Player Features and Ideas Discussion

"Infinite" Belts

Imagine if you warped to a static belt, that what greeted you on arrival was a simple beacon and a dispersed set of rocks filling the whole grid, and of course that spiffy new spectral lighting effect and dust. However, if you flew all the way to the edge of that grid to the next one, another field of rocks would be spawned that would last until downtime. The further you get from the beacon, the bigger the asteroids would be on average, and the more numerous or densely populated they would be on grid. This would need to be a logistic growth curve, logically.

In each grid that you spawn, perhaps there may be a chance to find npcs there, possibly even a base. The possibilities for incorporating exploration are vaster than the scope of this document.


Reward vs. Risk

We all know that high-end ores just aren't worth that much generally. You could charge 10x the price on megacyte, and it would only increase the cost of a typical t1 hull by 2%. The real value here isn't scarcity, but human labor on extraction and movement. Therefore, I propose that we inflate the 5% and 10% variants to a more considerable density increase. I would suggest 50% and 100% respectively. Low density ABCs could be spawned in empire, while higher density ores would cluster in less secure space. I would furthermore suggest refunding the refining skills, and replacing them with just two or three, focusing on the low density, medium density and high density ore successively.

Next, since we have our infinite belts, and need reasons to skulk about in them even with hostiles around, we need new mechanics to play cat and mouse. I propose that every asteroid sport both a mobile scan inhibitor and a variable sized mobile warp disruptor effect. These would be invisible, but would display on your overview when the effect was active. The only time you would see other players is when they were on-grid uncloaked, or on d-scan when they were moving between asteroids.


Travel is the best education

We need a way to promote in-belt travel, even at the risk of creating bottlenecks. To this end, we could have all belt grids act like deadspaces. You won't be able to warp directly to your friends in them. Instead, everyone starts at the beacon, but anywhere on that grid. They must then race along to seek out their objective or allies.

This is important, because it makes ore hauling members of the squad really critical. If the group has an orca or a rorqual, they can actually use it inside of the ore belt to tremendous effect. The ability to store or compress lots of ore on-site tremendously increases the value of these investments. Botters having to adapt their scripts would probably be the least significant consequence created by such changes.

How many bad ideas can we shoe horn into one suggestion?

Let's see here, we've got spread out rocks, so you're farther from the beacon, allowing you to see incoming hositles on grid, allowing you to warp out long before they ever have a chance to make it to you. We've got increased high density ores to drive down market value of minerals. We've got invisible scan inhibitors, so the big bad neuts can't see you mining. Oh, and even if someone gets a cloaky ship on grid with you, they still can't call in support, unless it's also cloaked, because you can't be warped directly to. Be smart enough to seed the beacon with loads of decloak cans, and you really don't even need to worry about cloaked ships, you'll see them coming.

And what's the penalty for not having your mining interrupted? The haulers have to slowboat to pick up the ore!!! Well, they do if they're not smart enough to use a MTU to drag the cans in from 125km away. Oh, you might need 2 MTUs set in a chain for those rocks that are really far away.

I'm going to put in a big, resounding no for this idea.

Of all the times I disagree with you, I do have to agree with you on this one. This seems like a "let me mine without risk" type of idea and do not agree with it at all.

Not to disrupt the circlejerk, but you both forgot the part where the scan-inhibiting rocks also act as warp disruptors of varying sizes, meaning that any risk-averse miner would have to also avoid getting their 30m/sec barge caught in any of these undetectable bubbles.

Let's not forget that one of those neutrals you caricatured warping into the belt would themselves also be invisible. The rocks don't care if you're a miner, an explorer or a hunter and will both dscan-disrupt and warp-disrupt everyone equally. That miner in their 30m/sec barge may not even notice that someone is moving around hunting in a gank catalyst unless they're paying close attention to their overview. Could it be that you missed that in your rush to dismiss an idea out of hand simply because it had "asteroid belt" in it?

It's not a bad idea. Maybe the two of you should focus less on stroking one another's egos and more on careful reading and the full comprehension of what you've read.

You miss the part where the barge has to travel those 200,000 kms with 30m/s because its a deadspace pocket.

I'm not going to go back and read the OP since I already did that once, but I believe he said it would be a series of deadspace pockets. Once you leave the grid, you immediately move onto a new grid with more rocks and more deadspace and more warp/dscan disruption.

You're really trying very hard to find any possible way that a miner might make themselves remotely safe so that you can say the whole idea is trash based on that one point, aren't you?

I can see some benefit to keeping ore anoms/sigs as is. It would be impractical to tie multiple belt entrances together. The 1M km gap typical of acceleration gates in deadspaces is a trivial distance on the scale of the game, but still a wildly impractical distance to travel under normal impulse. Additionally, with grids spawning on demand, it probably wouldn't be easy to have them mesh into one another.

I don't think the change would affect empire too drastically, aside from rewarding mining groups for their investments. In unsecured k-space and w-space though, it would result in more brazen activities by both groups. In k-space there would be a lot less logging when neuts enter the local intel channel. That in turn will reward persistence, because even scanned down to a single belt deadspace, they'll know they probably have a while before their location is uncovered. It would also dramatically lessen the reliance on metagaming, although that would certainly still be rewarded.

In w-space, nobody will know much of anything, but at least the miners won't be at an automatic d-scan disadvantage. As the type of player that likes to skulk about in cloaked ships and radio in friends, I very much like the idea of following a skittish hauler that is flitting from rock to rock.

I imagine this would also open opportunities for both pirates and anti-pirates to mix it up. I said that I would avoid discussing exploration, but I can't help but think that if there was a high chance for a button to spawn on grids in FW space, it would add some diversity of scenery to those conflicts.

I think, more than anything else, I just want solar systems to feel big. If that bigness has to just be in asteroid fields, then that would be a great start. WTZ PVP just never felt right.

at the cost of not doing anything productive once their ore bay is full. Moving out beyond any distance as that, it comes down to them being as safe as any mission or complex site.

And I believe the OP mentioned each grid having a warp in point that everyone can access, so it wouldn't be practically possible (assuming the code doesn't **** itself) to hide in perfect safety there.

I like the idea of spawning every ore type in all of High , Low, Null, but with increased density and size with lower sec status. +1 for that.

Everything else, not so much.

Ok, let me see if I understood this.

Each individual grid has a warp in point, so if someone tries to warp to their buddy, they get redirected to that closest warp in point?

Also, the warp disruption and scan inhibiting are not consistent, but random effects?

If someone tries to scan down one of these, will they only see the original beacon, or will they see each grid that has been spawned as options to travel to?