your miner. Just probe a grav site out in your scanner frig, bookmark a good site and then come back with your barge.

Not sure about ice mining though. I think ice belts might be limited to certain areas in game for balance reasons. Of course you could just have it that you only normally find comets(or ice roids) in those systems with a small chance of finding a comet in normal systems.

Make static belts appear in systems based on the system sec status and probability of depletion.

This means grav sites only in 1.0 systems with an increasing chance of finding a static belt as you go lower in system sec status. Let 0.5 and down be the only places that have a full run of static belts plus the usual grav sites like we have currently.

Obligatory Risk vs Reward statement here.

I would do it the other way around. The simple explanation is that this makes AFK cloakers work for their nullsec ganks.

What exactly is being added, apart from increasing some numerical value of available sites?

Yes, changes to static belts would add something to exploration, but that would be due to changes to the mining system, not because site specific probes were introduced to exploration.

The current exploration system already has increasing probe strength with higher skills, doing exactly what the proposed changes do, to non-grav sites, but without fixed hard caps through skill requirements.

Everything suggested, which isn't about changes to static belts, is born from the notion that players with LVL X skills should have access to an exclusive group of sites so they have a higher chance of finding a site when exploring.

That is easily solved by increasing the number of sites overall, if it's something that needs solving at all.

Competition for resources is part of EVE. As players increase in skill, they are encouraged to explore in places where lower skilled players don't venture much because the sites are harder to pin down with low skills. That's what they should do if they want "more" sites, not train to X so they can be handed a set of probes so they don't have to compete on equal footing with the other players in the same area.

All it would do is raise the perceived minimum skill requirements for the mechanic. God knows we don't need more of that in EVE - and everything would end up being the same in due time anyway as players skill up and start competing for the exact same resources again.

If training time and ISK were things you could use to balance game mechanics, supercap profilation wouldn't be an issue in EVE. It doesn't work for things that require months/years to train, and certainly wouldn't work for something with a much lower barrier to entry.

Shuffling numbers around doesn't work in a sandbox were people gravitate towards the best return on investment. That is all these probes would do, might as well just increase the amount of signatures by 100%.

Increasing supply, would lower the reward per site. It might be worth it if too many people are discouraged by not finding anything during an exploration session.

I was stating that site-specific probes would add to the ability to filter out unwanted signatures. I do not agree with the idea of having skill caps since having sig strength caps on discovered signatures goes against the changes made to probing specifically to prevent people having unprobeable OGBs.



Not at all. One of the suggestions was having probes that are specific to different types of signatures. While that may have been combined with the idea of having skill-limited sites, the two ideas are easily separable.



Someone probing for grav sites with grav-specific probes won't be uncovering all those mag, radar, ladar and combat sites. Increasing the supply of grav sites will simply cater to miners. There are no resources in grav sites that science-oriented explorers would be interested in.

There is even scope for an ORE scanning frigate, specialised in probing grav sites, with bonuses to survey scanner range. Perhaps there could be an ORE covert ops ship too, allowing for mining fleets to operate in low sec with greater confidence.

Everything you talked about is accomplished with the current filters. You filter out what you don't want...

... yes, it requires you to explore the signature, but with high skills, it is fast to get a good enough hit in order to tell what type of sig it is.

Now if you wanted to actually add something to the system, in terms of mechanics, CCP could add feedback to the results that tells you if you had a hit but it was not a type selected in your current filter. That way you could be sure that the signature you are tracking, disappeared from the scan results because it didn't match your filter, and not because you placed your probes wrong.

Again, the grav-site changes are a different discussion - and I agree an exploration/mining hybrid system could be interesting. I certainly agree that for grav sites to impact anything in hi-sec, they need to be more plentiful.

*EDIT* Because I'm tired and that 3rd paragraph didn't make sense

If low ores spawn in anomalies the first, third, and fourth points are covered. The second point *is* needed, however.

I would suggest that the very definition of moving static belts to grav sites has that part covered :)