Player Features and Ideas Discussion

It seems like a afk miner wet dream, even if the yield of mining drones is atrocious.

A mobile tractor is bad for solo mining if that's what you wanted to say, I tried it myself. A retriever is way better if a hauler isn't present. But at least with that, the miner need to press F1 from time to time and be in the belt with a relatively fragile ship.

With your idea, it could drop 5 of these (25 mining drones per player !) and stay around in a proteus or whatever stronk cruiser to defend itself against paper thin catalyst.

Plus swarm of drones (that could reach really insane amount of drones in nullsec anomalies) is bad for server performance. And putting automated strip miner instead on the mining depot would make all of the mining ships basically useless.

It's not the size of the risk that's the problem here, it's that you can leave one of these going and log off and the game plays itself for you. That's not a desirable state of gameplay, it's a state of "log off and do something else for the rest of the day".

If tech 2 drones with drone interfacing to V ? 2 hours i'd say maybe more, counting that they are really slow small drones, this would need medium-sized to be somewhat effective.

I like this since it represents an investment and a cause for conflict.

However, I would like to either see only "anchor for corp" as an option, or only allow it in lowsec, null and WHs.

In addition, I'd also like to see some investment timesinks in the form of refining. With stations and their services on the path to being phased out (maybe), it makes sense to look at the time aspect of refining arrays, or their future equivalent. These exist in space, take time to operate, and have limited capacity. Consequently, it is worthwhile to invest in more of them when you need more of them.

It would also be nice to see vastly enlarged belts. If the rocks were spread out within them, a player would only be able to anchor these next to a small cluster of rocks.

Another possible restriction would be to load scripts in the device which only target a specific asteroid type. To me, it's a good nerf to bots the same way that giving everyone standings in local was a response to the old undetectable early warning overlay system that was first used en masse by goons. Robots for everyone.

Originally posted as a seperate thread, because search function lied to me.

So, I was talking with my dad and he hashed out an interesting concept for a deployable. A mining platform.

Effectively a medium sized can and a strapped on package with a mining laser and a battery just large enough to power one cycle with no energy recharge of it's own, the mining platform would be dependent on the player's ship for energy to run said mining laser.

Why I think this is both interesting and a good concept:
This would mean that other ships than just barges are useful for mining, and that attention to the mining process is able to significantly affect your income, while skill (getting the mining platforms where you want to mine first and keeping them fed efficiently) acts as a multiplier to the possible income. Of course, this is balanced by the requirements of being able to cap the platforms and then move the ore produced in something which can move ore better than the first logical choices, osprey and augoror, promoting either more skill intensive solo or group play. It also removes the aspect of linked miners vs. unlinked miners, as the platforms can't be piloted and thus would get not fleet boosts. Finally, such an operation would be hard to bot efficiently, and would likely be extremely easy to disrupt in such a case of botting, due to the much tighter cycles increased number of complex commands required to do efficiently

Positive concepts:
Active mining system, which uses a skill and attention driven mechanic to drive income
Increased options, with a balancing mechanism between high focus and low focus game play (income and risk proportional to them)
Low additional asset requirements (re-purpose most of the MTU code, container and mining laser graphics, etc)
Fits with developing more active content with minimal effort or added complexity, as it reuses existing mechanics in a new way
Requires active defense in less safe space, but easier to cut and run, making it a scalable risk vs reward scenario in most cases.
Already tangential to the drilling platform discussion, and can be cross posted there if this is close enough in concept in the eyes of CCP or ISD.

Negatives:
Potential for good players to vastly deflate mineral prices with large influx if not well balanced.
Another thing that might need to be added to overviews and possibly needing a new icon for same.

Proposed versions:

Mining platform I:
Requires anchoring 1
Uses a miner i, Medium capacitor battery I and a Large Standard Container to build
Packaged 75 m3, expanded 700 m3
Mines equal to an unbonused miner i
Cap of 20Gj, uses 20gj to cycle
Capacity of 650 m3

Mining platform II:
Requires anchoring 4, mining 5
Uses a miner II, Medium capacitor battery II and a Large Standard Container to build
Packaged 75 m3, expanded 700 m3
Mines equal to an unbonused miner II
Cap of 70Gj, uses 70gj to cycle
Capacity of 650 m3

Large Mining platform I:
Requires anchoring 3, Mining 5, Astrogeology 5
Uses a strip miner l, Large capacitor battery II and a Medium freight container to build
Packaged 600m3, deployed 6000m3
Mines equal to an unbonused strip miner l
Cap of 90, uses 90 gj t cycle
Capacity of 5700m3

Large Mining platform I:
Requires anchoring 3, Mining 5, Astrogeology 5
Uses a strip miner l, Large capacitor battery II and a Medium freight container to build
Packaged 600m3, deployed 6000m3
Mines equal to an unbonused strip miner l
Cap of 90, uses 90 gj t cycle
Capacity of 5700m3

Had a couple negative reviews in that thread, which I reported myself and which is located here.

+1 I'm for a isk sink for miners (T3 or very fragile mining crystals), some idea are regulary trown on this forum thread, but this must be a active in the belt activity needing miner skills. So no for deployables, it needs to be done via a mining ship imo.

Make it lootable by all, with no reinforcement timer, and keep the yield on par with a single mining drone, and I might support this. Also make the cargohold quite small so it doesn't get abused to clean up deadspace pockets (though I guess those despawn when only deployables remain on grid). If you want passive mining, you should accept that non-passive players will steal your ore.

On retrospect, I can't see anyone using these after they are balanced to account for potential edge cases and abuses, so why bother?

Any suggestions for this should probably go here: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=414189&find=unread

Don't expect a good response for enything remotely AFK though...

No, really you should be out in a T1 Frigate with Cargo Expanders and Mining Drones if you want the potential to passively get ore for little to no risk. Or you could just get one of the extremely cheap mining ships and just mine like everyone else...