Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I do not mine, but my understanding is that current mining mechanics strongly encourage AFK gameplay.

There is currently no good reason I know of to stay ATK just to watch your mining equipment cycle, except watching out for the occasional ganker. But even then, at least in highsec, tanking your mining ship and maybe mining in a group and taking turns keeping an eye on local is probably more than enough to avoid 99.9% of ganks.

Don't get me wrong - I believe that anybody can play AFK or semi-AFK if they want to, but a game that encourages AFK gameplay is not a good game imo. One could argue it's not even an actual game!

The two Top Carebear Reasons to Whine are arguably 1) cloaky campers in null 2) non-consensual wardecs in highsec. And the main reason people get upset about those two things is that they disrupt their AFK gameplay. Problem is, CCP on one hand encourage AFK gameplay, especially AFK mining, while on the other hand they include game mechanics that occasionally dirsupt it.

WTF? No wonder people get confused!

So +1 from me, OP, great idea.

When one part gets boosted, another part needs to get nerfed to maintain balance. So AFK gets nerfed and ATK gets boosted.

Personally I think multiboxing shouldn't even be considered when doing game design. Actually multi-player gaming should be considered. Multiboxers just have to deal with it and adapt. They're a emergent gameplay that was never part of EVE game design to begin with. The more multiboxers get exchanged by groups of real players, the better for EVE.

I agree that it would be bad to nerf afk mining too much, but in my ideal world it would be at least a little worse than it is current.

I would want to a system where, in order from least to greatest, mining in the most rewarding: Mining in Hisec while in a NPC corp, mining in Hisec while in a player corp, mining in Losec, mining in Nullsec, mining in W-Space.

I'm not targeting or nit picking you but I would like to ask why you believe W-Space should yield more then 0.0 or lowsec. W-Space yes is "Scary" but overall maybe less risk of loss then lowsec or a known 0.0 with good ore.

In terms of prospecting for ores it could be neat if the asteroids spawned dynamically in a massive area that is more than just a few grids in size, but perhaps dozens. This idea will involve tons of recoding, especially to the warp mechanics, so may not be practical.

The anomaly would be scanned down in space, but your probes can only get a lock on one of a few warp-in points. From there you must venture using sub-warp propulsion, but you can warp to fleet members or bookmarks within the anomaly once you are actually in it.

This will encourage team work as well as roles in a mining fleet. You have the prospector with his skills in the best and quickest prospecting ships. He heads out at blazing speeds of 20 km/s+ (links and imps of course), survey scanners in hand, in search of an asteroid site. There are patches of gas to indicate you are still in the grid; no gas, you've left the site.

Once he's found a site the mining fleet warps to him and begins to chuck away as per the OP. Now let's imagine this in nullsec. Finally mining fleets are able to warp freighters, even Rorquals to these mining sites. When the coast is clear they warp the ships to the anomaly warp-in, and quickly warp to the fleet member who's prospected the site thousands of km away.

Scouts can stay at the warp-ins in order to scout out any hostiles, giving the mining fleet enough time to move out.

Some may wonder, "how can a hostile fleet actually have a chance then?". By having gotten to the site first and made their own bookmark. By having a cloaky scout waiting for a mining fleet to take the bite. If they are very patient, by warping in a scout cloaked and slow boating him around until a site is found. In these scenarios they can then jump into system, immediately warp some interceptors to the warp-in, immediately warp them to the bookmark/scout, and catch the larger ships before they have time to align out (i.e. the ones who don't know how to web-warp).

If this doesn't work they could perhaps scale the size of sites down so that slowboating around while cloaked to prospect -in a speed-fit cov ops- is viable in finding targets.

Would love to see some exploration combined with mining, considering exploration died after the release of Odyssey.

I should mildly disagree, though. Untill there is a method to somehow grant really exciting and thoughtfull gameplay to the mining, it should allow for AFK approach. But at the same type it should generously reward those selected ones who are still willing to make it manually. This is goal I think any proposal in this field should address. And to achieve this goal you have to include some strong, well thought anti-script/bot system in any new concept. For example, topic starter's idea of placing heads "like in PI" are pretty easy scriptable one and only will lead to bots' sofistication after which it will become ubiquitously abused and prices will just get balanced after some time resulting in small difference from what we have now. I don't even think some generic minigame would be enough.

I mean, the idea is quite neat and solid, but I think it needs some additional safeguards against automation.

Yes, what he proposes won't disturb current state of affairs too much (as gathering ores are currently mostly facilitated by different kinds of automation), but it still leaves the space and gives incentive for those who are willing to do it manually. Of course, if there will be a method to secure this new mechanics against automation, too.

Yes, it is. But what concerns me more is devious minds of bots' authors. In case of mining, we are talking about AFK activity able to grant incomes measured in tens and even hundreds of billions (if you are botting in some secured null environment), it's a very strong incentive to them, very profitable in terms of real money. And if they'll manage to automate this new mechanics, I'm afraid all the benefits for "manual miners" will be lost soon. Well, at least in highsecs )

I find myself agreeing that the bot miners will find a way to exploit any minigame mechanism put in place and any captcha style mechanism would just be mindnumbingly annoying. I don't actually see the issue with afk miners. So what if they are? they are presenting a target to those who choose to gank and are participating in the risk/reward dynamis that is always used as the measure in Eve (not entirely correctly in my view). They risk loss of ship and gain rewards in return, surely that is risk/reward in its purest form.

The real problem with bots is that any interface that can be navigated by a player can be handled by a bot. There are not only mining bots but ratting bots, mission bots, you name it, there's probably a bot for it. So the solution to bots is: Leave it to CCP and their bot hunting tools to deal with bots and ignore them from a game design perspective because whatever you come up with it will be handled by a bot.

Focus on the players and player entertainment/involvement when designing features. Bots don't play the game. They're not even people. **** them.