Science & Industry

So mining got a numbers overhaul but the game mechanic is still as mind numbingly boring as ever. The low isk payout doesn't even come close to justifying how much of one's time and life may never be gotten back.

I'm sure that this has been mentioned ad nauseam somewhere on this forum but something really needs to be done. Mining is the lifeblood of the entire economy and judging by the price of plex something just isn't right.

Perhaps having some sort of minigame mechanic to make it more interesting? Or perhaps just making asteroids destructible with semi-realistic physics rather than just magically vanishing into the vacuum? That way the ships will actually have to move around to reach the roids rather than just sitting there while the player reads a book or glares at the intel channel.

Simply making the experience more visually interesting would go a long way towards preventing the brain damage and eventual coma/paralysis resulting from the activity.

Maybe some sort of large ship with a mining 'superweapon' that blasts a very large chunk out of a roid but also makes the ship immobile for a while? Let's restrain it to lowsec/nullsec for balancing purposes. That would add yet another risky tactical element that would encourage pvp fleets to provide protection to asteroid and ice fields.

So much can be done....anything but what we have now ugh xD

PI yields an entirely different set of resources does it not? If there is a way to get tritanium and megacyte from planets then this must be a pretty well kept secret.

I seriously doubt there will be any basic change in the way ore is gathered.

Different players like different things. You may find mining mind numbingly boring, but plenty of players find it relaxing and enjoyable. Many players like roving around in PvP fleets, which to me is mind numbingly boring. The key point is no one HAS to mine.

The Eve industry system has developed in a somewhat haphazard manner, with several different not particularly related systems for gathering resources and considerably different mechanics for producing different things. This seems to have been largely accidental, a side effect of new content being released in discreet expansions. But the overall system is effective. People can be asteroid miners or sleeper hunters or moon-goo moguls as suits their playstyles, and in the end everything players want enough to shell out ISK for gets made. Vertical integration IS difficult, one person trying to gather and process everything that goes into an efficient ship build is impractical. But that very lack of vertical integration leads to a system where more players can participate without being pushed out by a handful of highly efficient specialists.

Problems of mining are: limited demands (due to high meta drop rates coupled with decent amount of minerals out of module reprocessing. Yep. Even after strong nerf in the past), stockpile already-in-game and "What I mine is free" mentality.

Whole "mining is blood" part is funny though. Eve starts not from the mining, but from the rat's bounty. Because it's the ONLY activity that takes nothing but your time if you want to go in bare. Not to mention huge reasons behind nerfing scrapmetal reprocessing (Whole thing was a very small step in forcing nullsec to mine).

What comes to problems, there is nothing you can do with stockpile and mentality. Except for maybe ADDING SOME CAPS BOLD RED TEXT SAYING THAT ORE AND MINERALS AIN'T FREE. in the training for mentality part.

But, you see, looking at how fast CCP with Meta4 EWAR modules getting worse or at least the same as t2, I can tell that problem won't be solved till I join 200M sp club.

CCP mentioned some mining related stuff at fan fest, but it was an update to null sec ore sites/null sec ore mineral content and the very early and overview for the drilling arrays as part of the structure revamp.

At the very least they should add new heating effects and make the rock fragments float around as the roid is torn apart. That was the point of this post.