Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Broadcasting the results of the scan and a continuous cycle would be extremely helpful.

The scanner also needs a big range increase. If my lasers can reach out to nearly 30km but the scanner only reaches 20ish whats the point of having that extra laser range?

The scanner should be able to reach most of the belt so you can position yourself in the best place without having to slow boat around the belt.

When you shoot a ship you get a meter showing it's HP levels, should dot he same thing for the roids.

A number of the mechanics changes OP has suggested can be accomplished by simple user interaction.

Only 300m3 left but your strip miner pulls 1000m/3 per cycle? Manually deactivate your miner at 30% of its cycle.

Another option, and I think this is a better idea, would be to shorten the cycle time, volume mined, and cap use of mining modules by identical percentages. Example: reduce cycle time to 10 seconds from 60, amount to 100m3 from 1000, and cap to say 10GJ instead of 100.

More granularity. Less wasted time/cap. Very easy to implement as it's just tweaking some numbers in the static database.

As far as sharing the survey scanner results, that sounds interesting. But tbh, the entire mining concept needs to be redone. Click on roid and wait x minutes for hold to fill (its 30 minutes for a max-skilled Venture pulling gas) is so brainless and non-interactive that it promotes multi-boxing and botting on a massive scale. It is one of the most afk processes in all of Eve.

Why does any one asteroid have to be composed of only one ore-type? Suppose an asteroid were composed of multiple ores. You can either use your miners without crystals to get everything at a base yield rate, or you could fit a crystal to get one specific type at a faster rate, allowing for cherry picking and cooperative mining of single asteroids. Or you could split your lasers with different crystals for the same effect.

The current use for survey scanners is pretty basic; scan all roids within range for volume. The overview already tells you exactly what you are mining. The scanner is a poor instrument because only the person who scanned it can see the result, and it is very difficult to share with others which asteroids you have scanned.

Imagine this:

Your survey scanner is now a single target module. You activate your survey scanner on an asteroid and a pop-up minigame appears. The pop-up has two frames. One frame will have a tabular overview of the asteroid composition. The columns should be selectable/deselectable like the overview in that you can choose which columns you want to display. Available columns should include units, volume, mass, and percentage of total by mass, since we are now mining by mass. The ore types can be right clicked or have an info button.

On the other side it shows the asteroid composition in a visual format similar to planetary scanning but with the different colored ores. Activate one or more mining lasers and click on the map to mine that area of the asteroid. Accuracy skills would decrease the size of your laser targeting reticle, making it easier to focus on one type of ore. Poor mining laser accuracy skills would show on the asteroid map as a larger laser targeting reticle and could result in a lot of junk you don't want getting mined. Poor amount skills would be the same as now, you have lower yield.

Crystals would still increase specialized yield as well as decrease all other types. This is similar to the give and take of sensor boosters, damps, and tracking modules in that you get to script for one or the other.

Since your mining laser now has a definite AoE, eventually the area you are mining will become depleted and you will have to move your laser to another area.

Here is a thought: what if you didn't fit a survey scanner? Should you be SOL like for exploration? No. You can still mine the asteroid just like before. But your yield will be only baseline and mixed because the asteroid has multiple ore types within. If you use the wrong crystal, you will get reduced mixed yield. If you don't use a crystal at all, you will get basic mixed yield.

This would encourage training into specialized lasers and crystals, as well as using survey scanners. It would allow those who want to afk mine to still do so. But for those active players they will be rewarded for their activity.

I also want to bring up another point. Asteroids have a definite volume in game. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to the size of asteroids compared to each other. Why is an Arkonor asteroid of 1000 units @ 16m3 per unit = 16,000m3 so small? They're tiny little things compared to 16,000m3 of say Scordite. An identical volume of Scordite would be 66667 units. An asteroid of that size is typically thousands of times larger in game! And remember Spodzilla? The giant spodumain asteroid in medium grav sites? Insanely huge and still 16m3 per unit.

Relative volume needs to be fixed. 10,000m3 is 10,000m3, no matter the density. The asteroids with the largest volume of ore should be the largest in game. Changing this would require a complete rethinking of how we mine.

How about we start mining by mass instead of volume? Simply change all the volume (m3) units of measure for ores and mining lasers to mass (kg)? This would make Arkonor 16kg per unit. Miners would be mining say 1000kg per cycle, rather than 1000m3. The number of units of an asteroid would then more accurately reflect the actual volume of the asteroid as we see it in space without changing any of the amounts mined. There would be no effect on the eve economy.

Having changed the volume figure to mass, we would then need to establish new volumes for ores, or simply copy the old ones. But now we have a way to relate volume, mass, and density. Remember, low density stuff takes more volume. High density stuff takes less. We could simply set everything to 1m3 per unit.

What would this change? For ores with a .1 kg/m3 density, miners' ore holds would fill up 10x faster. For high ends at 16kg/m3, they would fill at 1/16 the speed.

Since we don't want to increase the hassle of moving ore to station for refining (let's face it, hauling sucks ballz), we probably should keep the low-end ores at their current volumes, while reducing the high-end ore volumes.

Superb idea +1 from me.

The survey scanner isn't worth wasting a shield tanking slot on IMHO.

It would be far more useful as a system wide scanner to merely report the presence of each asteroid types in a belt - to save you from having to warp around looking for them, only to find it has been stripped out already.

The amount per asteroid remaining and number of asteroids is largely irrelevant - but it would be worth knowing the total volume.

Some kind of spectral analyzer perhaps - not good enough to pinpoint for warp, but enough to tell you what is there, or isn't there.

Things I'd like to see:
ability to auto repeat
broadcasts and tags listed in results display
targeting icons on targeted roids
(for fleet work) indy command ships can see which 'roids are targetted by fleet members, and this info is passed to all other ships below the command ship that also have a survey scanner (or maybe even don't have a survey scanner)
ability to scan AT LEAST as far as an orca max-boosted strip, or maybe that the mining link that boosts range - let it also boost survey range

bump

so any WIP? can the miner have a toy to these days?

+1 for op . love some of these ideas , increase range is a must

The survey scanner needs to be linked to the pilots capability and how far away he or she can mine. For example if a pilot can mine rocks 25 kilometres away with Orca fleet boosts then the survey scanner should be able to scan that rock at 25 kilometres. Obvious really methinks. I'm not sure any other changes need to be made though. Any other available man hours should be used to fix really broken parts of the game such as......Corporation Roles & Permissions in conjunction with use of POSes.

How about keeping it very very simple.


1. The Survey scanner becomes a passive module range same as locking range that shows the surrounding droids and size in m3, lore explanation is it is a magnemetric and gravitational displacement measuring device . The details are shown in overview, no separate window is needed.

2. Lasers take information from survey scanner and turns off the lasers when the current droid is depleted ....as the scanner knows!

3. There is no point 3

I agree with your comments on the idea of the mini game, but regarding the survey scanner, keeping things irritating, just so there is something to do to have an advantage is poor games design. And bear in mind auto disconnect does not mean it switches target automatically, not engaged, no yield at all.

Remove the irritations and add an interesting design to provide engagement.

I would suggest letting the lasers auto disconnect on expiration of ore or dropping range, and one idea would be to have the yield increase by travelling through the belt from asteroid to asteroid, switching the lock to new fresh asteroids.
Alternatively, have cloud belts of small asteroids to travel through and hoover up, you actively need to steer the ship through the denser regions, ring mining?