Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I was impressed with the ice mining (and grav site) fixes that CCP presented during fanest, and began thinking about how it could be added to replace the static belts as well.

I just picked a random system in a random (mainly hisec) region as an example.

Region - Everyshore
System - Quier (Constellation: Odilis)

It has 11 belts, and no ice belts. It's one of 7 systems in the constellation, and actually is the lowest sec status at 0.7, the others are 0.8, 0.9 and 3x 1.0.

I'm making the following assumption on asteroid fields, in their current form.

• maximum ore - 2,4 million m3
• average ore (immediately after DT spawns) - 6-900 thousand m3
• time to depletion (1 hulk + orca, max skills both pilots) -> approx 4-6 hours for an "average" belt

With these numbers in mind, here is a rough idea of how the new belts would function:

• Most common spawns will be approximately 1/6 to 1/4 the maximum size of a belt (so 400-600 m3). Low chance of anything larger (1/3 to 1/2), about 25% overall using a similar formula to invention (i.e. just because there are 4+ belts in a system, doesn't mean one or more of them will be a large belt).
• Spawns will be every 4-6 hours for the common belts, dependant on size (that is, smaller belts will respawn faster). the rarer belts will not necessarily be longer than 6h (can be though for balance, if needed).
• Large belts will auto despawn after a set time (12-24 hours?) so as to make it difficult (if not impossible) to have more than one available in a particular system at any time via cycling the belts.
• Change the name of the static belts, so that you don't know which belt you're mining. At best, you should see you're in one of the currently spawned belts, but not know that it's specifically "Quier 3, belt 2".
• "Grav sites" will not change -- you still have the chance of getting Jaspet/Hed/Hemo/etc spawns on the same frequency as now.

What this means now is that Dotlan will show Quier as having eleven belts. In game, you'll see anywhere from zero to eleven signatures in the system.

Now, I'm not trying to kick people out of hisec or anything -- I've been a miner on and off for nearly my entire EVE career, it's relaxing when you're just chilling with corpmates. However, the biggest problem with mining is that (in my own experience anyway) is that it's very easy for the corps to fall into nothing more than social constructs (i.e. no real drive or cohesive "group" feeling), and industrial corps are very unlikely to do anything (just take a look at the James315 crap -- all he's gotten out of the miners is a lot of rhetoric, and no action).

Optionally, add an incentive to the negotiations (or war) in that if the systems are over-mined, then the spawns start getting "worse".

• entire system cycled more than X times in one week -> less concentrated ores (or something)
• entire system cycled more than X times in 3 days -> less "valuable"* ores (e.g. omber/kernite/plag/etc, using baseprice, not market)
• entire system cycled more than X times in one day -> slow down the spawning

If any of the above happen, their effects are in place for a player-decided length of time. What I mean is, you start noticing the first telltale signs of "bad things" happening from what you expect, you have two choices on the mining side:
1. stop mining, and let the system recover (say minimum of 24 hours / 1 DT)
2. keep mining at current levels, and risk that the system drops to the next level down,

You also have the opportunity at this point to get in contact with the other industrial corps with offices in your system
1. hey, can you help keep an eye on this?
2. Hello, my name is Chribba Montoya, you killed my mining, prepare to die.

Really, what I'm looking for is to give people incentives to actually interact and to lessen the idea of "well, they mined out our system ... we'll just mine tomorrow", since tomorrow you might end up with only veldspar in the system.

it's probably because you've just suggested a fix for something that isn't broken.

rocks will go the same way as ice, i think that's inevitable. how else are they going to remove downtime if rocks rely on downtime to respawn?

yeah, I'm not so sure myself on the balancing aspect. I was (am) hoping to get the spawning to be a bit "random" feeling to help spur on player interaction -- anything to help break the walls that all indy-style corps fly behind.

hoped someone would catch the reference