Science & Industry

As a sometimes miner, this concerns me. To address mining, one has to frame the question. What’s the problem with mining? Is there a problem?

Some Problems I see:

• Mining is boring as … well, let’s just say it’s relaxing in a mind numbing sort of way.
• Ice mining is OMG relaxing…
• Some folks like boring, er relaxing and so don’t want to see any changes to the status quo.

Other thoughts I have:
Mining in EVE seems very unreal to me. Asteroid belts shouldn’t be orbiting or be anywhere near a planet or moon. The gravity well should suck them right in. Ice belts are pretty but also wrong for similar reasons and the ice is never mined out. We think of asteroids belts and we think of dense groups of rocks but I don’t think our asteroid belt is that densely populated.

I notice in 0.0 that we have anomaly sites (that can be scanned down with the built-in scanner) that despawn an respawn as players complete them. They also have signature sites that are more valueable which require probes to scan them down. The signature sites of interest here are the grav sites which are hidden asteroid belts. Now, these already spawn occasionally in empire and I wouldn’t propose changing that. I’m pointing this out so that the following isn’t misinterpreted.

My idea would be to eliminate the static asteroid belts entirely. Create new anomaly sites as small asteroid clusters that might keep X number of Hulks busy for a Y number of hours. Number, Type, size and composition could be hooked to the security rating of the system. As sites are mined out they despawn and a new site spawns a short time later elsewhere in the system.

By the same token, some systems probably have an Oort cloud dense enough to form ice sites. System with ice forming clouds could have the same sort of thing going. Sites spawn that would keep X number of machs busy for Y number of hours and they’d have to move on to the next site. Again, number, size, type and composition could be based on the system security.

The idea behind this is that a solar system isn’t going to have more than one or two asteroid belts that are thinly populated with choice mining spots coming together in random locations but on a regular basis.

I think this would make mining a little more interesting and would have the least impact on status quo miners. It may also help make botting more of a pain or perhaps more easily detectable by CCP to help them enforce the EULA.

I think this would be easy for CCP to implement and balance. They could even do this in tandem with the normal belts until they felt comfortable removing them.

Obviously, you fall squarely into that third bullet point and thus I'm not really addressing you. :P

However, I do agree with you on the loot thing.

I personally find watching sports to be mind numbingly boring, yet there are people that seem to enjoy it.

There are even people that enjoy basket weaving, knitting, crosswords, Sudoku, etc.

Don't be so quick to judge just because you don't enjoy something.