Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I ran a ~50 man lowsec mining corporation for around half a year. This is what I found out:

Mining in lowsec is bad. You earn 30% more in lowsec with the same ship and boost. Looks good on paper, but you can't mine with a Mackinaw or Hulk in lowsec like you can in highsec. A Procurer with Rorqual boost in lowsec will earn 16% more than an Orca boosted Hulk in highsec. Also looks good on paper, but you have to have to dock up at the first sign of PVP and replace your losses if you fail that, which quickly eats away the 16%. There's also ISK/effort. In highsec the bad ISK/h is balanced out with amazing ISK/effort from AFK mining. In lowsec, AFK mining means certain death. Not only can you not AFK mine, pretty much any other activity has both better ISK/h and safety!

So how do you make lowsec mining viable? Make ore yield dynamic and based on ore mined in a system. More people mining in a system will decrease ore yield and vice versa. In <0.5 this would make risk/reward dynamic and encourage people to mine in dangerous system like Amamake instead of botting/semi-AFK mining in a dead-end system. In highsec it would encourage people to spread out away from Jita (Solitude, anyone?) It would also make a lot of new or dead professions like prospecting and pirating possible and boost current professions like mercenaries.

Wouldn't it be cool if you could make a serious (player) mining corporation that found a system with crazy yield and got so stupidly rich you could hire the local (player) pirate groups for protection? With dynamic yield, you could.

and what about medium to large sized mining corps they could manage alone to drop the yield i meant lets face it with 6-8 miners + boost 6-10 belts are nothing

ok ok only if you have lots of free time without pvp

If they're big enough to deplete their home system and the neighboring systems they can either split up or move around. The Rorqual is great for this and I think CCP should make it even better at it when they fix it (jump bridge for industrials?).

Ice fields should be low sec only. Not null and not high. And it should really be random per regions so you actually need to find it. This should boost profit margin but still be semi random and hard to camp. This is just an alternative to dynamic yield ... Pulling people from high and null to visit low sec.

This is kinda nice ...

thing is, even if you can "only" get the "vanilla" ores, some bastard botter (or uber multi-boxer) will still be able to outmine a small-medium group of actual players because the players might not all want to mine for 6 hours ... and want to get paid ... splitting ore from a belt or two 5 ways means you're getting pretty low income. Furthermore, there's no real carrot to getting out of a NPC corp.

The new refining changes help, but maybe they don't go far enough?

That's the whole point of my idea. Bots will always perform better than players in a risk-free environment like highsec or that dead-end pocket, but good luck running a botting fleet in Amamake!


I totally agree! It's only logical that an agents will increase their reward if ignored and that NPC pirate groups grow bigger and stronger with higher bounties if left alone. I didn't include those because mining is in the biggest need of a buff like this and should be prioritized.

Maybe they should nerf POS so miners in null need to go to low also. Comparing just to high does not include the bots in deep null areas.

Dynamic ore yield sounds like an answer that would fit very well with Eve's Isk=Risk model! I'm all for making mining more rewarding in lowsec and null since it's so much more risky. +1

It would take weeks or months to deplete belts unless you nuke it with a massive mining fleet.

No it would encourage people to move around instead of sitting in next to Jita or in a dead-end pocket far away from everything.

The ore yield change should be non-linear, so most systems would keep around the same yield as now, but systems next to Jita would have slightly less and Amamake would have much more.