Science & Industry

The biggest issue affecting mining is not whether it is boring / tedious or whatever. Rather it's that the availability of 'roids in High Sec far exceeds the capacity of the miners there to farm it. To this add ever rising high-sec ore prices and the result is a perfect storm for the high sec miner - an almost unlimited supply with ready access to markets. So why on earth would anyone mine in low or null????

Add to this the antcs of Code that deters the more fragile & easily scared miners results in even less competition. Even belts in 0.9 and 1.0 systems are quiet when what should happen is that 12 hours after downtime those belts should have been stripped clean.

So, right now all a miner has to do is find some systems close enough to a regional market to make hauling straight forward, scour out the patterns of when the Code make a visit and then profit. It could not be easier.

Did anyone watch the Alliance tournament today?

One of the developers said he had spent time on a project designing ways to make mining more interesting. I couldn't tell if the project was active or defuct but he also did work on the data/relic mini-game.

When Ark is basically the same ISK/hr as Veld, something is badly wrong, and it's not just because hisec miners are pulling in too much ore. As I've said before -- the problem is that nullsec can't get enough cheap trit, so they're overmining high-ends to squeeze out more trit locally. I thought that adding compression arrays would alleviate the problem in hisec and make mining veld and scord more atractive to hisec miners, but apparently that pipeline hasn't yet caught up to the requirements of nullsec. Also I've heard a lot of complaints from null that the cost of compressed low-ends are still out of whack in Jita.

The solution to the high-end/low-end imbalance is to get hisec miners to go after veld and scord more often, and to compress the ore rather than refining it.

I don't know why more hisec miners don't go after veld and scord, myself. That's pretty much all I ever mine, unless I need other minerals for manufacturing. Veld is the best ISK/hr ore in the game (though Scord has been doing better recently due to the high pyerite prices). The addition of compression arrays was a boon, since I already had a couple of sticks going to support mining ops already. Being able to compress and haul in a Miasmos rather than a freighter is a real boon.

As I've said here and elsewhere, another good fix would be to add a Mobile Compression Unit so that solo and small-gang miners can just compress right in the belt and save the logistics hassle of maintaining a POS just for compressing ore. Right now the need to run a POS is the biggest bottleneck in the supply of compressed low-end ore. It's not that big a deal to run a POS in hisec now that no standings are needed and you can anchor in any system, but the startup cost and overhead of a POS is non-trivial (mainly fuel + charters). Of course you can leave the POS offlined until you need to actually compress your ore, but that just leads to other hassles (mainly, hauling all your ore back and forth to your POS for compression). An MCU would neatly solve the compression issue.

It would be a good idea to add some super asteroids around low sec belts. Something you could hunt like Mordus patrols and clone soldiers.

Lower (or possibly even eliminate) the asteroid supply in highsec. Call it excessive harvesting. It'd make sense, since that's why there's no high-end ores in highsec, right? Ages ago people mined the ever-living **** out of the high-end ores in empire space and now they're all gone? It'd make sense that eventually the same could happen to the low-end ores. This would drive miners out to lowsec, where they have to have friends to protect them. This encourages team play, and makes mining a riskier activity. Sure, it'd be possibly to solo it, but as with everything else, there would be safety and (and in this case, productivity) in numbers.

Well that says it all !! We don't anyone involved with what has happened to exploration going within one hundred miles of anything remotely connected with mining.

I disagree 100%! Yes, please get the guy that did the exploration/hacking minigames to take a stab at some sort of mining minigame.

You don't want it to be exactly like hacking, because exploration is necessarily a solo activity, and mining is (ideally) a social activity. The hacking minigame works great because it means you're distracted, by yourself, and in dangerous space, and that creates Fun Times. That wouldn't be appropriate for mining. But I like the element of thought and skill involved in hacking, and I'd like to see that for mining. So some sort of minigame that encourages (but maybe not requires?) cooperation, communication, and thought and skill in some way would be great! Maybe you have to coordinate your mining fleet's ships positions in space to triangulate fracture points in an asteroid to split it open. The current mechanic encourages cooperation (for bonuses and hauling), but not much in the way of thought or skill.

Also, some element of risk. Maybe if you screw up too bad, rats spawn in (not just piddling little frigates, but something serious), or the asteroid explodes and damages your ship, or your mining equipment has a much longer cooldown, or something like that. Although cooldown is not very exciting as a consequence.

As long as the yield per hour is roughly the same, you might as well make it more interesting. And nothing says you have to get your ore in a trickle either. If it's 30 minutes of set up before you get your mining payout, all the better if that 30 minutes was actually interesting. It makes you more susceptible to griefers, but that's the game!

How about earning "Mining points" instead of Loyalty.

1. Player does missions and upon successful completion, gets paid some isk, and mining points (plus standings increase).
2. Player can then use these mining points to exchange ore of type A into ore of type B - tax % (example, player spends X amount of MP + 100mil worth of Veldspar, to get 100mil worth of Gneiss).

This way, players would get around the bottleneck problem for specific minerals.

I don't see the profit in mining and compressing ore in high sec as compared to just running a few level 4's . But then again I'm pretty much a solo player right now because real life has caught me... Work, wife, kids and other stuff that screws up men's lives.

Plus running a POS is way too expensive to compress ore. At least for someone in my boat.

If you're solo, mining is the worst isk/hour activity you can do. That said, it's extremely easy to mine semi-afk while watching a movie/etc (hence, why mining is so low isk/hour).



There are already several threads discussing this- they need to change the composition of the nullsec ore anomalies so that there is less available high end ore and more available low end ore.